Thinking Globally

This week, in EDU 642 we are exploring the connections that can be made through technology, both globally and locally. This topic is something that I have tried to incorporate this year into my students' technology class. With the help of my EDU 685 course earlier this year, I developed a plan to implement ePals with my fourth grade students. After endless weeks on ePals.com searching for a group of 65-70 students of similar ages, I finally made contact with an educator in Australia. Since mid March, our students have been getting to know each other and creating artifacts about themselves and their lives to share with their new friends across the globe. This has been a great learning experience, not only for the students, but for me as well. One of the first things that the students were curious about was the time difference. We then began searching for the current time each class. This sparked some great discussion and became a great learning experience. It also taught the students that although an email is sent, the recipient isn't always waiting on the other side to open it! On my end, I learned to trust my students more, and that they were able to demonstrate the digital citizenship skills we had worked on and developed. In the beginning, I was afraid. I was worried that my students would cause international riots and offend an entire country if I did not go over their incoming and outgoing messages with a fine tooth comb. I checked over 100 messages weekly for several weeks, then I realized, that I was worrying for nothing. What was I expecting them to do? They were being kids, friendly, kind and curious. The next time I do this, I will do a few things differently. First, I will reduce the monitoring level of the messages. Second, I won't check incoming message (apparently I didn't trust the other educator either!) and I will trust my students to make good choices. Lastly, for those that want to, I will allow students to take their ePals information home, and continue their contact with their ePal outside of school. Overall, communicating with students across the globe has been a great experience for my students, many of whom have never left New England.