Canada 2.0

For the last month my students have been emailing their pen pals from Canada. We exchanged a video and hope to Skype soon. For those that haven't heard of it, ePals is a great website for meeting classes. Initially I helped the students draft their own emails and edit for spelling. Now I'm letting the process occur more organically and allowing the students a lot of freedom to send their own emails. With ePals all the incoming and outgoing emails get sent to me for approval so I feel it is very safe. Some students have even showed their parents their emails and sent an email from home. They are all have their own email and password and are proficient at composing, attaching files, and sending and replying to emails.

We used Google Earth to look at our partner school and we sent and received pictures from our respective schools. It has been a blast!

Canada 2.0

(photo courtesy of Garcia, Rosamar, pics4learning.com)

I am excited to tell you about a recent project I'm undertaking through ePals. My second grade class is corresponding with a class of first and second graders in Ontario, Canada. We began the lesson while we were still studying money so it was great to learn about their different money.

It was also a good opportunity to use Google Earth.

Once we finished our initial email and our second one to learn how to attach a file I pretty much let the students correspond on their own. I didn't correct for spelling or punctuation but encouraged them to communicate independently. Some of them managed to log on from home and showed their families. Some surprises were the trouble with capital letters and all caps, misspelling of target email addresses, and hitting send multiple times. Overall it was a blast! I wasn't sure the students could log on and send emails by themselves but they did remarkably well!

The lesson is posted here.