Sixth and Final Exchange!

I really had great time during our video exchange!!!It was an amazing experience.

At first I was quite sheptikal, the presence of a camera recording us wasn't encouraging. But at the end nobady seemed to careat it too much.

American peers were very funny and I have had a great time listening to them.

Overall, this year experience was incredible, not so easy but I think it helped me a lot with my English, even though there are still many things to be improved.

Bye, Bye guys.

Fourth Skype Xchange:

Unfortunatelly, I missed this exchage because it was really impossible for me to come to class this Monday.

Therefore, what can I say. Only two Skype exchanges are missing till the end of this II semester English course. I hope they will be interesting and useful as the past four.

See you next week. I will be able to tell you something more interesting.

Third Skype Exchange:

Hi people, here we are again, giving our impressions about the exchange...

This time, just as last time, I spoke to Bari. She is a very nice girl, she always trys to speak in Italian in order to improve it. She speaks it very well but sometimes she is not able to find the right word therefore she just stays quite. I find it a little bit a problem because I try to ask her questions and try to create a real conversation but her answers are always brief and incomplete...

Even though a conversation is supposed to be something easy I discover that it is very complicated. Perhaps the problem is the topic. Talking about alternative energy, she wasn't able to answer to many of my questions because of luck of information, and, on the other hand, I wasn't able to answer to some of Bari's questions, too. So it was hard to create a coherent debate about the issue in question.

On contrary, I noticed that when we spoke about everyday things the conversation was more fluent. I am refering to spring break, future plans, university lessons an so on...

Overall, I think that is very difficult to have a complete controll over the debate as you can never know what the other person is about to say or ask...And the luck of face-to-face conversation complicate it furthermore...

Second Skype Xchange:

Hi guys!!!
Here I am again, to tell you something about my second exchange with Tulane students.

This Monday I spoke to Bari, my brand new American peer. I think that it would be interesting if we change the peer every week. It can be useful for us, as English learners, to try to understand and to speak to different native speakers, with different pronunciation and way of speaking.

However, talking to Bari was very funny and stimulating. She made a lot of effort to try to speak in Italian all the time. Even though her Italian wasn't perfect I was able to understand quite everything.

This time the conversation was quite all about recycling. I wasn't able to obtain many info about recycling in New Orleans because often Bari had some difficulties with Italian. But, on the other hand, me too had some problems answering to her, especially when she wanted me to speak about Italian laws on environment and on alternative energies. I wasn't very prepared on these topics.

It was a great idea that of recording our conversation. Even though none of us love to hear its own voice recorded, in my opinion it is a fantastic feedback. This can be a tool to use in order to correct our pronunciation mistakes and therefore try to improve them next time.

See you next week.

Skype: Tulane - Padova

The second semester is already started. And many interesting and new things are waiting for us.

First of all we are going to treat brand new topics such as environment, recycling, energy, culture...
Secondly, every week we are going to spend an hour talking with American students, all from Tulane University (New Orleans).

First Tulane-Padua Xchange:

I have to admit that I wasn't very preperaded to this kind of experience. This exchange is something so new and differente from what I was used to do during university classes.
But I've got the impression that also the American student wasn't prepered either. He told me that the topic was very borring and that he did not know what to ask me or what to say.

After a brief presentation, I try to obtain some pieces of information about recycling in New Orleans. Therefore, I asked him about consequences of Hurricane Katrina on the environment, on the city and on the recycling system. He also told me something about the water pollution of the Gulf, because of the oilers.

We spoke both in English and in Italian.

Even though there were some moments of embarassment, where none of us knew what to say, it was an interesting experience. Usually, in everyday life we, as language students, don't have many opportunitites to speak to English people. and this exchange help us to improve our oral abilities.

I think that the next time it would be better to prepare some questions. In that way, one can have more control on the conversation.

This is all for now.

Some other impressions on wiking

Hi people,

this time I am going to give you my impressions on wiking. During last two weeks of our English course we focused on wikisphere. First we spent some time exploring it, trying to understand what kind of genre wiki is and finding its main characteristics. Then we gave our own contribution to a wiki, entitled edutechwiki, writing on its pages real articles.

The questions of this week is:
What have I learnt from these last e-tivities?

Wikisphere is a big community of people who are motivated and interested in sharing their knowledge and researches with other people. This is the reason why they spent their time to write something on wikis. The fact that I wrote something in one wiki makes me feel a little bit important. ^-^

But, on the other hand, it makes me reflect a lot, because it was not so easy to be part of this big community.

As we discussed in class it is always very hard to write something original that other people can read and find interesting. Perhaps the real problem in this case is our innate lack of confidence. We are never sure about the quality of our own work, especially if we compare it with other people work, which appears always better and more interesting than our own piece of writing.

Even though I was very insecure about what I was doing, at the end I gave my contribution to a real wiki. I wrote on the page “Learning Language” and focused on Second language learning and technologies: wikis and blogs.

One of the difficulties of this kind of work is quoting. Instead of putting many quotes I decided to elaborate them and integrate them with my own thoughts about the topic in question. Quoting is important because it gives more credibility to a work, but it is important not to exaggerate with quotations. I know that it is much more easier to put quotes but I think that it should be a good exercise for us, as English learners, to reword them.

Other difficulty is the layout, that means how to organize the article on the page and how to attract readers attention in that way. At first, I don’t spend too much time on the layout, because I was convinced that what really matters is the content. But, after our discussion in class and after having a look on other articles I became aware of the importance of the layout. Therefore, I reorganized my article by creating more paragraphs (it facilitates the reading), by putting key-words in bold (in this way the reader is not obliged to read every single word but can read only key-words and then chose if he wants to read the all paragraph), by adding more links, either internal or external.

Looking at my peers' works I have also learnt some other things. I chose to add my contribution on a quite empty wiki, but some of my colleagues added their articles on already done pages. In my opinion that is very difficult, because you have to pay a lot of attention on what other contributors have wrote in order to avoid repetitions and to be able to put your article in the right order.

I am curious to know if somebody else will add something else on the same page where I have added my article in order to see if they will change my ideas or correct some mistakes or simply add more information. I think that the main aspect and the most interesting one of this sort of community is the collaboration.

This is all for now.
Today I have an exam and the day after tomorrow I have another big exam. I am really tired…Tomorrow I will miss the class because I have to study (the problem is that I live far from Pd and will spend too much time to come to the lesson and then to return back home) and I really can't spent all afternoon…I am really sorry for that…
Therefore, I want to wish to all of you nice holiday, and especially Marry Christmas and Happy New Year to everybody…
Bye, bye.

Editing articles on Edutech wiki

Hi people,
this week e-tivity is once again about wikis, but this time we have a new task. Once we have explored the wikisphere, now we have to give our contribution to this space. That means that we should edit real articles on a wiki, and the wiki in question is edutech wiki.

Through this e-tivity we are supposed to better understand what wikisphere is about and to have an opportunity to write about what we are doing on our English course.

After having a look on edutech wiki, I decided to contribute on the page entitled “Language learning”. Firstly, because it is a very brief and poor article. That implies that I could write quite everything I want. Secondly, because it deals with learning language and technologies, in other words with main topics of our English course.

In my article I put an introduction about Second language learning and Technologies, then I gave some information about blogs and wikis. I think there are many other things to add and improve. But this is the first step.

I have to admit that it wasn’t so easy. While writing, I felt the pressure on my shoulders because I was writing something that everybody all over the world could read. I was scared of making too many mistakes or just of writing things that one can consider not very interesting or original.

See you in class!!!
Bye.