Organic Learning

E-Pals is a valuable service offered to all LAUSD employees and students. It offers e-mail and moderated forums, and has a wealth of resources for using these tools in the classroom.

Getting Started with E-Pals
When you first log in to E-Pals, you will find an online teacher’s guide and an interactive tutorial on the right side of the home page. These guides will help answer most questions you may have about using E-Pals.

Webmail
On the left side are all the tools you can use in E-Pals. When you click on Webmail, you will notice more tools you can use for your e-mail. Explore each of those tabs for further enhancement of your e-mail experience. If you don’t know how to use one of the tools, the help button on the furthest right will explain the features you are using.
Spam Control is set to moderate. Adjust as necessary.
In the Address Book, you can now search for teachers in your school and in the district, so that you can easily add colleagues to your address book.

Student Projects
There are many engaging projects to choose from on the E-Pals Website. Search for a project you would like to participate in.
Then go back to your E-pals account, click on Search Community/Search shared profiles, and include the title of the project you would like your students to participate in. You can narrow your search by adjusting the age, country, and language fields. To leave your search as broad as possible, you can choose to not specify details in these fields. When you find a partner classroom that you would like to communicate with, click the e-mail button at the bottom of the profile to begin communication with that classroom.
You can also search for any subject you would like to explore with your students. Do a search for recycling, to see how many other classrooms are interested in collaborating on this subject.

Shared Profile
In your E-Pals account, click on My Account in the left of the window pane. Under Other Settings on the left, click on “Shared Profile”. Here is where you can share your profile with the E-Pals global community, or just with other teachers in LAUSD. If you are interested in the projects you have explored on the e-Pals Website, be sure to include the title of the project in your description. This will include your classroom in the Search Community search for that project, and other teachers looking for e-Pals partner classrooms will be able to contact you.

Student Accounts
If you wish for your students to have email accounts, please contact your administrator to request this. It is a time-consuming task to create student accounts, so make certain that your students will use these accounts regularly.
Student e-mail and forum collaboration can be used as a tool to address reading and writing standards, as well as many other standards. Students can communicate and collaborate globally. The life-long learning skills they can learn from being involved in this kind of project? –Priceless!

Web Resources for E-Pals in the Classroom
For more information on how to integrate E-Pals in the classroom, here’s a page full of resources:
http://san-miguel.lausd.k12.ca.us/epals.html