Objectives:The students will establish a monthly correspondence with a partner in a different country.
They will also learn about the culture of teenagers around the world and they will establish their own monthly topic list.
The first challenge in this project is to find partner classes to match with your students . The first purpose of this website was to facilitate just that!
My students are now just a click away!
To learn more about matching your students with other students around the world go to "cyberclasses" in the "links" section.
Each participating class should submit a list of possible monthly topics/questions.
Ask your students what they think would be interesting topics/questions to talk about with other teens around the world for every month of the school year.
Write students' suggestions on the chalkboard.
Then, decide on only three or four topics/questions per month and voil�, you have your homemade list!
I ask my students to write bilingual messages (mother tongue and second language) to their penpal but not a simple translation.
This way, they get to practice two languages for the price of one! In our case, it's French and English.
A good incentive to have the students carry on the correspondence throughout the year is to grade them in the report card.
Some teachers might want to chose a numeric grade or merely a letter grade. Personally, I grade them on 15 based upon
quality of both languages, arguments put forward in the monthly discussions and pertinent questions to fuel the exchange.
Of course, students are encouraged to write more than just one email per month, on their own, but the "monthly topic" message should be about one page long.It also has to be sent as a CC message to the teacher.
Now it's time to test the "STUDENTS" section.
Happy writing, reading and sharing :-)
MGD
