More Technology... How?

I have done a lot of reading over the past week about the impact of technology (namely weblogs and wikis) for my graduate class. I am amazed at the things other educators are doing in their classrooms to expand the walls of their classes. Schoolwork becomes so much more relevant to students when they realize that they are connecting with someone outside of the confines of their classrooms. New technologies allow this.

On a side note, the past two weeks in my own class have been jam-packed with my students referencing technology and how they use it without my prompting! Several of my students have randomly (I swear!) mentioned their favorite blogging/sharing sites. Some of them come with disclaimers from the students (for example, fmylife.com, a website where people can vent about mishaps of their day), and many have given me some insight into what matters to my middle school students. Some examples include:

• Facebook: the [in]famous site for posting pictures, cataloging your day in status updates, and commenting on others' content shows me my students are concerned with being "in the know" about others' lives.
• PostSecret:this project was started by Frank Warren, who handed out postcards to random strangers and asked them to tell a secret and mail it in to an anonymous address. The project exploded, and I believe three books have been since published with samples of postcards. This shows me that many of my students value their privacy, but also need to vent about what is bothering them.
• YouTube: Several times a day, my students reference videos from this site for me to watch. Many of them have mentioned that they've watched some of these videos several times. Other students can go on and on with titles of videos they enjoy. I'm not quite sure what the fascination is with some of these videos...

Given these examples, I plan to use the sources that my students enjoy to find material that is relevant to our study of Italian and the culture of Italy. I would like to post this material on my blog, and open it up to student questions/comments/ connections either in Italian or English, whichever they are most comfortable with to differentiate.

For example, with my seventh grade Italian class, we are studying fashion. I could probably find a video on youtube.com of an Italian designer's runway show and post it on my blog. From there, I would pose questions about the show in both Italian and English. Students would have to either answer a discussion question that I posted or make their own observation.

The blog would serve as a forum for discussion about the Italian culture and language, as an area to broaden horizons about what we study, and also as a place to supplement our classwork since it is not realistic to fit everything into a 47 minute time block or 10 month school year period. The blog could be continued past those confines. This is a great instructional tool for middle school language learners. Many of them will not be able to experience a trip abroad until high school, college or beyond (sometimes they never will), and it is important to show them that they can have certain experiences virtually so that they may gain a better understanding of the products and practices of the culture.