Using
Email to Extend Student Learning
Revised 04/17/2001
Here are some practically ways to use email
to help students speak, listen, read, and write for meaningful purposes.
- Write a travel brochure.
Collect travel brochures from places outside your local area for students
to study. Discuss how the brochure is put together. Develop a rubric of
what distinguishes a good or useful brochure from one that isn't. Then,
contact a class from another geographic area to be keypals with your class
for this project. Next, research your local area for all the information that
should be included in the brochure. Include pictures and graphs if
desired. Email this information to your keypal class. The keypal class
will send you its information. Now each class develops the travel brochure for the other's area. Students may need to
email back and forth to add information or to clarify. The final product
must meet the approval of each home class.
- Write virtual biographies.
Have students email keypals to exchange information about one another.
Next, have students create biographies of their keypals. Keypals review
the bios, pointing out strengths, incorrect information, assumptions, and
anything they don't want included. The bios are revised and returned.
Next, students read the biographies of themselves aloud to the class.
Finally, have the class reflect on what they have learned from this experience.
- Write to Congress. U.S.
Senators or U.S. Representatives for an alphabetical list.
- Compare social problems.
Have the class and your keypal class to agree on five of the most
significant social problems in your respective area. Share information
with your keypals during the process. Example: (1) Identify the problems
and reach consensus on their definitions; (2) Research possible causes;
(3) describe different ideas for trying to address the problems. As the
final step, write and discuss what your class has learned and how group or
individual perspectives have been affected.
- Impersonate a literary character. With your keypal teachers, choose a short story or novel that
both classes are reading. Have students choose a character and recreate an
event, telling it from the character's point of view, keeping the
character's name secret so the keypal must guess who it is.
- Conduct a cultural exchange. Keypals from the next state or around the world have
characteristics of their culture that they can compare with your class.
Topic possibilities include: personal biography, notable geographic
features in their areas, local history, major holidays, famous people,
students heroes or who they admire, current fashions, current or
traditional music, what they eat, pets, transportation, the types of homes
they live in, who lives with them, and how their families earn a living.
- Compile a knowledge docket. Pair up keypals, from each class. Have the keypals correspond
about once a week on two specific topics: one thing I learned this week
that was interesting, and one thing I want to know more about or that I'm
having trouble with.
- Ask an expert. Ask an Expert site (maintained by Stevens Institute of
Technology) contains links to many ask-an-expert services online. See also
Ask ERIC and Ask KidsConnect.
Lerman, James. "You've Got Mail!" Electronic
School, March 1998, ppA34-A35.
See also Email Cautions and Finding Keypals
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