What are the implications for teaching and learning?

My grade 1 class is studying air and weather in science and I told the kids that we were going to go outside and look at clouds and feel the wind and talk about temperature. Immediately a kid said, can’t you just look up clouds on Google and show us? We have quite a few ESOL kids in the class and Google has been great to find images of words students do not know, but after a comment like that, I’m worried that I’m using the internet all wrong with my students. The readings tell me that we need to teach students to view technology as a means to help us participate in social networking, yet here I am still teaching kids that the internet is just used for finding images and videos. We have pen pals in Australia, why am I not skype’ing them with my kids or even emailing them? We send handwritten letters back and forth, but why can’t we connect digitally. Wouldn’t it be great if we could ‘meet’ them online and hear each other talk? By doing so we are not just practicing letter writing to some imaginary friends who live far away, suddenly those friends become real people that we can talk to. We will hear how their accents are different from ours, we will see the way they behave and act, we may even be able to go on a virtual tour of their school. Maybe they could bring their laptops outside and we could experience what the weather is like in Perth, Australia and compare it to what we are experiencing here in Shanghai at the exact same moment. Wouldn’t that be way cooler than just looking up images of clouds on Google?