In2Books matches volunteer readers and students on the Web!

I've been doing some searching around for volunteer opportunities in my area, and a search on VolunteerMatch turned up a neat program called In2Books. This program matches volunteer adult pen pals with elementary school-aged students across the country. The student and volunteer read books together and write emails back and forth to discuss them. This seemed like something for which I am well qualified, coming from an English department and a life lived mostly online, so I've been checking it out in more detail. As I was investigating the In2Books program, I found a wider organization dedicated to promoting community building and eliteracy in children.

The organization is ePals, and they are dedicated to helping children build relationships across regions, both nationally and internationally. With all of the safety concerns that parents have about their children interacting online with strangers, ePals offers a secure, teacher-supervised pen pal environment for the digital age. In order to facilitate international exchange, they use translation programs to translate the kids' emails back and forth.

ePals also offers lesson plans that seem to be geared toward promoting eliteracy even in an isolated classroom environment. The unit that grabbed my attention, of course, was on Digital Storytelling. How cool is it that there's a company designing digital storytelling lessons for elementary school kids??

Check out ePals and the In2Books programs at http://www.epals.com and http://in2books.epals.com.