PC Pals - e-Learning across the seas
Published on 6 Sep 2007 at 10:25 pm.
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Filed under podcasts, e-Learning.
This podcast is about PC Pal. PC pal stands for personal computer pal.
So what is PC pal? Pc pal is similar to having a phone pal or a pen pal but this is a cyber version of those. PC pals are two people exchanging e-mails to get to know each other. So why is it PC Pal? Pc pal is actually an education program. It can be used as an education program and I participated in it this year.
But a little history about PC pal.
When I was working for the Foundation for IT Education and Development, we were teaching teachers and school administrators how to use the internet in instructing-in teaching. In school how do you use the internet to teach physics, math, science. What are the methods-what are the ways of teaching trigonometry using the internet or teaching literature using the internet. One of the ways of teaching English for us was PC pal-personal computer pals. So how does the program go?
PC pals- you hook up students [for example you have a class of 30 high school students let say they are first year high school class there are 30 of them. You hook them up either 30 other students in another country or in another province. Like hooking up 30 students in Ormoc and hook them up one on one with 30 other students in Manila or you could do it 30 other students in Canada or in the US]. So you’d hooked them up one on one so each student would have his/her own pc pal and then they’d exchange letters-topics will vary depending on the objective of the program.
So this was a program we used to teach while I was in FITEd-to our teachers. But just recently in my own work I was participant in PC pal. So this second story is about me being a participant in PC pal.
So there’s a school in the US and they are looking for employees from our company to be pc pals with students to this school. I happened to be assigned to a pc pal male and his name is James (I’ll call him James). So James and I had an exchange of e-mails, we start out with the introductions telling him what I do, what I do at work a few hobbies and then he did the same and later on we exchanged stories about things that he likes(hobbies) things that he wants, career that he like, a book etc.
The objective of the PC pals program in their school was to develop their English because this school has a lot of non-English speakers like Mexicans, a few Asians and Italians (I think). So one objective was for them to practice their English another objective was for them (the students) to practice their computer skills-their keyboard skills, their mouse skills, and their e-mail skills. So it was a casual exchange, nothing heavy very light. We weren’t talking about rocket science or physics or anything like that. We exchanged thoughts and greetings-things like those.
In one exchange James told me about one of his favorite book and it was called “The boy named It” then he continued to say that in “The boy named It” the character was a battered child, he was abused but despite all of this abuse the boy named It rose up and survived and excelled-something like that. I was disturbed because it seemed as if James is reading a book that was more mature for his age. And I was thinking very well because he might be a battered child. Well these are just thoughts but that was another story-I thought of reporting this to his teachers-it’s up to them to handle it. I won’t be able to handle it via e-mails from across the seas right?
Anyway that was PC pals and it’s a program that schools can use to teach their students how to write correspondents via e-mail, how to practice their English, how to practice their computer skills. Its interesting-interesting program, its nothing highfalutin, it’s not a complicated program but it’s a good start. Teachers can use this in their schools.
They can try it out-you can ask me how to do it.
Podcast pemalilnk: PC pals
EdXcribe
04 September 2007
Technobiography
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