Ani_Ndut: Getting Your Class Connected

Dennis E. Wilkinson
gene [at] nagasaki-noc.or.jp Contents
Words of Encouragement, Email Penpals , Elementary HTML and some Useful Links.

Words of Encouragement

I hope to encourage other teachers to enhance their usage of email and to discover how easy it can be to not only master and teach their students sufficient html to set up a website, but also to come online for free.
This is a beginning swimmer who's only just taken the plunge calling out to those still on the shore, "Don't be afraid to jump in!"
Don't be afraid of making mistakes.
Mistakes are your friends that will help you improve.
Things proceed at blinding speed after setting up your own class website.
You'll grow quickly under the stimulation of all the new human connections.
We online teachers bear the awesome and joyful responsibility of turning our students on to the infinitely expandable resources of the WWW with its awesome potential for good or evil uses.
Are we mentally, morally and spiritually equipped to perform this task? Probably not yet, but we're becoming so even in the process of doing it.
The extreme interactivity online requires the flexibility to reformulate your philosophy of teaching.
A personal ethics developed for classroom teaching is likely to be found wanting in Internet instruction.
In order to empower your students, it may be necessary to go a bit beyond teaching English and assist them in becoming webmasters.
It's not the meek but the computer literate who will inherit the virtual Earth of our future.

Email Penpals

The easy way is to subscribe to a mailing list for teachers seeking classes for email exchange: iecc-request@stolaf.edu
After opening this link, only write, "subscribe IECC (Your Name)" as your message.
As class to class exchanges are a bit limited considering that you'll be connected to the entire planet, how about subscribing to a mailing list for penpals? listserv@unccvm.uncc.edu
After opening this link only write, "subscribe Penpal-L (Your Name)" as your message.
What I learned by the following method of seeking penpals is: By asking individually you'll get a much more diverse and responsive group of penpals for your students. You'll probably also find as I did that some penpals will continue correspondences with you, providing you with valuable information and support.
Penpal-L is a large group of energetic correspondents enjoying personal messages posted to the whole list. I read many letters to identify a variety of writers from different backgrounds, who I believed might be stimulating, contacted them individually and made sure they were eager to correspond with us. After printing up info sheets with each penpal's address and some background information (as well as pictures of those I'd been able to download off the Penpal-L Homepage, I let my students choose their personal penpal. This resulted in quite good rates of reply and continuing correspondence.
As I solicited prospective penpals and wrote thank-you notes to volunteers, I got my first inkling of the interactive growth to come. Some volunteers didn't simply wait quietly for the project to get underway. They continued emailing me questions, advice and support. Some proved awesome correspondents beyond my wildest dreams of excellence, who are still aiding and inspiring me today.
Next time, however, I might use a search engine like Alta Vista to find penpals.
Alta Vista finds pages with lists of penpals when doing a Web search for <penpal*>.
Alta Vista also finds messages to newsgroups about penpals (even if your server doesn't provide access to newsgroups) when doing a Usenet search for <penpal* -Re>. (Use < -Re> to eliminate a long list of replies to messages.)
Using Alta Vista might prove easier than reading through the over 200 daily messages that Penpal-L can generate.