ePALS Classroom Exchange
http://www.epals.com/

This remarkable, resource filled site is designed with the goal of making the Internet a positive and safe experience for busy classroom teachers and their students.  ePALS Classroom Exchange is the world's largest online K-12 classroom network, connecting more than 61,000 self registered classrooms with more than 4.4 million students in 191 countries around the world. Online since 1996, ePALS is  currently available in English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese and Arabic.

The main purpose of ePALS is to encourage teacher and student participation with other teachers and students anywhere in the world.  Here’s a fantastic and easy way to integrate the technology into the classroom and help students learn  world history, geography, culture, another language and other facts about their global neighbors or neighbors from their own country or continent. Best of all the tools to make all this easy and possible are here at this website.  In just a couple of minutes teachers can register their classrooms.  A free ePALS membership comes with access to features such as e-mail, chat rooms, electronic greeting cards, and discussion boards.

There is an option here of providing students with a Teacher/Parent monitored e-mail account.  Two e-mail accounts are available – School Mail and an ePals.com web based e-mail account. With either of these monitored e-mail accounts, an adult can create an e-mail account for a child or student, and then can preview and approve every message sent to or from the child before it reaches its recipient. Aided by sophisticated filtering  tools, the special filters can quickly preview messages for inappropriate content  before they are delivered to their recipient. If a message is  questionable, it can be held or deleted instantly. The person who is monitoring the account has total discretion over how tightly to control the account. This is one option for parents and teachers to ensure a safe Internet experience for their children and students.

Check out other tools such as Instant Translation, World Maps and International Weather and teacher resources such as Group Projects, Class to Class Projects, and 20th Century Retrospective and more.  Once you log into ePALS, you’ll quickly realize why this site is the world's largest  online collaborative classroom network.

...