ePals Corporation, an education media company and the world's leading safe social learning network, today announced the launch of the ePals World Elections Center, designed to involve students in a range of interactive activities to help them learn bout election processes, candidates and issues globally.
Interactive and Student-Centered: The ePals World Elections Center includes projects and activities for both whole-class and independent learning and reinforces problem-solving, critical thinking and the cultural awareness emphasized in the new Common Core Standards. Among the multimedia offerings available for students to explore are videos on the recent French presidential inauguration, the 2012 Venezuelan presidential campaign trail, and the U.S. Republican and Democratic National Conventions. Students can also tap into a variety of safe social media features that enable collaborative projects, discussion forums on election topics, quizzes, polls, and other interactive communication elements.
Encouraging Student Voices: A primary area of the World Elections Center is Students Speak, where students can share their thoughts and feelings about the elections, leaders and issues in their countries with peers around the world. Student voices are showcased through a variety of media, including writing, artwork, and videos. In this area, students can create collages illustrating the candidates' platforms, videotape a reading of an original poem about peace, or craft a persuasive essay explaining their personal political position. Special Challenge sections ask students to craft election slogans, campaign rules, or a video-based Presidential Minute, in which they have 60 seconds to address the leader of their country with advice, concerns, and issues important to their families.
Classroom Projects and Teacher Support: Making it easy for teachers to integrate the World Elections Center into the curriculum is a Teachers' Corner where educators from around the world can find partners for collaborative projects on a range of election-related topics. Sample projects include exploring primary election issues, researching candidates' viewpoints, and examining the U.S. presidential campaign from a global perspective. Students can also gain a kid-to-kid perspective on leadership through projects in which they research and share detailed information about their country's candidates and how their current leaders came to power. Independent investigations can also be part of projects, with students interviewing parents and grandparents to learn about their immigration stories and how these affect their attitudes towards candidates and issues.
International Curricular Focus: Additional elements of the World Elections Center include Fact Pages for countries that have had or will have Presidential elections in 2012. Fact Pages include detailed curricular material on each country's political structure, including its form of government, election processes, terms of office, voting regulations, projections, and implications of results. Countries with elections in 2012 include the Russian Federation, the U.S., Taiwan, Mexico, Slovenia, Gabon, South Korea, France, Sierra Leone, Venezuela, and more.
"Every teacher understands the power of the teachable moment," says Nina Zolt, ePals Co-Founder and Chief Learning Officer. "The World Elections Center provides a terrific opportunity for students around the globe to explore, communicate with peers and generally become involved in the 2012 elections and issues around the world that will have a direct impact on their futures."
To learn more about the ePals World Election Center, visit http://www.epals.com/worldelections
About ePals Corporation
ePals Corporation is an education media company and the leading provider of safe social learning networks (SLN). Focused on the K-12 market, ePals offers elementary and secondary school administrators, teachers, students, and parents worldwide a safe and secure platform to build educational communities, provide high-quality digital content, and facilitate collaboration for effective 21st-century learning. ePals' award-winning products include: the ePals Global Learning Network; SchoolMail(R)365; LearningSpace(R); In2Books(R), a common core eMentoring program that builds reading, writing and critical thinking skills; and popular children's educational publishing brands including Cricket(R) and Cobblestone(R). ePals customers and partners include the International Baccalaureate, Microsoft Corporation, Dell Inc., IBM Corp., National Geographic and leading school districts across the United States and globally. ePals serves approximately 800,000 classrooms and reaches millions of teachers, students and parents in approximately 200 countries and territories. Visit www.epals.com. For In2Books, visit www.In2Books.com.
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