E-PROJECTS

E-mail Projects

Since the late eighties, schools world-wide have used e-mail for international communications activities and projects. Email is a way to practice writing and reading, but its major attraction is speed, as participants need not wait days or even weeks for a response, but can receive them in a matter of minutes. This fact usually leads to motivation to write and to maintain contact with the foreign students. There are many different sites on the web which can lead you to the right email based collaborative project or to find people who can participate in your own project. Visit my favourite sites:

Intercultural E-Mail Classroom Connections. The IECC (Intercultural E-Mail Classroom Connections) mailing lists are provided by St.Olaf College as a free service to help teachers and classes link with partners in other countries and cultures for email classroom pen pal and project exchanges. I recommend this site as one of the best place where to announce your project in order to find the partner/s to collaborate with you. You are also able to consult the list of on-going projects and see if there is one which meets your needs.

E-Pals Classroom Exchange - (K-12 Education Resource). E-pals Classroom Exchange (ECE) provides students with an opportunity to meet and have correspondance with other students from around the World. Search its online database of classrooms or add yours to its search engine for free. You can search by School Name, the classroom's First Language, Grade, or the City or Town, State or Province, or the Country that they live in. You can then send an email or visit their home page to find out if they would like to become your classroom's pen pals.

Expo 2002 - School Projects Registry. From the search results by student age and country you will be able to email the school directly and ask for partnership. You can register so that your school details appear in the web site. You then may receive messages by groups of students or teachers asking for a partnership.

	E-mail Projects Home Page. This is a page aimed at helping learners world-wide link together and produce meaningful publications. You can choose from a list of about 15 on-going projects, read about them and ask for participation in any of them.
	I*EARN . This is a truly international (it has member schools in over 30 countries), non making profit interactive network of both schools and youth service organizations which is open to elementary and secondary schools, committed to making a significant difference to the world as part of the educational process, using telecommunications.This network coordinates more than 40 structured projects in different areas and also gives you the opportunity to design your own project and seek partners throughout the world.
	Global School Network Projects & Programs. This network offers a list of ready-structured projects which visitors can consult and register on if desired.

To know more about international networks aimed at enhancing student' communication and improvement of the English language through the use of computing and the internet visit European School Project. Among other projects this site promotes The image of the Other, a teletrip focussed on the English language as a second language with ready to use materials for the students. I myself have carried out this project between Dutch and my own Spanish students. The experience was brilliant!.

Other examples of e-mail projects can be found here

key pals

Apart from the projects which are usually set up by the teacher, and which involve groups, students can also have their key pals with whom they can exchange electronic messages in a more or less systematic way. Visit those sites in order to find individual or group partners around the world for your students.

The E-Mail Key Pal Connection, from the Comenius site provides a person-to-person key pal registration on payment of a nominal fee.

	International House Barcelona offers a comprehensive guide to penpal sites with advice for students and teachers on how to write good e-mail messages and on how to organise classes exchanges.
	Its-online Key pals. The its-online pen pal section is designed to be used by students of English around the world and native English speakers who would like to exchange messages with students of English in other countries. Students can become an "Its-online pen pal" by filling in the register form, or can just contact somebody by reading and answering other people's messages. And it is free!!
	Dave Sperling's ESL cafe Student Email Connection. Students can participate in this section by adding their names and email address to this list so that they can communicate with ESL students from all over the world. I think this is a good place to begin looking for key pals. It is also free.
	Search 2 [Internet FL Partners] , where students cannot only find a key pal but also search for people by language, level of ability, the type of Internet resources they want to use (e-mail, chat, web page..) and their interests (music, movies, sports, books...). It is free.

Linguistic Funland Penpal postings, which has postings by teachers describing
their students and what sort of pen pals they are seeking for. There's also a link there to the form
where you can post your own request.

E-PROJECTS

1. http://www.montageplus.co.uk/about/overview.htm The overview page is a good place to enter the Montage Plus site (a British Council site) -. Click on the Projects button to find the projects.

2. http://www.iearn.org/ iEARN. Click on the About Us button for an overview. Click on the Projects icon to find the projects. An alphabetical list of projects can be found by clicking on the Project List button. Note: there is a Czech iEARN site at http://vok.gymck.cz/%7Eiearn/

3. http://www.ruthvilmi.net/hut/Project/IWE/ Ruth Vilmi's IWE (International Writing Exchange) is designed to help university students improve their writing skills. For a quick overview go to http://www.ruthvilmi.net/hut/Current/iwe_intro.html You can download an overview from: http://www.ruthvilmi.net/hut/Conference/Overview.doc

4. If you are interested in a project which involves creating webpages, Dudeney provides some useful templates at http://uk.cambridge.org/elt/chlt/internet/teaching/ A description of 10 different project ideas can be found in Dudeney, G. 2000. The Internet and the Language Classroom. CUP. pp 142-147

5. http://www.wotw.org.uk/showcase/index.html View examples of international projects in the showcase section of Windows on the World (a British Council site).

6. http://www.epals.com/projects/ Click on an age group (or the featured project) to view the sorts of projects you might undertake with other schools.

7. http://www.teaching.com/iecc/ IECC is an American site for which you need to register (for free).

8. http://www.webfranceinternational.com/volterre/teacher.html A links page to all sorts of internet projects for teachers and learners of English at Volterre.

9. http://top.ngfl.gov.uk/projects.php3 British Educational Communications and Technology agency directory of online projects and expeditions.