Epals---Learning together with firends all over the world

     Epals is a website which provides opportunities for users to communicate and learn collaboratively with people in other countries.
      This website is designed especially for  education. When you sign up an account, you need to choose your character first，student，teacher or parent. For students, they can make pan-friends with foreign students and share their life， their interests in student's forum. For teachers, they can share teaching resources and experience on Eplas. Most importantly, by posting an introduction to his/her class, the teacher can find a partner-class in an other country to do some projects together.  For example, in the picture bellow, a teacher in Canada posted an introduction of her class and was seeking for a partner-class to work on a project about  cultural differences. In this process, they would change emails or using Skype to communicate. At last, students would finish a PPT showing the cultural differences they learned from the communication with their foreign friends.

     Epals provides the opportunities for students to make friends and learn together withstudents in other countries. By sharing cultures and different learning methods, students can broaden their horizons and have more interest in learning. In a L2 class, Epals is an even more valuable tool，because our students can learn their second language and use it practically with their friends online, they can achieve peer-mediation from those native speakers.

VoiceThread for Teaching Language

      Voice Thread can be widely used in a language class. It can serve as a audible discussion board for students to communicate, and also can be an online classroom where teacher can post their lecture notes on it and teach according to notes.
       I choose Flora and Celia's product of Voice Thread as example, I think they are well made.  They both have clear clues of the content, so students can easily figure out what the points are in the class. Flora's class focuses on student's self-introduction, and Celia's focuses on introduction to the bilingual phenomenon in Quebec. Moreover, they both provide clear introductions to students about how to use Voice Thread. They show it step by step, therefore students can successfully handle it according to their instructions. Another thing is their voices are sweet, students will love to listen to them. That is why I choose them as examples.