ePals

The ePals program is an online global community of connected classrooms, teachers, students & sometimes families. EPals offers a safe place online for collaborative learning via project sharing, learning forums, and pen pal communication. There are opportunities for students to learn about countries and cultures from other students their own age, practice a foreign language through emails, and collaborate on project areas including: digital storytelling, global warming, habitats, maps, natural disasters, water, the way we are, and weather. Focus areas that exists in addition to these project areas include: biodiversity, black history, election, geography, human rights, and team earth.

Teachers and parents can facilitate connections with others having similar interests via searches for classrooms looking for partners, as well as by map and by project. The site has grown from humble beginnings of 10 classrooms in 4 countries to over 16 million teachers and students in 200 countries in just over 12 years!

One fascinating aspect of this site is the translation feature of the community site where classroom profiles reside. It is capable of translating 72 languages – each in about 5 seconds! EPals is proud to claim they were the first company to embed translation services into email.

After poking around on the site without a login for quite a while, I found the list of ePals classrooms now available. There was a posting from a French family living in Switzerland looking for an ePal for their 8 year old boy. This might be a fun international opportunity for our family. He’s looking to practice English – we could gain a great cultural experience. There were also lots of fantastic links on the ePals site to resources related to topics of focus. I passed a few on to my teacher husband, and will definitely come back to check out more for supplemental education projects for my own kids! Unfortunately for me professionally, this site was focused completely on the K-12 world, so there isn’t really an application for teaching in Higher Education or Medical Education – but there is definitely a LIFE application & connection that I’m sure I’ll put to good use in teaching my children about the global connections in our world.