Epals Evaluation

Purpose/Brief Description
Interactive site. This site offers a sheltered and monitored email environment in which students, teachers, parents, and school administrators can create messages and collaborate on class projects. The epals company controls and verifies access to the system to keep potential online predators out. The result is a safe and robust forum for educational development.

Learner Fit
This site is a good fit for all levels of ELLs: the depth and complexity of the messages and projects can grow in sophistication as a student's English proficiency improves. Also, it fits into the defacto default communication mode of the digital age: email/text communication.

The site also meets several of the Conditions for Optimal Language Learning Environments, as listed in Figure 1-2. Under the guidance of an instructor, students have the opportunity to collaborate on assigned projects, during which they would have to interact and negotiate meaning. On student forums , learners can communicate directly with one another, again interacting and negotiating meaning.

The design of the site encourages the students to produce varied and creative language, another condition for optimal language learning. The asynchronous nature of the communication also helps to create a workable and balanced stress level and supports a fair level of learner autonomy.

Teacher Fit
This site is an excellent fit for teachers. They can get an idea of how other instructors have used the site by browsing the Project tab, which contains links to the current projects and canned projects from National Geographic. They can also follow projects currently underway and talk about the nuts-and-bolts of project creation and monitoring in the Project Forum.


How Can It Be Used?
The real strength in ESL teaching lies in the site's collaborative nature and its protected environment. A user can search the site for ideas and post messages to which like-minded teachers or students can respond. This clearinghouse approach makes such connections easier and faster.

Likes/Dislikes
Likes:
The site supports not only teachers and student but families as well. I saw several posts from families looking for epals for their children...to share cultural and historical information, for example. Also, the partnering with National Geographic is especially powerful. Though the power of the Internet and epals, students can now actually connect with the persons and places that a project/article is talking about.

Dislikes:
The only dislike I have (which is a really a personal preference) is the presence of some animated gifs advertising epal services, products, or links to other sites. I tend to prefer a generally static web page.