ePals: collaborate globally

I think ePals help teachers to create authentic opportunities for our students to talk, share, learn and collaborate with their classmates and other students around the world. And also I think ePals could help our students to get a glance at other countries’ culture and give them a chance to practice their English skills in authentic, natural and spontaneous ways.

EPals is like a window that could lead students to the more authentic language context and actually “touch” the language or really know someone who is at the other corner of the world using the language everyday!

On the ePals webpage you can have a lot of opportunities like search by projects and then find some interesting topic you would like to engage to. Or you can collaborate with a classroom by searching by country or searching by project. If you are a teacher, you can find a lot of useful resources such as you can see various teachers’ work in various topics. One can even search by families and get to know what other culture’s families look like.

All in all, ePals is a wonderful forum that can allow teachers and students all over the world to collaborate together.

photo by: mtsofan

A learner is like a...

  To me, a learner is like a passenger, who is traveling on a train and when the train has arrived its destination, the passenger took off the train and switch to another train, and the train system is extensive and convenient and the train system could take the passenger anywhere at anytime.

  I've learned a little about sociolinguistics and I read about Vygotsky's theory about language learning occurs on two planes, one is inter-relationship and the other is intra-relationship; Learning is not only about the learner himself, but is also occurring between one and the other person. When I read the article "Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age", it is not that unfamiliar to me, because I know that "One of the most persuasive factors is the shrinking half-life of knowledge. The “half-life of knowledge” is the time span from when knowledge is gained to when it becomes obsolete." Connectivism deepen and strengthen my knowledge of nowadays learning.

  Indeed, "In a knowledge economy, the flow of information is the equivalent of the oil pipe in an industrial economy." And truly, today's knowledge is no longer life-time knowledge. Today's knowledge is half-life of knowledge and "When knowledge is gained to when it becomes obsolete."

  I think to take this online course is not about learning the knowledge of how to integrate online technologies into our teaching, but it is about how to apply this Internet knowledge into facilitating the gaining of our knowledge and our students' knowledge. Just as the video "The Conflict of Learning Theories with Human Nature" says, "To focus less on try to bring knowledge into the mind of a person and more on developing the skills of our learners".

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