Community reviews for ePals

Setting up classes is time consuming but once they are in you are good to go. Finding classes to work with can also be time consuming and frustrating but once you connect it is so worth how excited your classes become. Students are anxious to write and share with their ePals.

Students are motivated to check and respond to emails outside of class time. The discussion boards are only in English so it's not useful if you are a foreign language teacher trying to give students an immersion experience. One drawback is that all of your students are in one class and can see each others discussions. I would prefer to have the ability to group my students based on readiness levels to have more rigorous discussions. A shared work space for teachers to collaborate would also be helpful.

I have attempted to make more than 10 connections with other classrooms via Epals. I have never had one response returned. I have spoken with other teachers who had the same disappointing experience.

EPals is known for being a student email system. I was looking for one, but I never realized how much more EPals had to offer until I actually started using it with my students. EPals is a program that not only provides free email addresses for teachers and students, but also sets several levels of restrictions, provides opportunities for students to collaborate and correspond with other students from different states and countries, and also provides a very interesting homepage for students with games, news articles, and many other things that can also be used by teachers as short lessons, etc.