E-mail Projects
Since the late eighties, schools world-wide have used e-mail for
international communications activities and projects. Email is a way to
practice writing and reading, but its major attraction is speed, as
participants need not wait days or even weeks for a response, but can
receive them in a matter of minutes. This fact usually leads to motivation
to write and to maintain contact with the foreign students. There are
many different sites on the web which can lead you to the right email
based collaborative project or to find people who can participate in your
own project. Visit my favourite sites:
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Intercultural E-Mail
Classroom Connections. The IECC (Intercultural E-Mail Classroom
Connections) mailing lists are provided by St.Olaf College as a free
service to help teachers and classes link with partners in other
countries and cultures for email classroom pen pal and project exchanges.
I recommend this site as one of the best place where to announce your
project in order to find the partner/s to collaborate with you. You are
also able to consult the list of on-going projects and see if there is
one which meets your needs.
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Classroom Exchange - (K-12 Education Resource). E-pals Classroom
Exchange (ECE) provides students with an opportunity to meet and have
correspondance with other students from around the World. Search its
online database of classrooms or add yours to its search engine for
free. You can search by School Name, the classroom's First Language,
Grade, or the City or Town, State or Province, or the Country that they
live in. You can then send an email or visit their home page to find out
if they would like to become your classroom's pen pals. |
To know more about international networks
aimed at enhancing student' communication and improvement of the English
language through the use of computing and the internet visit
European School Project. Among
other projects this site promotes
The image of the Other,
a teletrip focussed on the English language as a second language with
ready to use materials for the students. I myself have carried out this
project between Dutch and my own Spanish students. The experience was
brilliant!.
Other examples of e-mail projects can be
found here
key
pals
Apart from the projects which are usually
set up by the teacher, and which involve groups, students can also have
their key pals with whom they can exchange electronic messages in a more
or less systematic way. Visit those sites in order to find individual or
group partners around the world for your students.
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International House Barcelona offers a comprehensive guide to penpal
sites with advice for students and teachers on how to write good e-mail
messages and on how to organise classes exchanges.
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Its-online Key pals. The
its-online pen pal section is designed to be used by students of English
around the world and native English speakers who would like to exchange
messages with students of English in other countries. Students can
become an "Its-online pen pal" by filling in the register
form, or can just contact somebody by reading and answering other
people's messages. And it is free!!
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Dave
Sperling's ESL cafe Student Email Connection. Students can
participate in this section by adding their names and email address to
this list so that they can communicate with ESL students from all over
the world. I think this is a good place to begin looking for key pals.
It is also free.
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Search 2 [Internet
FL Partners] , where students cannot only find a key pal but also
search for people by language, level of ability, the type of Internet
resources they want to use (e-mail, chat, web page..) and their
interests (music, movies, sports, books...). It is free. |
![bullet](_themes/blitz/btzbul1a.gif) | Linguistic
Funland Penpal postings, which has postings by teachers describing
their students and what sort of pen pals they are seeking for. There's
also a link there to the form
where you can post your own request. |
E-PROJECTS
1.
http://www.montageplus.co.uk/about/overview.htm
The overview page is a good place to enter the Montage Plus site (a
British Council site) -. Click on the Projects button to find the
projects.
2.
http://www.iearn.org/ iEARN. Click on the
About Us button for an overview. Click on the Projects icon to find the
projects. An alphabetical list of projects can be found by clicking on
the Project List button. Note: there is a Czech iEARN site at
http://vok.gymck.cz/%7Eiearn/
3.
http://www.ruthvilmi.net/hut/Project/IWE/
Ruth Vilmi's IWE (International Writing Exchange) is designed to help
university students improve their writing skills. For a quick overview go
to http://www.ruthvilmi.net/hut/Current/iwe_intro.html You can download an
overview from:
http://www.ruthvilmi.net/hut/Conference/Overview.doc
4.
If you are interested in a project which involves creating webpages,
Dudeney provides some useful templates at
http://uk.cambridge.org/elt/chlt/internet/teaching/
A description of 10 different project ideas can be found in Dudeney, G.
2000. The Internet and the Language Classroom. CUP. pp 142-147
5.
http://www.wotw.org.uk/showcase/index.html
View examples of international projects in the showcase section of Windows
on the World (a British Council site).
6.
http://www.epals.com/projects/ Click on an
age group (or the featured project) to view the sorts of projects you
might undertake with other schools.
7.
http://www.teaching.com/iecc/ IECC is an
American site for which you need to register (for free).
8.
http://www.webfranceinternational.com/volterre/teacher.html A
links page to all sorts of internet projects for teachers and learners of
English at Volterre.
9.
http://top.ngfl.gov.uk/projects.php3
British Educational Communications and Technology agency directory of
online projects and expeditions.
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