In2Books ---- Epals

I have heard ePals before, but I have no idea about what is it. I never thought it was a global community where learners connect. What the most excited is this website is totally free! As the website introduced, the ePals Global Community™ is the world's largest network of K-12 classrooms, enabling students and teachers to safely connect and collaborate with classrooms in more than 200 countries and territories. Offered at no cost to classrooms, educators can access the community to find collaborative projects, join discussions in the community forums, and search thousands of classroom profiles to engage with others in authentic exchanges - all within in a safe, protected online environment. Isn’t it amazing? Now let’s exploring it!
First, watch a short presentation about EPals as communication Tool.

In this way, the ePals platform is a suite of logically, highly-interlaced communication and collaborative products and services that create focused interaction on specific issues with learners across the country or around the world: the ePalsLearningSpace; SchoolMail; the ePalsGlobalCommunity, and In2Books. The platform drives home founder Nina Zolt’s impassioned thesis that with proper design, social media and networking can, and will, play a profoundly transformative role in effective, authentic, and naturalistic globally based education. (cited from ePals: Effective Social Networking for Education )
As for me, I like to use In2Books in my future teaching. It brings the Common Core Standards to life with a safe motivating online curriculum that matches students with adult eMentors. Students get authentic experience purposefully reading books with eMentors and sharing ideas about important issues via online letters.

The reason I like In2Books are as follows.
1. Real learning, real dialogue, and real collaboration. In2Books, ePals' curriculum-based e-mentoring program for students in grades 3 through 5, matches students with adult pen pals, who read the same books, and exchange teacher-monitored, online letters about questions and issues raised by the text. The program provides standards-based professional development and professional learning communities and is facilitated by three resource-filled websites - one for students, another for pen pals, and a third for teachers.
2. The categories of the on-line books are fiction, biographies, social studies, traditional tales and science. The teacher chooses the topics, but children pick up their interested books, then teacher revises them. This can take ownership of children’s learning.
3. The book on-line is not like the paper book. It’s more colored and vivid. Children can see the outline and author’s information directly and can do the puzzles and interesting quits. It can arouse students interesting, but not just read.
4. In the Interbook writing center, penpals will find the great tools. It can provoke questions, key vocabulary and checklist and example letter. It'll help them to better comprehense the book and improve their writing skills.
5. The information is free and open to share between teachers and penpals. It's like both teacher and students are learned in this website.
In brief, it's a really open shared teahing platform with plenty resources, tools and information.