Week Five: Online Communication Tools

Before researching the different methods of online communication for this class, I had no idea how much was available.  Some of the tools I had never even heard of.  One I am very familiar with and have used daily as a teacher is e-mail.  Although this is not something I have used as a teaching tool with my students, I use e-mail as a main source of communication with parents and co-workers.  Many parents would prefer to receive an e-mail rather than a phone call if I need to get in touch with them.  Also, in an attempt to "go green", I have started sending out many classroom documents through e-mail, rather than paper copies, to those who have a working e-mail account. 
When I taught third grade, I did get to use an online communication tool in the classroom with my students.  Instead of doing pen pals, we Skyped with another third grade class in Japan.  We had a Japanese lady come to our school and teach us different things about Japanese culture and their schooling.  She then made a trip to Japan, and while she was there, she got us hooked up with another third grade classroom.  My students LOVED it, and were so engaged.  It was so neat to hear the types of questions they wanted to ask the students in Japan, as well as the questions the Japanese students asked us.  I think it was a great experience for my students, and definitely something I hope to do in the future.  That same year, we used Skype another time.  For a persuasive writing piece, my students were trying to convince their parents to get them a certain gift for Christmas.  To show them what it meant to "persuade" we Skyped my husband, who teaches at another elementary school, and I did my best to persuade him to get me the gift I wanted that year.  They thought this was really neat, and it gave them some good ideas for how to convince their parents!
Like I said, Skype is a program I definitely want to use with my students in the future, but I also think it would be great to teach them how to use e-mail.  This is such a real life skill, and I think it would be a great learning experience for kids, even my little guys.  I think it would be fun to use e-mail in place of hand written letters to write to penpals at another school.  It would be kind of the same concept of how I used Skype, except each child would have their own e-mail buddy to write back and forth to.  This would give the students lots of exposure to writing e-mails, which is something they will all be doing in the future.  It would also be a good opportunity to teach appropriate ways to speak using the computer, rather than "texting" or "instant messaging" language that so many kids use today.