A fantastic online learning community---ePals

      

       The program ePals provides teachers, students, and parents worldwide with a safe and secure platform for building educational communities. Both teachers and students can enhance their teaching and learning effectiveness by sharing projects and best practices with other professors and learners around the world. I think the most obvious feature of this program is it creates a global collaboration-learning environment for participants. As its website describes, ePals connects teachers as well as students with people not only they have already known, but also with the people they may not know around the world. People may get connected because of a common interest, or a common need. Also, this program involves authentic communication and learning activity.

      In my future classroom where students are Chinese and learn English as a foreign language,  I will encourage students to make the best use of the program. For example, ask students to establish learning collaboration with students from the US. They can send email with American students through the product of ePals SchoolMail, and also discuss with them in the LearningSpace. By communicating with target language people, students are exposed to English frequently. As a result, their four skills (reading, speaking, listening and writing) will be improved dramatically.