School;

Choose Your View View By Subject Language Arts Outline
Choose
Your View
View By
Subject
Language
Arts

Teamwork
Keypals Activity
Keypals
  • Brief Description
  • Objectives
  • Materials and Resources
  • Activity Description
  • Internet Resources

  • Brief Description

        Students will begin communicating over e-mail with students around the world in preparation for future collaborative activities. This lesson can provide a great supplement to traditional language arts activities, such as writing for an audience, reading for editing, and writing a journal, and can introduce students to different perspectives and points of view. The concept of students as global citizens and appreciation for people of different cultures, societies, and countries are stressed in these types of activities, as students come to know and respect other students outside their local community. A personal connection between two students can help each understand the others' point of view and broaden their thinking on local, national, global, and personal issues of interest. Up to Contents of this Page
    Objectives

        Students will:

    Up to Contents of this Page
    Materials and Resources

        In developing our lessons and activities, we made some assumptions about the hardware and software that would be available in the classroom for teachers who visit the LETSNet Website. We assume that teachers using our Internet-based lessons or activities have a computer (PC or Macintosh) with the necessary hardware components (mouse, keyboard, and monitor) as well as software (operating system, TCP/IP software, networking or dial-up software, e-mail and a World Wide Web client program, preferably Netscape, but perhaps Mosaic or Lynx). In the section below, we specify any "special" hardware or software requirements for a lesson or activity (in addition to those described above) and the level of Internet access required to do the activity.

    1. Special hardware requirements: None.
    2. Special software requirements: None.
    3. Internet access: Low-speed (less than 28,000 BPS via modem).
    Up to Contents of this Page
    Activity Description

        Pre-activity Preparation

        Before beginning this lesson, the teacher should locate and coordinate e-mail exchanges with students in other classrooms by visiting the resources listed below (see Web Resources). Posting a message to these e-mail discussion lists or Websites will publicize that students are looking for keypals. This should lead to another teacher contacting you and setting up an ongoing exchange, or perhaps a group of classrooms sharing e-mail.

        Prior to actually starting the keypals lesson, teachers may also want to consider how students will receive and respond to their e-mail messages. There are at least two ways of doing this:

    1. Each student can have their own e-mail address and receive their e-mail directly, without teacher involvement. Teachers may want to discuss issues related to privacy and security for students, and establish rules for conduct over e-mail, prior to letting students send and receive their own e-mail. In addition, parents should give their permission for their children to participate in these e-mail exchanges.

    2. the teacher can use their own e-mail address for all messages sent and received, and then use the SUBJECT field in the e-mail message to direct mail to specific student names. This allows the teacher to filter all the e-mail sent and received, before passing it along to the students. This oversight obviously requires more time and effort on the part of the teacher.

    3. use a classroom address for all students that is different from the teachers as a collective space for incomming and outgoing e-mail.

        Also in preparation for this lesson, consideration should be given to when students will be allowed to read and respond to their e-mail, and how this activity will fit within their other classroom work. One way is to have students communicate with their keypals around specific writing tasks (such as describing their local community, research their doing, etc.) or on specific topics - related to science, social studies, etc.

    Activity

    Up to Contents of this Page
    Internet Resources

    Up to Contents of this Page

    School;

Choose Your View View By Subject Language Arts Outline
    Choose
    Your View
    View By
    Subject
    Language
    Arts

    LETSNet is © Michigan State University College of Education and Ameritech