ePals---- Find Your Partner around the World

ePals is a worldwide site to find partners of other countries to accomplish a project together. I found an Indian project called “On My Plate” interesting because many projects deal with the exchange of language or culture among countries in the world, but this one aims at developing healthy, nutritional eating habit by exploring different cuisines and food facts of other countries. The topic of food is really a big issue in the world, especially in countries with large populations such as China and India. If there are proper ePals, this project will give the Indian primary students a new outlook to the food out of their country.

Another one is Collaborative Detective Story Project which is initiated in a class in Pakistan. In this project, students first know each other through emails and questionnaires, and then one class composes the first paragraph of the story and the second class read and proofread. The exchange continues until the end of the story. At the age of 11 to 13, boys and girls really have great curiosity and creative imagination. This project would arouse their interest easily and everybody is looking forward to knowing how the story will develop while they are learning the language through interaction.

After exploring the site, I feel like the young generation is so lucky because it was so hard to find a pen pal in other provinces when I was a teenager, let alone an epal. However, with the site, students are provided a world map to find their foreign friends who share the same value or characteristic with them.  One of the features of this site we can use is students will see and feel another country by their interaction with another group of students from that country rather than just read or watch some reports created by others on the newspaper or television. They can incorporate with each other to share any kind of authentic resource if there will be one or more classes to participate in the project.