The document provides information about ePals, a social learning network that allows K-12 students and teachers to connect, communicate, and collaborate globally. It discusses how ePals can be used to facilitate international partnerships between classrooms to conduct collaborative projects. Specific examples are given of different types of projects undertaken by classrooms in various countries using ePals' communication and collaboration tools. Tips and guidance are also provided on finding suitable international partners and setting up a classroom profile on ePals.
4. Israel – United Nations – USA – Haiti India – Brazil – Switzerland – Kenya France – Japan – Greece – Thailand
5. Hill City Elementary Bringing the world to rural Kansas through social networking
6. Statewide projects with ePals Maine : 150,000 students Wisconsin : 800,000 Pennsylvania : 1.8 million students, Classroom For the Future Kansas : 400,000 students, on the state’s KanEd portal Colorado : 800,000 students through eNet Colorado
7. Example profile: Students learning to speak English 190+ Turkish teachers have submitted profiles in 2011! (All seek English speakers.)
13. ePals Brings Next-Generation Solutions to Schools free -- students and their teachers locate, connect with and work collaboratively with another class free -- secure online communication for students, parents, teachers and administrators, instant translation in 58 languages. “Problem word” filter and ability to control how widely students can send/receive email.
14. ePals Brings Next-Generation Solutions to Schools NEW in Feb. 2011! Safe, secure online communication for students, teachers, administrators, parents. ICT administrator can establish school-safe usage policies . Used by New York City Schools. $4/student + setup fee. No ads. A virtual workspace optimized for creating, sharing, managing and collaborating on educational content. Integrated web 2.0 tools: SchoolBlog, wikis, forums, digital portfolios, cloud-based storage and ePals SchoolMail, all with industry-leading safety and security for K-12 schools.
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19. Waterloo Junior High School in Waterloo, IL, USA is part of the Globally Connected World! Your school can be also. It is just a Snap!
42. We'd like you to meet our ePals from Brazil Mrs. Russell's First Grade Glenwood Elementary Vestal, NY
43. School: EMEIF "Terezinha do Menino Jesus Porto Wuó" Town: Santa Branca State: Sao Paolo Country: Brazil Hello From Sao Paolo, Brazil
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45. Our square is being rebuilt. See how our town is a hilly place!
46. Collaboration across the Digital Divide : New York Students and their ePals in Botswana A story of global connections that transcend socio-economic status, culture and place.
47. Students from the Guangxi School, China Shared language and cultural awareness, China-San Diego, ages 16-18
48. Their California ePals These teachers have worked together for eight years….some projects are just a few weeks or months!
89. Filter Levels Level 1 All messages must be approved by the monitor, whether they contain profanity or not. Level 2 Messages containing profanity must be approved by the monitor, but unflagged messages will reach their recipients automatically. The monitor will also receive a copy of every unflagged message. Level 3 Messages containing profanity must be approved by the monitor, but unflagged messages will reach their recipients automatically. The monitor will not see unflagged messages. Level 4 All profanity filters are off.
93. Six Access Levels (when set up as a district account) Class/Monitor Students are limited to mailing other students who have the same monitor. Choose this access level if you want students to use email only for internal exercises within the classroom . School Students are limited to mailing students and teachers in the same school. Choose this access level if you want students to use email only for school-based projects and communication . District This option, available only if your ePALS SchoolMail™ system includes multiple schools, limits students to mailing students and teachers at schools created within your system. Choose this access level if you want students to use email only for district- and school-based projects and communication . and…….
94. Six Access Levels (widening the walls) ePALS SchoolMail™ This restricts student communication to other students with an ePals SchoolMail account regardless of school / district. ePals Allows students to communicate with other students with active accounts in the ePals Global Community . Internet This option allows your students to email anyone with an email address , whether they are inside your district, part of ePALS or using the Internet through other means. Choose this access level to allow students to email anyone, anywhere . Note: as a teacher, you might then go to Filter Level 1 and preview all outgoing and incoming messages.
Partnership for Global Learning 2011, Rockville, MD July 8, 2011
In the UK, every classroom must have a collaborative partner. How about in YOUR school? One of the challenges of doing collaboration is getting a partner and having a way to communicate safely. ePals offers both!
Ask to figure out what YOU know….. Then consult with two others sitting by you….combining your knowledge, how many do you know? Demonstration that you know more when you are collaborating.
Here are the answers….left to right, top to bottom BRIC = Brazil Russia India China
This is a picture of Anita Kerbaugh and her grade 4 class from Hill City! This K-8 school won the global education award, in part because every classroom in the school has some global collaborative project. The school is 100 miles from the nearest Wal-Mart….definitely a rural area!
