Abstract:

This presentation will show the evolution of an international learning cooperation between my students of Italian at Cornell University and students from universities and high schools in Italy. After showing how I successfully implemented over the last five years guided Skype exchanges between language students at all levels (from novice to advanced) and native speakers in Italy, and how this dramatically improved students’ listening and speaking abilities as well as their cultural awareness, I will discuss how this project evolved into an even more innovative, engaging and collaborative one. At Inted 2013, where I presented on the intensive use of technology in the language classroom, I met Professor Sabrina Noccetti, from the Università degli Studi di Pisa. We designed a collaborative project between my students of Intermediate Italian at Cornell and her students of intermediate and advanced English at the University of Pisa. The goal of our project was and is to enable students to work cooperatively on a stimulating and pleasant activity, with the purpose of creating a constructive and reality-based outcome in the foreign language they are learning. Moreover, they do this through an intensive use of Skype and Moodle, the two technology applications that give the most outstanding results in a language classroom.

My presentation will be the first one of a tandem of two presentations, that Prof. Noccetti and I have in mind for Edulearn 2015. I will introduce how my intensive use of technology progressively changed to a more targeted use, with the necessary step of choosing only the software applications that are irreplaceable and necessary to enhanced active and collaborative learning among the students. After experimenting over the last five years with group projects using social media and software applications such as Facebook, Blogs, E-portfolio, Video Editing, and Skype, I came to the conclusion that the most engaging and effective softwares and social media for language acquisitions are Skype and Moodle: these are technologies that students evaluated and consider as necessary and not replaceable by a textbook or by the traditional channels used in language teaching. At the end of my paper at Inted 2013, I wondered if it is worth sacrificing the curriculum to make room for technologically-mediated activities. I asked myself if technology complements the curriculum or if it is the curriculum that is being sacrificed so as to give too much space to technology. After this project with the University of Pisa, I came to the conclusion that a successful technology project cannot being seen as a sacrifice of the curriculum, but rather only as a gift for the course and the students.

Keywords:

International Cooperation, Moodle, Peer-to-Peer feedback.