Padova-Dickinson Exchange 2009 - Session 2

My observations from the first actual Skype exchange:

• the usual - two students had technical problems, but the rest did fine
• all of them started off text chatting and then, thankfully, Nicoletta made hers call ours so they actually started talking - usual blushing, smiling, anxiety, discomfort
• most students' first comment was 'it was fun' or 'that was great' :-)
• most of the American students are very weak in Italian, and our students noted this - some said it made it impossible to speak in Italian, others said once they 'got to know each other' in English, then their peer was willing to speak in Italian, others said they just had to speak slowly - will have to question the order, i.e. in the case of weak students, maybe it's better to start in English
• use of the Web: I found observing very hard (see next post) but this was my general impression - some students kept the screen only on the questions on the wiki, others Skype audio and text so that they could text in awkward or difficult moments, only 2-3 had other windows/text chats going on at the same time, and one student was using a dictionary rather than the Web! It will be interesting to note whether this limited use of the Web was caused by the fact that the first session is overwhelming and will increase as time goes by or not.
  
• most students had already contacted one another on Facebook and were very excited about meeting there peers online in Skype - one had read all the intros and decided who she wanted to be paired with (girl-boy) and when that wasn't the case she was disappointed.
• Lara-John: John doesn't talk much so this needs to be observed in the future exchanges.
• Silvia-Monia-Nina: Silvia was very disappointed when she found out the reason she wasn't able to hook up with Nina was that Nina wasn't using her Skype name and had already started Skyping with Monia using another name - then added Silvia to the conversation but Monia seemed to dominate (she seems to be a strong student) - thought about changing the groups, but towards the end Monia seemed to 'leave space' for Silvia as well so for now, have left così, 3 strong students - will see how it goes.