Get Your Students Epals!

Not only we teacher expect to get connected to teachers all over the world, but also our students are looking forward their partners from different places! Decades ago, we had pen pals to talk and learned from each other. Now you can help your students find their epals.

That is such a fascinating website which can help us and students interact with the outside world. I like epals because almost 30,000 people from different places of the world are here to find study partners. There are some filters on the left side of the page, you can choose the country, student age range, language(s) spoken, average class size, subjects, grades, and specializations here, and it is easy for a teacher searches and contacts another teacher to connect two classes from two totally different areas in the world. For an example, a teacher in the U.S teaching French can contact a teacher in France teaching English so that their students can have language partners and have broader views of the world.

Teachers can also write their backgrounds, goals and expectations in the description part, so that others can view more detailed information here to see if their needs match each other. If you are viewing a teacher’s page, you can also see other teachers he/ she has made connections with. Their experiences are also viewable, which makes me believe this program can really work well!

It is so unbelievable how easy it is to reach out to a teacher in another country thousands of miles away from you. I am teaching Chinese in the U.S right now, and I think it will be a great idea if I can find a teacher in China. Students in two classes can find language partners and write to each other sharing their different lives. Besides the goal of improving language skills, I would like to let my students to connect with kids at the same age living in other different countries so that they will understand what a world citizen means.