ePals promotes itself as ‘the internet’s largest global community of connected classrooms.  It is a free resource that offers collaborative school projects, eMentoring as well as ‘ePals on the web’.

From the website comes the following information:

The Social Network for Learning

ePals is the largest and fastest growing K-12 online community for meaningful learning. More than half a million educators and millions of learners across 200 countries and territories safely connect, collaborate and build community.

• Schools around the globe use our school-safe email and blog tools.
• Deep learning is catalyzed through collaborative learning projects and experiences such as In2Books, ePals’ research-based curriculum-aligned eMentoring program.

Exchanging ideas and questions in a meaningful way with other learners – down the block or around the globe – generates great excitement about learning and builds 21st century digital literacy and learning skills.

ePals was written about recently in The Journal. The text of the article follows: 

ePals Boosts Language Translation Capabilities

By David Nagel

08/19/09

Education technology provider ePalshas upgraded its ePals Global Community by expanding its instant translation capabilities. The service has now added 26 additional languages and can now translate text in a total of 35 languages.

Some of the new languages supported by the translator include Arabic, Dutch, Finnish, Hebrew, Hindi, Polish, Russian, Swedish, and Vietnamese

ePals is a free resource that reaches more than half a million educators and millions of students worldwide, offering collaboration tools, social networking capabilities, and school-oriented features like Classroom Match, SchoolMail, SchoolBlog, and In2Books.

• Classroom Match is a tool designed to let teachers connect with other classrooms or online projects around the country.
• SchoolMail is an integrated, teacher-monitored e-mail system that includes 72 language-translation pairs, spell checking, virus and spam filters, and file-sharing capabilities.
• SchoolBlog is a literacy education tool that offers teacher-supervised message boards that encourage students to express ideas and collaborate with peers and instructors.
• In2Books is an online literacy curriculum based around a dialog between a student and an adult mentor designed to improve student achievement on standardized tests and increase critical thinking and writing proficiency.

According to ePals, more than 500,000 teachers and “millions of students” around the world use the online service. Further information can be found here.

The In2Books section of the site may be of interest to Primary School teachers:

With In2Books, 3rd – 5th grade students:

• Are connected with carefully screened adult pen pals
• Select and read 5 books closely each year
• Engage with adult pen pals who read the same books
• Exchange 6 online letters each year with their adult pen pals

and,

With In2Books, teachers: the learning with in-class discussions about the books and related instruction in genre and literacy skills.

Reinforce and extend

Certainly worth perusing.