What is eLanguages?
eLanguages is a global online community of teachers sharing ideas and working together with their students on curriculum relevant projects.
You can join projects that are already underway or start your own and invite other teachers from around the world to take part. All the teachers involved can upload photos, presentations, podcasts and more, creating lively, interactive resources everyone can be proud of.
Schools have used eLanguages to swap presentations in Spanish with pupils in Argentina, podcast with classes in China, find out about festivals with friends in India and explore climate change with students in Nigeria. What could you do?
Let's find out what an eLanguages project looks like.
A project page consists of a project homepage and a discussion page. The project page is linked to the Hello page of each participant.
Your project homepage
This page lists the project details; project title, project summary, students' age group, project language, project status, project participants' details and the project sections. In other words all the information visitors need to quickly get a good impression of your project. When a teacher likes your project, he or she can contact one of you. Let's hope they are so impressed they want to join your project, wouldn't that be great?
The Hello page
You can access the Hello pages of each of the participants by clicking on their name in the participants list. Each registered teacher on eLanguages has a personal Hello page with relevant information regarding their availablity for partnership. On this page each teacher can introduce themself, their class, their school and their town. As with any other project page, a variety of resources can be added to the Hello page. Why not include sound recordings of your students introducing themselves, or presentations about your school made by your students, or pictures of your town or a link to its website?
Your project discussion page
Talk to your partner about your project. Here you can send a message to your partner explaining a little about yourself and your class and outlining your ideas for your eLanguages project. Why not use this to agree on the final project title, the short description (2-3 lines) outlining what the project is about, the age group it's for and any lesson activities you want to organise.
Resources
You and your partner can add resources to your project. It's best to add project sections to your project homepage reflecting any lesson activities you plan to work on, perhaps completing one section each week or fortnight, and to do so in tandem with your partner - although, of course, if you find good material for an earlier section, there's nothing to stop you going back and adding it. It's also a good idea to include a little text in each section as well as some resources and to vary the type of resources in your project - as you can see from our example project, eLanguages allows you to add movies, sound files, text documents, presentations, web links, polls, pictures, galleries, PDF and more.
The End
There will come a time when you all think, that's it, that was a nice project, we have accomplished our goals, let's move on to the next eLanguages project. At that point you close your project and submit a final evaluation. At that point you will learn how you can extend the partnership, show off your project and maybe even get your project featured as an example to other users.
