Pen Pal Schools was a hit with students!

My Take

I loved that it hit so many information literacy and digital citizenship skills with the students. It was easy to observe their work and it gave them hints about what a good answer would look like. On the teacher end, there were many options about what you could assess, and you could adjust what specific skills you wanted to grade. One downside was unresponsive pen pals. We did this project towards the end of the year and our school year lasts longer than others so we lost our pen pals a few weeks in. I'd also like to have the option to approve posts before students can submit them to their pen pal chat. Most students wanted to be able to communicate properly with their pen pals, but some used text speak and bare minimum answers, It would have been nice to have been able to send it back to them for corrections before it got posted.