FACEBOOK AND SECRET IDENTITIES, SKYPE, E-PORTFOLIO AND VIDEO EDITING: HOW THE INTENSIVE USE OF TECHNOLOGY CREATES REAL AND VIRTUAL WORLDS WHERE STUDENTS OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES LEARN BETTER AND MORE

During the oral presentation I will talk about the project I worked on the past two years on Intermediate Italian (third and fourth semesters). I will begin with explaining how the students of the third semester used Facebook and created secret famous Italian identities in order to learn cultural aspect of Italy and Italians that it’s impossible to do with the usual textbooks. The same semester I implemented Skype exchanges between my students of Italian and students in Italy in order to practice and share the language and the culture they were learning. The following semester I asked the students to work on an e-Portfolio that became a way for me to assess their learning but also as a means of self-assessment where they collect the "experiences" they have been accumulating the whole semester of Italian. At the same time, during that semester I asked them to work in groups and use Video Editing to create a movie where they presented a novel I assigned them. During the year, with this technology projects the students were given a new experience on language learning in the classroom and outside the classroom. The learning process was more creative, fun and more related to the real and contemporary Italy.
I will first present the Facebook project, where students had a secret Italian identity and posted video, articles, music and comments on their page and on the page of the other "Italians" of their network. I will show how that brought enthusiasm and more interest on students, how I managed the project during the semester and how I assessed it. Second I will show some of the skype exchanges that the students had with their Italian partner and the written reflection they wrote in the language, about guided culture topics they talked about during the exchanges. Third I will talk about how the e-Portfolio allowed the students to have a picture of what they were learning during the semester; it was a creative way for them to assemble the experiences they had on Facebook and Skype as well as to be critical and think more about what they were learning. And I will continue with the last project, the video-editing, where the students had to work in small group and create their interpretation of an Italian novel. After reading five Italian books and watching the Italian five movies taken from the story they read, I asked the students to read a Pirandello’s novel and create a video that represented the novel and their interpretation of it.
I will finish discussing the implications of intensive use of technology in a language class; what worked well and what needs to change in order to have a better response from the students. Is this generation of students really a technology native generation? Student’s point of view and feed backs will be presented to have a comprehensive idea of the technology project in the language classroom.