Herndon, Va. (June 29, 2009) – ePals, Inc., has formed a strategic partnership with the Gabriel Piedrahita-Uribe Foundation, based in Cali, Colombia, designed to bring high quality learning resources, safe communication tools, and collaborative experiences to Spanish-speaking educators and their students around the world. This collaboration, along with last week’s announcement about the ePals and International Baccalaureate partnership, illustrates the many ways in which ePals is serving the accelerating demand of educators around the world to use safe, collaborative Internet-based technologies for their professional development and in their classrooms to connect, educate and engage.

This partnership will combine the high-quality Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)-focused content of the Foundation’s (www.eduteka.org.) Web site, with a set of newly-enabled capabilities on ePals.com, so that educators and their students can more easily connect, match and collaborate in Spanish for professional development, to share best practices, and to collaborate on learning topics of shared interest.

The ePals Spanish language portal (currently in beta at www.epals.com/bienvenido) will foster a large and vibrant learning community of educators and learners from the Spanish-speaking world, allowing them to create ePals profiles, match and collaborate with classrooms worldwide, contribute engaging content, and participate in discussions and collaborative projects. Available at no cost, the community is an open environment where discussions can grow organically around ideas and common goals, with an initial focus on ways Spanish-speaking educators can effectively use ICTs to engage students and improve educational achievement.

“Our goal is to bring together in a free and widely available manner the highest-quality set of resources for Spanish-speaking teachers, school administrators and teacher trainers interested in enriching their institutions, curricula and learning environments through the effective use of ICTs,” said Claudia de Piedrahita, Director of the Gabriel Piedrahita-Uribe Foundation. “Through the ePals Global Community, many more Spanish-speaking educators can engage with resources, and connect and collaborate with other educators from all over the world to help their students build the critical skills they will need beyond the classroom for their future lives.”

Strongly aligned to the mission of ePals, and especially the ePals Foundation, the primary goal of the Gabriel Piedrahita-Uribe Foundation is to promote the improvement of education for disadvantaged and underserved children, specifically in Spanish-speaking countries, through the effective integration and use of ICTs in the curriculum.

“Educators around the world have shared with us they are constantly looking for high quality resources, teaching methods and tools to help them teach today’s students. This has a variety of native language and cultural components, in addition to global dimensions,” said Edmund Fish, President and CEO of ePals, Inc. “We have taken a significant step forward through this partnership with the Gabriel Piedrahita-Uribe Foundation and the new functionality on ePals.com and Eduteka.org. We look forward to continuing to bring the great work of organizations like the Gabriel Piedrahita-Uribe Foundation to even more educators and classrooms worldwide.”

In addition to the release of the Spanish language ePals portal (www.epals.com/bienvenido), ePals also released a major upgrade to ePals.com by expanding instant translation features to now include 35 languages and more than 1,000 language pairs. These features further support the safe and collaborative work done in the ePals Global Community by nearly 600,000 educators and millions of students across 200 countries and territories.

More Information

For more information about ePals, Inc., visit www.epals.com, or for company information, visit www.epalscorp.com.

About The Gabriel Piedrahita-Uribe Foundation

Since June of 2001, The Gabriel Piedrahita-Uribe Foundation, based in Cali, Colombia, has run Eduteka.org, a free web portal targeted to the Spanish-language educational community. Since its inception, the goal of Eduteka has been to become the preferred destination, meeting place and gateway for Spanish-speaking teachers and school directors interested in enriching their institutions, curricula and learning environments through the effective use of ICTs. To this purpose, Eduteka offers a great variety of original and third-party content, including up-to-date national and international articles, interviews and research studies, resources and interactive spaces, at no cost. Eduteka currently boasts more than 1 million page views and 430,000 visits per month, and has more than 53,000 registered users from more than 3000 cities and towns in Colombia and 95 other countries. For more information, visit www.eduteka.org.

About ePals Inc.

The mission of ePals, Inc., is to support lifelong learning through collaborative experiences that empower and inspire. Through its technology, programs and services, K-12 students and teachers around the world build and exchange knowledge based on safe and protected communication tools, evidence-based curricula and authentic, collaborative learning experiences. The ePals Global Community™ (www.epals.com) is the largest online community of K-12 learners, enabling more than half a million educators and millions of students across 200 countries and territories to safely connect, exchange ideas, and work together. The company’s curriculum-based e-mentoring program, In2Books^®, uniquely builds reading, writing and critical thinking skills and embeds literacy instruction across the curriculum. These, and a host of partner products, are built on the ePals Distributed Learning Platform™, an innovative online collaborative environment optimized for K-12 audiences and learning. ePals is especially committed to enabling academically rigorous educational opportunities in economically disadvantaged environments worldwide through the ePals Foundation.

Contacts

ePals, Inc.
Rebecca Kilduff
703-885-3400
rkilduff at corp.epals dot com
www.epalscorp.com

C. Blohm & Associates, Inc.
Sandy Fash
608-839-9800
sandy at cblohm dot com
www.cblohm.com

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