1. ePals & Skype Education
Have you ever wished you had access to more information regarding your lessons? Finding material in your local library can be laborious and searching for good material online can be just as difficult.
Have you ever wondered if there was a way you could use technology more to your advantage?
Today we are going to address these issues by briefly discussing the benefits of two specific online teacher resources.
ePals and Skype Education offer a variety of tools and resources you can use in your classroom. They are easy and fun to use and put resources at your fingertips that you would not otherwise be able to access,
First, we will look at ePals.
ePals & Skype Education
Bringing a world of ideas to your classroom!

2. ePals
Home Page

3. ePals Find Classroom: Entering Criteria
When looking for a classroom, or anything in ePals, you can narrow down your search by entering desired criteria. In this instance, let’s choose English; look for the keyword: culture; limit our search to Europe, North America, Oceana, and South America; choose small classes; and limit our access to exchange only.

4. ePals Find Classroom: Results
The results of our search brings us one choice.

5. ePals Projects: Entering Criteria
Next, lets look for a project. Notice we have not entered a keyword and we have eliminated Oceana.

6. ePals Projects: Entering Criteria
Then, let’s choose “Become Detectives” on the right side of the screen.

7. ePals Projects: Results
Out of the handful of possible results, I clicked on this project. Notice that the page includes a description of the project. It may be that the target class would be inappropriate to contact… or you’d rather just do it yourself. You can use the ideas of other teachers to get your own mental juices flowing.

8. ePals Start or Join a Project
Clicking on Projects and choosing Start or Join a Project will bring you here. You can choose to start or join a project, read project reviews, or find other classrooms and contact them to determine what sort of project you’d like to do.

9. ePals Projects: Start or Join a Project: Entering Criteria
I chose to start or join a project and it brought us here. It gives us search criteria or we can choose from among featured projects. Let’s choose “Taste of Culture” in the lower right corner.

10. ePals Projects: Description
This brings us to an existing project. We see the Subjects involved, the type of project, and then we have six tabs of information. Description, Objectives & Standards, Culminating Activity, Lesson Plan, Preparation, and Timeline. Each project contains these same elements. We see here a description of this project.

11. ePals Projects: Objectives & Standards
These are the Objectives and Standards that will be met by this project.

12. ePals Projects: Culminating Activity
The final project is the culminating activity.

13. ePals Projects: Lesson Plan
It even gives you a lesson plan so you don’t have to create your own.

14. ePals Projects: Preparation
It gives you everything you need to prepare for the project.

15. ePals Projects: Timeline
And the timeline gives you an idea of how the project will progress.

16. ePals
Games
ePals also has many games that can be played, but only on their website.

17. ePals Projects – Global Citizen
Global Citizens is an area where students can learn how to make a difference in their community or around the world.

18. ePals Projects – Global Citizen – Games and Quizzes
Within the Global Citizens area are interesting games and quizzes. You can use these or you can make your own based on the ones already created.

19. ePals Teacher Resources
Clicking on Teacher Resources will take you to this page. Here you can find tools that will help you collaborate with other classrooms, you can read about experiences other teachers have had, you can look at the Common Core Standards, and read the forums to see what other teachers are talking about. I selected “Resources” in the middle.

20. ePals Teacher Resources
The resources section is full of great tools already created by other teachers. Click on the options on the left, to narrow down your search or just scroll through the many resources available. You can organize your list by clicking on the four headers. Clicking on Title will list the resources alphabetically. Clicking on Date will list them chronologically. Clicking on Downloads will list them according to which were downloaded most. Clicking on Rating will list them by the rating other teachers have given them.
Now that we’ve had an overview of ePals, let’s take a look at Skype Education.

21. Skype Education Home Page
If you are familiar with Skype, Skype Education is… not surprisingly… the educational section of Skype. If you remember last summer when the summer program students Skyped an astronaut… projects similar to that can be conducted here in Skype Education.

22. Skype Education Home Page
As we scroll down the home page, we see some suggested lessons.

23. Skype Education Home Page
Further down the home page we see recent news and on the right you can see other options. I was intrigued by “Mystery Skype” and found that it is where two teachers connect their classrooms without telling the students where the other classroom is. The students then ask questions in order to determine where in the world the other classroom is. Even if you don’t participate in this, it can give you some ideas of things you CAN do.

24. Skype Education Skype Lessons
Clicking on Skype Lessons at the top will take you to this page. Here you can search for something specific or scroll down the page…

25. Skype Education Skype Lessons
…to get ideas on lessons you can participate in.

26. Skype Education
Skype Lessons

27. Skype Education Skype Lessons
There are 8 lessons on each page… notice at the bottom there are 680 pages. That’s over 5000 lessons to choose from!

