Assignments & Activities

HYPERTEXT-BASED CORRESPONDENCE VIA SNAILMAIL

One first approach to international contacts using computers is to prepare materials stored on floppy disks or CD-ROM and just send it to your correspondent through the ordinary mail (now dubbed "snail-mail", as opposed to "electronic mail").

What you need to do is to prepare some materials materials, preferably using multimedia, so that your friends will have not only things to read but also something to see or listen to: pictures, drawings, short audio clips, or just about anything you think can be fit for your purpose.
You can use a multimedia editor like PowerPoint or an HTML editor like Frontpage or others. The second choice would be recommended because almost all computers (about 90% of all computers in the world run on Windows) have an in-bult browsers to read HTML documents. But if you don't feel comfortable with that, PowerPoint can be a good solution too.

Of course, if you want to exchange materials with other people you must first think of why you want to do it. So you must find a topic: one that is usually a good starting point is the "cultural background factsheet". This simply means that, after having negotiated a number of themes, you gather information about Italy and your correspondents do the same about their country. The themes could be something like: eating habits, school system, political institutions, leisure and sports, holidays, the home, role of the family, teenagers lifestyle, music, art, geography, environmental issues, etc.

Gather the materials, put them into a nice presentation format and send the floppy or CD-ROM via mail.

ON-LINE EXCHANGE OF HYPERTEXTS

Instead of penpals now we have e-pals. They use e-mails to correspond, a much faster means of communication than the traditional snail-mail (ordinary postal service). You can find perspective e-pals from all over the world at www.epals.com. Have a look!

However, to make things a little more exciting, after some e-mails you can arrange the exchange of information based on hypertext projects as explained above; only, this time, each school will prepare and format its materials on the Internet. 

What you need is a space on a website and somebody that can manage some HTML and webdesign skills. The little extra work that this solution implies is very much compensated by a number of advantages:

• The materials are immediately available, so you don't have for the floppies to arrive at your correspondents' school, which, if it is in Japan, could take rather a long time.

• You can expand the contents any time.

• HTML gives a much wider choice of layout and graphical solutions.

• The Internet allows a relatively high degree of interaction with your correspondents.

• Feedback may be quite fast.

• The same material can be seen also by other perspective partner schools.

• Working out a webpage is an exciting activity.

The long established tradition of penfriends, a common practice in the foreign language class, has been fading away lately, but the idea behind it is still working in other forms.