ePals Project Participation

ePals has the potential to be a powerful collaboration tool. It has the ability to break distance and language barriers to allow educators and students to collaborate on a variety of projects. These projects can be content specific, or can be goal specific. If your goal for using ePals is to provide content collaboration with teachers and students from around the world there are built in tools to help you locate a participating classroom to engage in the project. Similarly  if your teaching goals are not content specific, meaning that you want to provide opportunities for collaboration, and are not particular about the content, there are also a variety of built in tools to help you connect to a classroom. 

The ePals portal is designed to make it easy to find classrooms, teachers, and projects that fit your needs. With the goals of 21st century skills emphasizing collaboration, communication, and creativity  ePals provides a great opportunity to enhance those skills. Students have the ability to participate in a project that can also serve as a format to teach about digital footprints, and digital citizenship. The unique connection of ePals, is that it is easy to connect with students and teachers from around the world. It requires a bit of organization by the teacher to make initial connections and arrange a collaboration opportunity. It appears as though once things are underway, the collaboration opportunities are seamless and simple. Even if the teacher is unsuccessful at creating a connection with a specific classroom, the projects are visible to other ePals users, and allows you to explore how the project was completed. 

With appropriate planning and organization, the connection with global classrooms can be made prior to the start of your project to ensure that all the pieces are in place by the time you want students to start collaborating. The other issue I ran into, which may vary from school to school, was that ePals was blocked by the school firewall. It was deemed a social networking site and therefore blocked. I would imagine that upon request, access to the website could be granted for use with students. Again, using this program would require some planning and organization prior to the use with students. However ePals has the potential to provide a wonderful experience to the students to collaborate on a global scale.