ePals and iEARN

WHAT is EPals?

It is just like a place on line where you can find pen-pals around the world. But Epals offers more than pen-pals. This collaborative online community offers students, parents, teachers, and schools an opportunity to be connected in a safe, creative way. After your profile has been approved (students under 18 are not allowed to submit personal profile except they are under parents' monitor--parents need to submit their profiles instead), you can join in any classroom that fit your interest or learning objectives; or you can exchange ideas through Epals email system with your epals--either you find them or they find you by Epals searching tools; or join in forum discussion on teaching, parenting, or book-reading(again, if you are a student you can only post on students talk). What I really like here in Epals is that it claims that it reserves the right to edit messages, since "many of (our) users are non-native English speakers, ePals forums function as a method of learning and improving English language skills. For this reason, (we) encourage (our) members to model English language use when participating in our forums." Spelling is always one of my concern about internet using in classroom. A lot internet English spellings are in use today, such as lol (lots of laugh), r(are), u(you), cuz(because), ect.. With ePals I can involve my students in worldwide interaction without worrying they may hand in an essay with spelling like "r u sure?" on. Oh, and above all, It's all free!

iEARN

I like the name of this site, iEARN (International Education and Resource Network). It is also a non-profit organization. It has a bit longer history than ePals. It was founded based on a Foundation, linked 12 schools in Moscow and 12 in New York State in 1988. The project yielded some profound results, which lead to a further development of iEARN program. It is celebrating its 2oth anniversary. The major difference between ePals and iEARN is iEARN has physically centers in each country that work for iEARN. As an advantage for this, iEARN offers exchanging programs for schools and students who participate in its program. Another difference is that, some academic researches and studies have been implemented based on iEARN programs since 1995, as well as evaluations on its projects and conferences, which back up iEARN's further improvement and development. All projects on iEARN are designed by teachers and students. iEARN requires a final "output" of each project to make sure that learning is actually taking place and as an indication of what those participants have been achieved. Moreover, iEARN also cares about teachers--it has an online professional development workshop and course for teachers who want to improve their ability and possibility of assisting their classes, schools and communities to join internet based collaborative learning projects. Basically, iEARN is more like a governmental institute whereas iPals is a free public cyber space for virtual collaboration.