Learn from the world

"Students are motivated to learn through experience, and with ePals I’ve introduced an experience beyond the classroom." M. Orlando, Italy

ePals is an online community that provides connections for people around the world. You can find numerous learning projects that incorporate students from around the world. You will realize that the world is so big and there are so many people just like you, eager to learn the outside world.

There are various good projects in the long list. If you were just curious about the world, scan the list and you will find many interesting projects. For example, I found a project posted by a group of students from India. They are 11-20 students of age group 11-13 seeking partners for friendship. In their project description they wrote that they would like to hear from Chinese students and discuss topics like Food, Preserving Monuments, Chinese Terracotta Army, etc. I like their topics; it feels good to know what people interested in my country. I would like to join their project and share my knowledge with them and also learn their culture.

So you can see that it is easy to put your goal on it and attract people from all over the world to participate in your project. ePal also provides categorized search on the side bar. You can narrow your target projects by choosing region, project type, duration, collaboration and common core. You can also simply type in the key words like topics or country.

For teachers, we would get inspired from various projects created by teachers and students around the world. A Korean teacher posted a Culture in a Box project. They send out a Culture Box full of posters, t-shirts, puzzles, pictures and messages about Korean culture each week. Similarly, a class in Japan seeks partners to exchange City Video. The creative thinking in teaching outside the classroom is perfectly revealed on this website.

And as a future ESL teacher I would say ePals is one of the best to teach student cultures because they could learn authentic content. I could also learn how to make a better lesson plan on teaching culture; there are so many experienced teachers posting gorgeous lesson plans, just like building a data base. Besides, by clicking Contact Leader in project page, I suppose I can contact and keep in touch with teachers, learn and share experience. I would definitely suggest my students and my college to use this site in the future.