28. Skype Education Skype Lessons – Plains Indians
Here is one lesson I selected. We can see a brief synopsis of the lesson, including how long the lesson should take. Once you “Register for this lesson” you will be placed in a group of other classes and will be notified when the lesson will take place.

29. Skype Education Skype Lessons – Plains Indians
Scrolling down we can see a little about the guest speakers involved in the class. You can also see that this Skype lesson is targeted toward 3-11 year olds.

30. Skype Education Skype Lessons – Plains Indians
Scrolling to the bottom of the page we see that there is an area for people to leave feedback. This is a good way to learn a little about potential speakers and lessons.

31. Skype Education Teachers
If you wanted to search for a specific teacher, you could select that menu. Notice there are 77,318 teachers from around the world who are looking to collaborate with another class room. To narrow your search, you can make specific selections on the right side of the screen.

32. Skype Education Teachers
Notice here I’ve indicated an interest in a teacher for 6-11 year olds in the subject of culture.

33. Skype Education Guest Speakers
Another angle to get to a desired lesson would be to go through the “Guest Speaker” menu.

34. Skype Education Guest Speakers
As you can see this list indicates the title, the subject, and the speaker.

35. Skype Education Guest Speakers
Scrolling down the list we see that we can also narrow our search by making selections at the right of the screen.

36. Skype Education Guest Speakers – Building a Dogsled
I have selected a presentation on building a dogsled. You can see that 32 classes have registered for this lesson and there is even a discussion area provided. Once you register, you will be notified of the time and date of the presentation. Again, you can see at the bottom right which age groups this lesson is intended for and the subject covered.

37. Skype Education Collections
Under the “Collections” menu, you’ll notice that there are several series or groups. On this page we see 17 lessons under Field Trips; 27 under Editors’ Choice; 3 under Global Geography; and so on.

38. Skype Education
Scrolling down we see more collections and the number of Skype lessons contained in each.

39. Skype Education Field Trips
I selected “Field Trips” and we can see a brief description of the field trip lessons.

40. Skype Education Field Trips
This page shows a variety of field trip lessons avaialble… from the USS Missouri to the Amazon Rainforest.

41. Skype Education
Field Trips

42. Skype Education
Field Trips

43. Skype Education Field Trips – USS Missouri
As in previous lessons, this field trip gives a brief description shows how many groups are registered, and lists who this lesson is targeted to.

44. Skype Education Resources
OK… now what if you don’t really want to connect with another class… maybe not yet… but you want to find some good teacher resources or get lesson ideas? Back at the main page, click on teachers.

45. Skype Education Resources
Back at the teachers page, we are going to narrow our search.

46. Skype Education Resources
We chose “lesson ideas”, “resources”, and we are narrowing it down to ages And of course we want it in English.

47. Skype Education Resources
Our search is showing 187 results. Let’s look at the first two.

48. Skype Education Resources
Here is a children’s book author offering FREE resources for teachers, libraries and classrooms. We will click on the link provided in a minute, but first lets scroll down.

49. Skype Education Resources
Here we can see her books and under “categories” see what sort of resources this will provide.

50. Skype Education Resources
Going back and clicking on her link, it takes us to her page and tells us a little about her offer. I see free minute skype visits for the entire school year. Further investigation shows that you can also download free information to go along with purchased books. She says you can her and my first thought would be to see if the free minute skype requires the purchase of the book or will she just read it to the children.

51. Skype Education Resources
Going back to the 187 results, let’s click at the second resource.

52. Skype Education Resources
This resource appears to be from the USDA regarding nutrition. It is aimed at children ages 3-11 and the goal is to integrate nutrition education into math, science, english language arts, and health. Clicking on the link will take us to…

53. Skype Education Resources
The project home page established by the USDA. The site includes teacher’s guides, original songs, posters, mini posters.

54. Skype Education Teacher’s Guide
To check it out, I clicked on the 1st and 2nd Grade Teachers guide.

55. Skype Education Teacher’s Guide
The guide contains good information for kids.

56. Skype Education Teacher’s Guide
It includes a lesson plan, breaking the topics into three “courses”. Each course has 3 sessions. Essential questions are listed, in addition to learning objectives, and student handouts.

57. Skype Education Teacher’s Guide
The last page I’ve included here is also from the lesson plan, which states the common core standards met from each “course”. While we may not be concerned with the common core standards as a whole, it does help give us an idea of which portions of our curriculum you can use this with.
I actually found this guide interesting enough that I printed one and have it available if someone would like it.