These are states where the leadership in education has examined ePals and decided that it should be used throughout the state. They have examined the safety and security aspects, as well as the opportunities for student learning, and want to encourage wider use. In all these states, there are a few large urban areas and then a great number of rural schools. Maine Connects : 150K students http://www.epals.com/connects/usa/maine Wisconsin Connects : 800K students http://www.epals.com/connects/usa/wisconsin Pennsylvania Connects : 1.8 million students http://www.epals.com/connects/usa/pennsylvania Project supported by Holly Jobe for Pennsylvania Classroom For the Future (high school reform) Kansas : 400K students On the state’s KanEd portal Colorado : 800K students through eNet Colorado
Some examples of the organizations that ePals works with. National Geographic has invested in ePals and also has given us a seat on their board and has a seat on our board. You will see many digital assets from NatGeo used in ePals too! Eduteka joins ePals, bringing Spanish-language content and a Spanish-speaking community of educators Do you want Spanish teachers to have pen pals for their classes? Do you want high school classes to collaborate with southern hemisphere classes? (in school from April-December) Many technology and business classes for high school, also ESL classes are available
Vestal Central School District (Vestal, New York) Students and teachers from Vestal made international classroom-to-classroom connections through the global ePals community with schools in India, Sweden, South Korea, Germany and Brazil. Through the use of ePals safe email and blogs, they practiced literacy skill building via shared book reading, foreign language practice with native speakers, learned about other countries and cultures, shared maps and photos of their lives and home in upstate New York with their ePals classrooms across the globe. Vestal teachers integrated ePals technology and community as an essential communication and collaboration tool connecting both educator and learner. Teachers reported their students being more on-task, having a motivational purpose for their reading and an authentic peer audience for their writing. As evidenced in their work, collaborating with their epals across the globe encouraged Vestal students to use proper sentence structure, punctuate and spellcheck their work as they cared about what they were sending.
Many email collaborations begin by sharing personal and community information. Sometimes pictures are exchanged. A gr. 1 teacher can find many “teachable moments” from a photo like this. How many boys? How many girls? (counting) What are they wearing that is like what we wear? (comparison/contrast) How does this class look like our class?
Students are excited to discover that schools in different parts of the world can look very different from their own. This is a GREAT way to kick off the school year with kids of all ages. A child in NY said, “My dad drives a car just like that VW bug…but we don’t have palm trees outside our school.”
Even grade 1 students can write simple sentences (with help from teacher/parent). The vocabulary of their environment is a great way to start reading and writing.
New York and Botswana: A story of global connections that transcend socio-economic status, culture, and place. This is a class in a very affluent area of New York, and they partnered with a class in a very remote area of Botswana. After one month of weekly collaboration, they exchanged photographs. Notice what they are holding over their shoulders in the picture. Notice that the children in Botswana are playing soccer without shoes! The kids in America sent them soccer shoes. What do you think the response was of the children in Botswana? – They considered the shoes too precious to wear, except to church on Sunday. They did not want to get the shoes dirty.
California and Southern China: A story that embraces shared language and cultural awareness. The students involved in this partnership used the English version of SchoolMail on a daily basis to communicate. They also used SchoolBlog to share photos in a safe and protected way. A high school English teacher in San Diego has been paired for 8 years with a Chinese teacher who teaches English in a “tech school.”
The California students learned about Chinese culture, and the Chinese students learned English and about American culture. In China, people who speak English, understand American culture and can use computers can get good jobs!
The 4th grade class at Roseville Avenue Elementary School in Newark Public Schools used a protected and multi-lingual school email solution and global classroom network called ePals Classroom Exchange for email letter writing exchanges twice a week with an ePals peer classroom in Bologna, Italy. At the end of the school year, those students scored 72.4% on the New Jersey State ASK4 Language Arts Literacy Test, a 30 point higher score on the state standardized test than the previous year's fourth grade class, which had been taught by the same teacher, using the same curriculum and goals. Twice a week, the students were required to read and write proper email letters using the ePals SchoolMail solution as part of the curriculum. Students became increasingly motivated to email their peers and gradually increasing the amount of reading and writing they normally would perform each week. The Newark pilot also suggests students may be more motivated to do classroom assignments with a collaborative peer using email, than for the teacher with pencil and paper. "Students studied volcanoes, collected photos of famous Italian cities, ruins, Mt. Etna, and corresponded in email letters on specific topics. They learned to create and send Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, even created a class Haiku poetry book, which they brought home to parents and sent electronically to Italy. Using email and connecting the students with a peer enabled more literacy skill building to occur and they were self-motivated knowing other students would be receiving their work,” said Newark teacher Mary Carille .
