Freshman Students Create Digital Correspondence with Kids Their Own Age on Three Continents.
To expand the potential for global collaboration between my students and counterparts their same age, we included E-pals in our work since it boasts the largest interconnected community of classrooms worldwide. After registering and exploring E-pals we realized that it has very limited and controlled functionality. So our mission became clear. Our purpose was not to linger in E-pals but to connect with its members who were teachers in order to bridge communication between their classes and our own. After registering on E-pals, my students reached out to teachers from around the world and invited them to learn with us. Students sent letters to teachers throughout Latin America and Spain. Included in their invitations was the link to our Twitter discussion group, Bilingual Connection. Within nine weeks of sending letters, students built connections with many teachers who sent us class lists of over 400 students emails combined!!! In each of these instances, communication occurred solely between the students and the teachers abroad. Once my students provided me the class’s names and emails, I created a Google doc for each list and linked each of them to a password protected blog page within our network, Learningconnects.us.
More videos from the Madrid class.
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Students were provided access to the page containing all the class lists ; they divided the emails and began communications with other kids their same age living on distant continents. Many students were able to exchange Skype and Twitter names as well as links to their personal learning blogs with their partner’s- an example is Erin’s email exchange with Fede.
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Students inserted sections of their email exchanges on their blogs and then wrote and reflected about their learning. In Meghan’s blog post you can see this as well as some of the pictures her new friend Adrian sent her. Adrian and his school below.
I was so excited when I read a message from Sean, one of my Spanish 1 students:
[12/8/2009 2:42:55 PM] sandersen84: Valentina y yo somos amigos en Facebook, y ahora puedo hablar con ella sobre una base más regular. (Valentina and I are now friends on Facebook and now I can speak with her more on a regular basis.)
- Sean and Valentina take the conversation to Facebook
Sean began his interaction with Valentina, a girl his age from Argentina, via email but then they decided to connect via facebook since it is a network that they both use regularly. In his blog post titled “Conversaciones con Valentina” he talks about how powerful it is for his personal learning to connect with someone his same age in Argentina who also plays the guitar and has the same musical interests as himself! I was also thrilled to see that Sophie connected with Valentina via Facebook since both are very passionate musicians.
As you can see by the student examples and feedback, this has been an incredibly rewarding experience for us all.
