NEW YORK, Sept. 12, 2005 (PRIMEZONE) -- ePALS Classroom Exchange(tm), the Internet's largest collaborative classroom network, and PubSub.com, the essential tool for anyone tracking what people are saying about the topics they care about, today announced a joint partnership to develop and release ePALS StudentBlog(tm), a safe and protected blogging tool designed for teachers, students and parents to search, publish, and share classroom projects across cultures and continents in an age-appropriate environment.
ePALS StudentBlog constantly monitors relevant blogs and Web feeds for matches to students' subscriptions, filters out inappropriate postings, and delivers the results in real time. The solution's prospective search engine delivers ongoing matches to student and teacher queries by making them persistent. Instead of relying on a static, historical collection of data, prospective search registers queries and evaluates them against every new document published as it is discovered. Matched results can be delivered as an RSS or Atom feed into a news aggregator or read on the Web, empowering students and teachers to become more informed citizens and view education and research as an ongoing process. This product will enable teachers to supervise and keep curriculum focused on all content and posting activity.
"Blogs in the classroom provide a means of open communications between students and teachers with the added bonus of having the world learn what's going on in classrooms everywhere," said Candace Pauchinick, a San Diego-based teacher at Patrick Henry High School, who is collaborating with classrooms in China. "It's such an exciting way to share and learn from each other, no matter where you live. I've seen blogs by teachers and students that are masterpieces and have learned so much from them."
PubSub is a service that monitors more than 16 million Internet sources of news and information on users' behalf, notifying them instantly when things they care about are published in blogs, press releases, SEC filings, newsgroups, and other sources. ePALS Classroom Exchange is the Internet's largest community of collaborative classrooms and leading provider of school-safe e-mail, eMentoring, and Web browsing technologies. Combining these capabilities enriches students' online research and publishing experiences while protecting them from inappropriate content and enabling teachers to keep project or lesson plan focus.
"The potential of the blogosphere as a learning tool is tremendous," said Bob Wyman, PubSub's CTO and co-founder. "Never before has the power to share so much information been in the hands of so many. The blogosphere offers expert opinions and information on just about any subject matter known to man. We're very excited to partner with ePALS to bring prospective search to students so that they may benefit from the universal sharing of ideas within a secure educational environment."
"Schools demand a safe, collaborative environment for their communication and Web browsing needs," said Tim DiScipio, chairman and co-founder of ePALS Classroom Exchange. "The combination of ePALS's large global classroom community and collaboration technologies and PubSub's unique prospective search capabilities allow us to bring safe, secure blogging to teachers, students, and schools worldwide for international cross-cultural collaboration and project sharing. More than 80,000 new blogs are created every day; for education to ignore this phenomenon would be to risk putting our kids behind the technological times. Blogs enable deeper, richer interaction among community members and encourage students to explore, express, and collaborate. Our partnership with PubSub brings students information that was previously inaccessible in an educational environment."
About ePALS Classroom Exchange, Inc.
Founded in 1996, ePALS Classroom Exchange (http://www.epalscorp.com) is the largest and fastest growing online collaborative classroom network and leading provider of school-safe email, eMentoring and Web browsing technology. The company connects more than 104,000 registered primary and secondary (K-12) schools and classrooms, comprising 4.6 million students and teachers in 191 countries and supports over 2 million K-12 email user worldwide. Teachers and students use the ePALS network for cross-cultural project sharing, foreign language practice, inter-school communication and international classroom-to-classroom exchanges. Approximately 1,500-2,000 teachers register their classrooms with the ePALS Global Network each month in order to connect with foreign classrooms. ePALS is the pioneer and leader in school-safe email, eMentoring, and Web browsing technology for the global K-12/primary and secondary education. Additional information is available at www.epalscorp.com.
About the PubSub.com Service
PubSub.com provides a free prospective search service that continuously monitors more than 16 million blogs and syndicated Web sites, over 50,000 newsgroups, all SEC Edgar Filings, press releases from major wire services, earthquake data from the US Geological Survey, and FAA airport delay information to instantly alert users whenever material events occur. PubSub's prospective search provides a real-time notification service made possible by PubSub's proprietary "matching engine" which, each day, performs hundreds of billions of matches between subscriber requests and newly published items.
About PubSub Concepts, Inc.
PubSub Concepts, Inc. is a New York-based company founded in 2002. The company develops Internet-scale Publish/Subscribe systems and plans a series of product releases designed to make prospective searching a vital element of the Internet experience. Visit www.pubsub.com for more information.