Skype Call to Italy - Wednesday 12 May

Back on 19 April we received an email from a teacher (Luca Piergiovanni) in a middle school in Como, Italy. He had started an International Podcast for his students, and was doing interviews of teachers and students involved in different school podcasts from around the world.

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After some email correspondence back and forth, including a Skype call between Carol and Luca - neither speaking the language of the other (but using Skype Chat and Carol translating Luca's words into English, and her words into Italian using Google Translate) they were able to have some sort of conversation!

Trying to coordinate a time for the Skype interview to suit both parties, with Italy being 10 hours behind New Zealand time, was very difficult. Luca had intended to have a fluent English-speaking student interview us, but that was impossible for him to arrange for the time we decided on - 11:00 pm on 11 May in Italy (9:00 am the next morning here). So we were interviewed by one of Luca's friends, Matteo Ronchini. Unfortunately, Matteo's microphone and sound setup didn't work as well as we'd hoped, and we found it almost impossible to hear his words - they were very muffled and indistinct, so virtually the whole call involved us guessing what he was saying, and responding instead to a list of possible questions that Luca had previously emailed us.

The outcome was that teacher (Carol Kendall) and students (Kachina and Jahna), responded as best they could on the intended interview topic - our Springston School Podcast on Podomatic. They wanted to know: How long we've been doing podcasts, how we got started, the sorts of things we talk about in the episodes, why we choose them, the benefits to students, what the students enjoy most, why certain topics appear in the episodes, as well as information about our class blogs and how we use these.

We thought you might be interested to listen to a recording of the Skype Call anyway, with the patches of difficult communication where we simply couldn't hear Matteo's questions, edited out. Luca is going to record the questions separately, and integrate them into the recording they made, and publish the Skype call on their International Podcast Chocolat 3b page.

It was great to be able to communicate with our new friends in Italy, and to realise that their interest in our Podcast had brought us together. Hopefully we'll have the opportunity to speak to students and teachers in other schools around the world in the not too distant future.