Making Pen Pals through the PC

By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 3/1/2005

A letter from a pen pal is not only a note from a friend—it can be a geography lesson, a foreign language tool, and a boost toward literacy. But in the age of bits and bytes, students have veered away from letter writing and embraced e-mail and instant messaging, the content of which can be hard for parents and teachers to control.

Enter ePals (www.epals.com). Cofounder Tim DiScipio, once a substitute teacher himself, launched the "walled garden" program, as he calls it, nine years ago. The idea? Promote pen pals in the digital age, but allow teachers to limit the pool from which students can make their contacts.

EPals charges schools a small fee based on the number of participating students. With the fee comes a dedicated e-mail account for each student, and a program that automatically translates an e-mail message into a choice of eight languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and Portuguese).

The idea is clearly booming. More than 4.6 million students and teachers participate in ePals, along with 100,000 schools in 191 countries, claims DiScipio.

Beth Paris, library media specialist, at Talley Middle School in Wilmington, DE, has used ePals, along with Karen King, a librarian at Oakbank School in West Yorkshire, England. The two met at a June 2004 meeting of the International Association of School Librarians in Dublin, Ireland, and wanted to get their students together online. Since then, students from the two schools have corresponded regularly. EPals also facilitated a live, online chat in which the American kids and their cohorts across the pond discussed English stereotypes about Americans and vice versa. Paris says her students learned that their English peers are actually a lot less formal in their interaction with teachers, despite their school uniforms. Meanwhile, the English students learned that American kids don't typically behave like the sassy young characters that they see on Disney channel shows.

"Teachers say literacy is improving among students, because when a child sends a message to another student they spend a lot of time crafting it, wanting it to be right," says DiScipio. "When the Internet developed, people said, 'What happened to letter writing?' It's back, and it's back in a big way."