Week 8: Go Pangea

Go Pangea, formerly Penpal Schools is a new take on the idea of pen pals. As a kid, I had several pen pals and I love the idea of connecting my students to students in other places and expose them to different cultures. 

Go Pangea is a safe, online platform where students can engage across cultures to create connections and learn valuable library skills.

It is a free program (you have probably figured out by now that FREE is about as much as my district can afford 😆) that was super easy to set up. You can choose your language, create a class, and then invite students to your class using your class code. There's even a flyer you can download to send to parents for consent (COPPA, I'm looking at you!).

Then you choose a question or topic to assign to your students. There are so many different types of questions, you can really get to know your students this way! 

Once assigned, students will have the opportunity to learn about the topic before writing their responses. 

Students will write their response, practicing using different mediums for communication and building their multiple literacies. They post their response and can chime in on other kids' posts. In some ways it seems like a super controlled, civil version of social media. It is a great tool to use in a digital citizenship unit!

I am hoping to explore this platform with my 3rd and 4th graders next year. I don't know if it will be something we do often, but it might be a nice way to connect with other topics and continue to build digital citizenship skills.