ePals

ePals could be a combination of the functions of Google Blog, Twitter, Wiki, and Flickr. According to its website, ePals is a virtual workspace optimized for creating, sharing, managing, and collaborating on educational content. On top of that, it also provides a safe and secure environment for students and teachers to build up an education-orientated community. Among all of the features, SchoolMail and Digital Lockers have impressed me the most. With digital lockers, users of ePals are able to save and edit personal documents, photos, or audio files. As to schoolmail, users can not only rid themselves of spam and virus that slow down their time of work-processing, but also make use of the instant language translation in 35 languages. To use ePals in my own teaching, I would divide into groups and assignment each group a blog project. In this assignment, they are asked to design the layout of their blogs, decide the topic, and delegate the responsibilities of group members. Publishing at least one post is required to be able to continue working on their blogs which would be graded at the end of semester. As an ESL teacher, I would make English as the only viable language for communication. In this regard, students would be given opportunities of improving their fluency of writing.