Mod 8

For Mod 8 I choose Global School Net and Epals. Global School Net (GSN) states as its purpose the
…meaningful project learning exchanges with people around the world to develop literacy and communication skills, foster teamwork and collaboration, encourage workforce preparedness and create multi-cultural understanding.

The site offers links to various projects that are being conducted in order to achieve these goals. This site has some nice links that could be useful in the class room. While I was impressed with the resources on the site, I got the generally impression that the projects and suggestions contained in the site were geared more toward the affluent spectrum of education. I do not mean this as a derogatory observation. I simply wish to point out that I always try and imagine the use of any new resource in a variety of settings, and find this site more advantages for use in classrooms where students are already incorporates into the power structures of our society. This being said I think that the links on this site offer great opportunity to schools with abundant resources. I was particularly impressed by the “Door to Door Diplomacy” project. I think this inclusion of this State Department Funded program demonstrates a positive way in which the internet can help bridge the bureaucratic gape between Washington initiatives and schoolroom practice. I could definitely envision using the previous projects detailed here as a model for classroom projects. As a language teacher I think there also could be a benefit in using the international project created here as not only a template for future projects, but also as a means of motivating FL students by reminding them of the reality of the non-Anglophone world. The main drawbacks that I found with this site are the lack of a convenient search engine and a lack of Spanish language resources.
I found E-pals a little easier to use, although I think that it is more geared toward teacher preparation than direct classroom application. My favorite part of this site was the forums. We have encountered other teacher forums in the course of our projects, but I found the ones contained here the most useful and accessible. By doing a quick search for the word “Spanish” I was able to find a large number of pen-pal requests. Additionally there are many forums which provide teaching suggestions from around the world. I would love to be in position where I could pair my students with correspondence from other parts of the world, and this seems to be a great resource for doing so.