Vodcasting

For years my students have written to pen pals in other countries and waited patiently for the letters to come back. This one dimensional contact is a thing of the past. There is a new wave in our future and I would love to get my 8th grade students ready for it. We live in a very small wine community in the NY Finger Lakes area. Many of my students will never leave here to see the world around them. What I propose to do is to video tape short little clips that correspond to our units and have the children send them to other countries that speak Spanish using perhaps www.epals.com and request similar replies. For example, they could talk about their homes and show clips of the siding and the bricks and talk about the rooms of their house. They would be using the language and speaking in Spanish. They would have real audiences. The idea is that they would get back clips of what a Spanish home looks like and be able to see first hand how similar or different the world around them looks. We would need several flip minos to use in the classroom. Also I have a laptop of my own, but would love to purchase a new one so that the students could make better use of the class time. Our district has a lab, but it is diff icult to get into when you are competing against the other CORE subjects. I would also like to able to have webcams on it and the latest technology which is not always possible on archaic hand me down machines.