Global cooperation (Part 2)

Among those tools we discussed in last mod, I will use BigThink to explore my project. BigThink is one of the asynchronous tools we explored in our WIKI group, and the great merit of BigThink is that it can facilitate global cooperation in ways of offering learners and teachers great freedom to express ideas through uploading videotapes made by our own, from which not only could we get to know other people’s thoughts but also hear their voice. Besides posting our videos, we can also reply with plain text to have a conversation with the public intellectuals in various fields.
If I had the chance, I will use BigThink to conduct a Weather project. And I will search and contact another classroom on ePals who is making the same project as us. The objectives of this project are to intensify students’ cooperation ability and let them learn how weather works. After this cooperation project, students will learn the components of weather like air pressure, humidity; and how weather affect their daily lives and the choices they make about clothing, food, transportation, and mood, etc.. They will discuss essential questions like what factors make the weather change, in what ways does weather control our lives and what methods should we use for predicting the weather? And post their thoughts and ideas as videos on BigThink. In exchanging ideas through BigThink, students will gain more than the fact from reading: they could make friends with people from other culture backgrounds, learn from each other, and see how similarly and differently their opinions are towards the same question, and improve their 2 skills (listening, speaking) and computer skills as well.
Doing global cooperation project is a good way to elicit students’ learning interests. Students will benefit a lot when they engage in this.

iEARN VS ePals

I choose ePals and iEARN as two sites of global cooperation internet tools.
ePals is a collaborative learning experience, it provides learners and teachers around the world opportunities for sharing and exchanges thoughts, skills and experiences with their peers about anything related to education such as study, books, life, etc.. As it is said on its official website, ePals is the “internet’s largest global community of connected classrooms. It is connecting over 125,718 registered classrooms, more than 7 million students and educators, in 191 countries.” Through ePals, a home of global collaboration, learners and teachers could establish international friendships by making pen pals all around the world, sending protected SchoolMail, maintaining secure classrooms blogs, connecting with other classrooms for collaborating projects, and practicing language and literacy skills.
iEARN, the short name for International Education and Resource Network, is another global network community for teachers and students in more than 115 countries to collaborate together in education field. All the 150 projects in iEARN are designed by teachers and students to fit their curriculum and classroom needs and schedules. With participating in the same project, students and teachers can connect with those who are working on the same project around the world.

To compare iEARN and ePals, the common thing of them is they are both online learning websites which offer learners and teachers around the world chances to work on common projects and collaborate with each other. The major different thing is that ePals offers fewer projects while iEARN has more options of projects which is 150. However, besides collaborating projects, ePals has various functions such as email sending, classroom blogs, In2Books, etc, which is different from iEARN focusing on operating projects only. And using ePals is safer than using iEARN. I personally prefer ePals to iEARN because ePals has more powerful functions such as Classroom Match, SchoolMail, etc., and all the files created and operated there are safely guaranteed since ePals blocks SPAM, pornography, and curse words. However, I find there is a tiny drawback in using ePals, sometimes logging in is slow and not easy.

If I had the chance to apply these global cooperation sites in my future teaching, I will use ePals in connecting teachers and students around the world, because it is more functional and convenient. The join steps are easy and fast, the matching and searching provides me much convenience. I will try to use the tools of Classroom Match and In2Books to facilitate my teaching. With the use of the ePals Classroom Match, I could lead my students to join the classroom projects they are interested in through matching the classroom ---I could find any classroom and learning project worldwide by typing in keywords or brief description, such as global warming, maps, natural disasters, etc. and share and exchange emails or blogs broadly. At the same time, I may use In2Books to help students find their own penpal since it is a good platform for learners making global penpals under teachers’ supervision. And I believe a good language learner should have a language partner to practice, and making pen pals is a very good way to improve language proficiency especially under the supervision of teachers.