Meeting a new group

Meeting a new group is always a matter of breaking the ice in the good or wrong way. It´s easier when is big one: if some of the people doesn´t like my way to approach they stop to come to the class and they are still enough people so the course continues.
In this new group I have 17 people: the youngst is probabily 9 and the oldest 80 years old with different methods and learnering tecnique.
I don´t know yet what kind of learner I have in front of me but for the first time  I divided them in groups. In every group was a person that studied Italian before from 1 to several years (even long time ago that has the task to check how people writes those words) and I asked them to write in 5´all the italian words that they know. From those words we started to speak about phonetic. I gave them some rules about it and then I wanted them to work in group: read each others words, correct them, and then with a really difficult toungue twister read to me.
I use group working quite much: not only for the reason that Italian we are socials and we need to make contacts with other people; I use group work because I truly believe that from your class mates you can learn/notice/ improve much more than just passively sitting and listening me. In add, people doesn´t like to be in the centre of the class, they prefer try with the person who is sitting next to them (who is eventually in the same boat).

Finnih people needs time to find the courage to read aloud all by themselves in front of the class: but they are enought brave to read their class mates.
I have anyway to consider the different way of learning: that´s why next time I am going to start with the book, so that the visual learners can start to see and to remember stuffs and the auditory (after my reading) will probabily be able to read descently.
I use tecnology every now and then but not all the time if for tecnology is considering Internet. Material in Italian language is quite few and in summer time I don´t have the power to make on my own. I use usually videos when we speak about culture (events in Italy for instance) or when we want to learn gestures. I will try to use it more: people might enjoy (at least the young ones).