ePals: An Online "Teacher's Convention" for Social Learning

By the day, more and more educators from all subject areas are becoming more aware of both the value of social learning and the ways in which the internet can make this more and more feasible. Particularly in second language learning settings, the ability for students to interact with other learners and even native speakers is extremely conducive to an enhanced learning experience. However, until the last 10 years, and even less than that in some cases, classes and student groups connecting with these learners or foreign language speakers has been difficult and rare, if not impossible.

Today, with the ever-expanding internet where more and more of the world is connected and able to communicate in real-time while on opposing sides of the globe, learners and educators have a much higher capability to learn a foreign language in a social context ; the way which many researchers suggest it is best accomplished. A large assortment of tools make this possible: social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, blogs such as those found on Blogger and eduBlogs, and of course individual websites of organizations and teachers all provide (either directly or through reference/links to other resources) a sort of populist assortment of learning tools. The problem with such an expansive battery of resources is that there is, to date, no centralized collection of these user-created tools that saves an educator valuable time and attention by presenting a vast selection of tools that are "peer-reviewed"; not in the research sense, but in terms of user-ratings. Using the internet, it is indeed very possible to get completely lost from the comfort of your home. One site, ePals, is potentially the start of a solution to this enduring road block in using the internet for focused social learning.

ePals  is an education technology website that connects users to learning networks that are both safe for students of all ages and effective. The fields of study and project foci are greatly varied but are targeted on the primary and secondary school levels. The bulk of the site in terms of value are the Member Projects. These projects are social learning plans that are not only designed by educators, but are in practice now. Even more, the site allows registered users to rate projects. Of course this is subjective, but it provides at least some means of sorting through the fog in an open-community to find projects that are truly advantageous.With a self-reported 700,000 users, ePals does have what could be seen as an overwhelming amount of "stuff" to share with you, but keeps them all in one space where you can search it, sort it, sneak a peak it it, then use it. Or move on to the next project.

As an example, one project I find interesting and with great potential in the field of social learning of an L2 is Far or Close Language Always Flows (A Culture and Language Project) submitted by an educator in Turkey and a partner in Italy. The project aims to allow teachers and students from different language backgrounds to share and teach language to each other using lexicon from a number of practical topics such as household items, food, clothes, animals, etc. The project puts students from the larger group into pairings to provoke them to both teach and learn their partner's language socially. The aspect of this project that these learning exchanges was precipitated by an actual, physical visit to one anothers' home countries. This may or may not be feasible, depending on many contextual and environmental circumstances, but, while ideal, may not be necessary thanks to tools like Skype and web-conferencing. That's what the site is all about... finding projects out there that you can use or that inspire you to modify them so they suit your class' situation. Visit the project's own external site to learn more about it.

So how do you take the above project and make it work if you can't afford 20 airline tickets from Buffalo to Paris? Well, another project of value to me that would aid in putting a modified project, as discussed above, into fruition virtually is Connecting Classrooms with Skype submitted by educator Betsy Weigle of South Carolina. This project attacks the hurdles of distant social learning. The project synopsis linked above shares the teacher's goals for this specific project: "...to open my classroom to the world by bringing children from Washington state and South Carolina together virtually to share insights on Native American cultures".They did this in a shared virtual classroom by doing research, creating PowerPoint point presentations and other digital exhibits, and maybe most importantly, verbal presentations. "Combining these presentation techniques with Skype allowed in-depth, real-time interaction on shared content," according to the submitter.

Of course, the topic of Native American cultures may not at all be pertinent to my L2 classroom or your own. But, the topic of study in the projects you find on ePals is not necessarily relevant at all. The biggest advantage of the site is the ideas the projects provide regarding how to teach a lesson socially and how to use technology to do it. This is how I would use this site in the future; not to carbon copy a project and duplicate it with my students. Rarely would all of the circumstances be the same to make such a duplication as effective as it could be. The networking of information and ideas that you can incorporate into the best possible use for your specific classroom is what makes this site great. Again, these benefits are amplified by its centralized nature, ease of "search-ability", and its user-ratings.