ePals Review

I was really interested in Kunihiko's project last week and his site, ePals. I want to know if students could have real Pen-pals in the year 2012, a concept I've always been a bit skeptical about. But ePals is a little different than a traditional student vs. student letter exchange. This is class vs. class! ePals hooks your class up with another class to complete a given project. The format of ePals reminds me of Craigslist, where you search for a project: "We are a group of about 14 public school kids in 6th grade (11-12 years old) located in Hollywood, California, USA, who seek international ePals for email exchange." That's one posting on ePals. My primary question is whether ePals is trustworthy or not, and from digging around, it seems like the postings are controlled solely by teachers, which is a good sign that it is trustworthy. I like that you can browse projects, so if you're out of ideas, you can find a fresh one. You can also post your own, so if you have a specific project in mind, you can find a partner to go along with you. I was really excited by the variety of ideas on the site; one class in the UK wanted to start a "message in the bottle" project, a class in Milan, Italy has a PowerPoint project, and a class in New Jersey has an anti-bullying message it wants to share. Truly you can explore other cultures on ePals. So how will students use language and improve their skills? It all depends on what project the classes wish to do together. But for the most part, students will be communicating in the target language with genuine native speakers (if you set it up that your new "virtual" classmates are native speakers of your target language). This project is a two way street; perhaps you're teaching English in Strasbourg, France...well if you hook up with a French class in Alabama, boom, you have two classes each with the ability to communicate in their respective target languages with genuine speakers. It's fun for kids to speak a foreign language with someone other than their teacher. I think motivation might be high here as well, as long as you have a cool project that your kids can get excited about, like the "Where in the World" photo contest. Students post pictures from random places in the world and students have a contest and discussion trying to figure out where the picture is. That's fun! Don't forget about linking other technologies with this as well; students could create and share Voicethreads, PowerPoints, Prezis, anything really...It's quite a community, billing itself as the world's largest K-12 educational community. It seems you must have an approved account, which is good. Unfortunately this is one of those applications that I can't directly try since I don't have an actual class to pair up, but it seems easy to use, safe, and versatile. I can see myself using ePals.