ePals Communication and Global Citizenship

Today more than ever, educators have a responsibility to encourage their students to see themselves as global citizens in an interconnected world. This is one reason why ePals is an invaluable teacher resource. Several features of this program are particularly useful for enabling students to interact with people who are different from themselves on topics that stretch their thinking.

First, the ePals Student Forums and Focus-Area Forums are set up as open discussion boards allowing for students to contribute their ideas in areas that are of most interest to them. These forums are screened for appropriate content and are initiated through questions that pertain to specific website content (e.g., biodiversity, black history, geography) and other global issues, so teachers and parents are assured that student interaction is educational in nature.

Second, the ePals SchoolMail feature enables students to connect and build relationships with other students around the world through school-safe emails. The email has built-in instant language translation to aid in cross cultural communication.

A third feature that aids in establishing cross-cultural relationships is the Classroom Match component . This resource helps teachers to find a match with another classroom that is looking for a collaboration partner. Classroom Match adds thousands of new classroom profiles each month, and participating classrooms come from over 200 countries.

Another component, the ePals Projects feature, nicely complements Classroom Match by providing collaborators with structured activities, such as digital storytelling, to work on together. All of these ePals features facilitate global communication and collaboration. By using them students begin to see themselves as informed and active global citizens, not as passive spectators of the world.

With regard to my own ESL classroom use, I could use ePals Classroom Match and Project features to connect my students to a classroom of adult English language learners in another part of the world. Adult learners could share their observations of the culture in which they are immersed, and in doing so compare and contrast cultures. Students in both classrooms could compile for one another a brief description of the three greatest social challenges that they have observed in their country of residence (e.g., crime, income disparity, racism, access to healthcare, access to quality education). Students could support their choices with links to media reports and photos that illustrate the severity of the problem. Together the classrooms could identify countries where these issues are well managed and reasons for it. Since adult ESL classes typically include learners from many different countries, the wealth of perspectives makes this project particularly conducive to broadening students’ understanding of social issues and imagining the possibilities for change that may be realized through interconnectedness.