This story was shared during a training in Louisiana last year. At the morning break, the classroom teacher stopped to tell about this project that she had completed through ePals last year! Our Story The 2nd grade classes at LeBleu Settlement Elementary participated in the Louisiana Region V Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center's (TLTC) Making Collaborative Connections (MC2) project by partnering with another class in Plymoth, Devon, United Kingdom using the ePals global community. This is our story! To begin we learned all the safety precautions that must be taken when children are utilizing the Internet. Then we introduced the students to email using ePals. After practicing sending email to each other we began sending emails to the students of Pomphlett Primary. The students had so much fun reading emails from their new friends. They learned many ways they were alike as well as different. To follow up the emails the student groups wrote about different aspects of their schools and videoed themselves to create a "documentary" about their school and community. We then exchanged "culture parcels" with the other class. It was great fun to receive mail from our new friends including their DVD, newspaper, soccer magazine, a popular English comic, English candy (confections), and post cards on which the students wrote messages about the pictures. We included our DVD, local newpaper, a visitor's guide for Southwest Louisiana, postcards, small bottles of Tobasco hot sauce, small packages of Tony Chachere's seasoning, Mardi Gras beads, a Cajun cookbook, postcards, an American Flag pin, and a stack of brochures about Southwest Louisiana.
Loudoun schools have videoconference equipment and are encouraged to use it!
Searching by Location is also fun! If you are involving your students in the search, you might enjoy projecting our interactive map on a screen. You may select the continent, or ask a student volunteer to make a recommendation. This is a great way to review geography.
Awareness of countries increases!
Note that the original profile was typed in Spanish. To ease searching, we translated it into Spanish and added that to the profile. That way, when someone is searching in English, they will turn up profiles with the key words in English, even though the original content wasn’t in English. In this example, the words “Greek and Roman mythology” might be important for the search!
The most common 13 languages are first, and the others are below, both in alphabetical order.
Primary school…..ages 10-12
“ College” in France….ages 11-12!
Then You’ll Click My Profile and complete.
We collect information that is NOT displayed. For example, we ask for the school address and phone number, but that is not displayed for the public. That is so we can verify that there IS such a school and that the people who claim to be teachers there…are teachers there!
A sample description has some key info highlighted.
A Successful Profile includes a variety of pieces of information. Plan to provide as much detail as possible about yourself, your students, and your classroom project. We have included this slide and the next within the participant handout. Participants will find that this handy checklist is a great reference tool as they compose and submit their own profile during the training.
A successful profile includes: age-range of class (age in years as well as grade level); language(s) the students speak; location of the classroom; location of desired partner; methods with which you would like to collaborate (email, postal mail, blogs, video conferences) If you are interested in a particular method of communication, but do not know how to undertake it (i.e. you want to do a video conference but don't know how) please indicate this.); Length of desired collaboration (school year, semester, a week, one-time exchange, etc.); Frequency of desired collaboration (weekly, monthly, at holidays); Topic of desired collaboration (the more specific the better. Global warming is better than science).
“ mediate the forums” means that anything a student writes, we preview before posting it. It does slow down the discussion, but it guarantees that nothing inappropriate is posted.
In Maine, we are using maine.epals.com for ALL schools. In Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, we are using wisc.epals.com or pa.epals.com for districts smaller than 5,000 students or for individual schools in the state.
In Maine, we are using maine.epals.com for ALL schools. In Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, we are using wisc.epals.com or pa.epals.com for districts smaller than 5,000 students or for individual schools in the state.
ePALS SchoolM@il™ filters words it considers to be profanity when detected in student messages. When questionable language is detected on student incoming or outgoing email, you will be able to read the email and either approve or delete it. If you approve the student email that was caught on the filter, it will be sent to its intended recipient. If you delete the student email that was caught on the filter, it will not be sent to the intended recipient.
ePals offers a range of filter levels to keep students safe. ePALS SchoolMail™ filters words it considers to be profanity when detected in student messages. This filter level can be adjusted for each individual student or for your building.
This is the inbox for your monitored mail. Notice the tabs at the top of the screen. You can use those tabs to go back and forth between your own teacher ePals email account and your student monitored mail. Note: You’ll see flag marks next to student monitored mail messages on the right side of the screen. Click the message hyperlink to check a student message that has been flagged on the filter system.
This is what you’ll see when you actually read the student message. You’ll have the ability to see both incoming and outgoing student messages when they are flagged on the filter system. Note: Depending upon the content of the message, you’ll click approve or delete. You might also choose to forward questionable messages to your building desktop administrator for extra support depending upon your building policy.
ePals offers a range of access levels to keep students safe. ePALS SchoolMail™ access level determines where students can send email to and receive email from.
LearningSpace regularly updates its security suite of tools to provide the most current versions possible.
LearningSpace regularly updates its security suite of tools to provide the most current versions possible.
NOTE: If you want to see more stories of collaboration, get the two-part PPT shows available on scribd.com.