| Using E-mail If you are lucky enough to have a set of computers at school available to you and your students, it will help if all your students have e-mail accounts they can access from those computers. I have found that relying on members of the group to do at home the communication they need to do as part of the project can be problematic. "I forgot again!" doesn't make for a welcome refrain, and the guilt associated with, "Wow, your partner is the only one who hasn't received anything. He's probably in tears even as we speak," will only get you so far. It can be complicating to try to arrange for e-mail accounts through your school for each student, as the tech folks in education tend to be wildly overworked people. A better alternative that leaves you far less responsible for what your students do is for them to sign up for free, web-based e-mail. Such services have become very common, with sites such as Hotmail and Rocketmail providing everything one would need. A downside to free e-mail is having to give information about yourself (but not credit card info or anything else really questionable) so that you can see the advertisements that keep these e-mail services afloat. A tremendous upside is that one can check one's e-mail from any connected computer on the planet. The point, of course, is for members of your group to be able to send and receive e-mail from wherever you meet. Recently, a site called MailStart has appeared which allows people to check their mail from regular accounts on the web. The account must be POP3 compliant (if you're not sure, just try it and see). This may also help students acess their mail from school. For doing e-mail in Japanese, you will need some kind of Japanese environment on the computer(s) you will use. The standard choice for Macs is the Japanese Language Kit with a Japanese-capable e-mail program such as (the absolutely free) Eudora-J. For PC's, having the Japanese version of Windows is probably the best solution, though there are reasonably priced options for the English Windows operating system such as the programs available from NJStar. Doing e-mail in Japanese can take a little time and money to set up, but is well worth it if your group is learning Japanese and you want language practice to be a part of the project. Fortunately, there are many sites with information on how to e-mail in Japanese. Here are a few; links from these sites can get you to others if you need. A Guide To Japanese E-mail Guide To Japanese Computing Japanese as a Second Language Keiko Schneider's Bookmarks To the Internet Exchange Project index page | 
