One site that was originally set up entirely to support information exchange between teachers and learners in different cultures is ePals, reviewed recently in the New York Times (mostly this article reviews the business model but there are some interesting quotes about the pedagogical approach adopted as well). Not that I have tried this service, but it has been around for a while now, and looks like it might be worth checking out.
According to the article the idea of exchanging information over the internet with students from other cultures is inherently motivating to a lot of the students participating. One teacher comments:
If they were just writing for me, they wouldn’t be as careful. But they’re writing for a student in another country. It’s not drudgery for them. They buy in and they enjoy it.Teachers are using the site to send their students on virtual field trips, where they can learn about the family life and political systems of up to 120 different participating countries (that's a lot!). The site now has 13 million registered participants so it is getting to the point where it could have an impact.
I know that teachers in Hong Kong are always looking for ways to engage their students, and give them opportunities. I'm not aware of many exchanges of this nature though. I wonder how well this kind of collaboration could work in the local scene, or what kind of work would be necessary to make it a success.
4 comments:
The project sounds interesting. Yet, I always think this kind of communication depends highly on students' motivation.
I still remembered that when I studied in secondary school, some of my friends started to find a pen-pal in some other countries. Later on, some succeeded finding a pen-pal and came back to show what they had done. For the other students that didn't join the program at first, they thought it would be more superior if they could find one. Thus, most of my classmates managed to find a pen-pal.
What I am thinking now is that peer do have influence on the others. That's why we should encourage those enthusiastic students to join the programme first and introduce to the others later on.
Thanks for the comment. I'd agree that peers' influence is extremely strong and that it's a good idea to try and tap into that if you can. Like a lot of things, something like a cultural exchange could easily be seen by your students as just one more thing to do or another piece of homework.
Ultimately, the hope with projects of this nature is that the person or social group at the other end (i.e. the epal) makes some kind of difference. If they turn out to be more motivated than your students, then perhaps some of that would rub off on your students. And of course we hope that they will have interesting things to share. I haven't tried anything like this out, so I would be interested to know if you have any other thoughts.
It's a good idea to let our students to write some authentic texts with a target audience. Sometimes I think the reason why my students do not have motivation in writing is because they treat their writing as homework and I am always the audience who they may not be interested to write to. However, I have a worry which is as we cannot control what students write to the pals online, I'm not sure if the online pals will have bad influence to my students through the communication online. I think it's not only my worry but the parent's worry as well.
Hi Fiona,
One responsibility of the school should be to provide a safe online environment for children to explore the internet, I guess. I imagine that the ePals web site tries to achieve this, so it might be worth looking at what they have tried to do security-wise.
There are definitely some controls built in. The article mentions this example:
'A teacher in California, for example, set the controls so her class could communicate online only with a class in China that was engaged in a joint cultural exchange project.'
Is that the sort of thing you have in mind, or do you have other concerns?
Why do you think you cannot control what students write to the pals online? Doesn't that depend on how you set the programme up?
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