e-letter exchange for students

[Jeff Holdeman]

Dear Brian,

I have a website with suggestions for the use of technology in the classroom:

http://www.slavic.ohio-state.edu/people/holdeman/web

In Section I.E.2.a.1) E-mail "keypals", I have some links to pages which
discuss the use of e-mail in the classroom , as well as ways of finding
exchanges (including K-12).  I just checked the links and all but two still
work.

Concerning the matter of readability (fonts, attachments, etc.), I hope
that someone else on the list will have an easier solution than mine
described below.  Attachments cause many, many problems (e.g., students on
both sides have to have the same word-processing program, the same (or
similar) fonts, preferably the same platform, etc.).  In order to
communicate back and forth in the body of e-mails (as opposed to
attachments), one solution is to have the students download the same font
and keyboard driver (the software that lets you type in Cyrillic [the
layout of the keys], as opposed to just receiving and reading Cyrillic),
which you can find (and download for free) through the AATSEEL homepage:

http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~aatseel/index.html

under "Slavic fonts and keyboard drivers".  Find a good font and agree on
it for all of the students.

I suggest having students use the same platform (which will probably be IBM
as opposed to Mac if you are corresponding with Russia), as this will
eliminate a lot of cross-platform problems.

I hope that you find this somewhat useful and that others will contribute
to the discussion.  Unless it was discussed this summer, this topic hasn't
been addressed for at least a year, and I'm sure others in the
SEELangentsia have more experience under their belts by now.

Jeff Holdeman
The Ohio State University


>Greetings to the reader,
>
>Have you ever set up e-letter exchanges for your students?  If so, please
>share of your experience.
>
>I would like to provide the opportunity for my students to correspond with
>Russian children their age.  Since some students do not have e-mail at home,
>at least some mail would have to come through a school PC or through my home
>PC.  To avoid the problems of coding, we would probably use attachments when
>writing in cyrillic.  I have:
>
>150 elementary level students and about 50 high school level students.
>
>I would appreciate advice on setting up an exchange either school-to-school,
>class-to-class, or individual-to-individual.  Are there programs already
>existing to this end?  What are some of the pitfalls/problems that come with
>such exchanges?  What do I need to know?
>
>
>Any help appreciated,
>
>Brian
>
>BrianLeh at aol.com