ePals

The ePals website has four different features.

ePals Platform
--This is something like an operating system in that it provides the basis for the other ePals features.

ePals Learning Space
--This is a system that incorporates email, filesharing and browsing.  It would be used on a school-wide or district-wide level.  It has the advantage of allowing access and collaboration from teachers, students, administrators, and parents.

ePals School Mail
--This is a system for student email accounts.  It allows instant translation, spam filters and some other features.  The most useful feature for the classroom, especially if a teacher is conducting a pen pals project, is the monitoring option.

ePals Global Community
--This is a collaborative network that allows teachers to match their classrooms with other classrooms around the world for cooperative projects.  It is supplemented with graphics from National Geographic.

In2Reading
--This is a website that matches students in grades 3-5 with adults who read the same books they are reading.  The adults become mentors and pen pals, and interactions can be monitored by the teacher.  This would be useful to me as a teacher if I knew who the adults were.  For example, if I knew that they all came from a local community center or were parents of older students in the district.

What seems most immediately useful to me is the selection of unit projects provided toward the bottom of the main page.  I will be working with ESL students, so the Holidays and Celebrations project will be particularly applicable.  A complete package is provided, and I could focus any of the activities around whatever language feature I wanted to highlight.