PenPal Schools

One of the hardest aspects of teaching a second language, in my case, Spanish, is to encourage (ahem...force) students to use that language - especially extremely self conscious high school students.  I want my students to focus on the things they ARE learning instead of the things they are missing.  It is easy to take a writing sample and just make it "bleed" red ink, but when they get that paper back all they will see is what they did WRONG.  I want to encourage them to see that despite their grammar being far from perfect, they are still able to COMMUNICATE in Spanish.  The website penpalschools.com allows students to interact with one other using video/text prompts to write their own letter and then also to respond to others.  In order to experiment with the site, I created both a teacher account as well as a student account.  Both were easy to create. 

Things I like:

I like that the teacher can pick various topics and narrow down the penpals the students choose.  I LOVE that teachers can go in and grade the students work and manipulate how the student is graded.  It can range from grammatical accuracy to creativity or all of the above.  I really like how the students see the prompts and are given examples of how they could use would they read/heard to write their response. I LOVE that students are asked to read and respond to three other posts after their own letter.  I LOVE that students are required to create their own project/video presentation to share with others!

What I don't like:
I don't like that while they do have forums/topics to work from, the students can ultimately interact with whoever they want/however they want.  There are a LOT of English speakers using the site, so even though I have selected Spanish as the language and selected Spanish topics, they can ultimately write with whomever.  Ultimately, this is not a HUGE downside as they will still have to complete whatever tasks are assigned to them.  Without a school subscription, you can only enroll your students in one topic.

My fear:
The same fear I ALWAYS have....Google Translate!!!!!!

Here are a few snipits of what both teacher and student view look like.

 teacher view

 student view