Connecting With Students

How many times have you finished giving your students instructions for a lesson to hear, "but teacher, why do we have to do this?"

"Because I said so!" or "Because it is in the standards." are not the most satisfactory answers.
Lucky you, I found a tool to help relieve us from this most discerning question. PenPal Schools is a website that connects students around the world and provides them with an avenue to discuss current issues that are relevant to their lives. It provides students with an authentic audience for their writing and gives them great opportunities to broaden their perspectives.

Writing is a struggle for many students yet is a critical skill. Connecting students to peers from around the world will give them a motivation to write that I cannot create in the classroom alone.

Let's explore PenPal Schools and their Digital Citizenship lessons. After you create your free teacher account you have to get your students enrolled. Dang it, PenPal Schools! This is the first stumbling block. Teachers do not have the ability to easily enroll students, like with many other programs, where you can import student information from a csv file. Students have to first login individually and then enter a class code. PenPal Schools is intended for grades 3 - 12 so for most students this will not be an issue. However, young 3rd graders who have not had much experience on the internet will require a fair amount of help with the process.

However, the good news is that once students are enrolled getting back on should be simple. PenPal Schools has Single Sign-in capabilities. In my district, we use a program called MyApps. Students are able to save their login information for commonly used programs and MyApps will automatically log them in.

Once students are enrolled they begin by exploring a teacher-assigned topic. In our case, that will be Digital Citizenship but there are many topics to choose from including Covid-19, Race in America, Schools Around the World, or The World Through My Eyes. There are topics that fit every curriculum. On top of that, students and teachers can adjust the reading level of the connected texts. There are also videos and graphics included in the lessons to help keeps students engaged and reach a wider range of abilities.

After students have explored the connected texts and videos they answer a prompt. This part is great because they must write a minimum number of words (no more "teacher can I be done yet?") and PenPals helps students to be a "PenPal All-star" with writing tips. Once students have completed writing their responses to the prompt they must respond to another student. I connected with students in New York, Canada, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, and New Zeland!
      
Talk about an authentic audience.

Finally, students will create a larger project on the same topic. They can explore similar projects that were created by students from around the world. Once they create their own project they publish it for everyone to see. The steps are very well thought through and there are plenty of scaffolds in place.

The final component that makes me excited are the built in grading rubrics. You can give your students feedback and a grade right from the website. The rubrics are aligned with common core standards. My only wish is that there was the capability to change the grading scale. But that is a minor issue that can be worked around.

All in all, I am very excited to give this site a chance to bring global connections to my students and increase their interest in both writing and the world around them.