Palestine Project

As I may become a teacher of English I am busy doing teaching practice at a school in Haarlem. This week there aren’t any classes, but instead there are exams and special projects. One of these projects is a ‘Palestine Project’. The children from 3G are walking through Haarlem with a video camera and a laptop sending live footage to a group of school children in Palestine. Meanwhile they also talk and chat via the internet, which means that the Palestine children could tell the Haarlem children what they wanted the Haarlem children to show them. This is definitely an assignment which is ‘real life’ and something from which everyone will learn plenty.

Since this is a pilot project it isn’t surprising that a lot of things went wrong. The children used too many Dutch words and weren’t speaking clearly. Also, the technology failed us on certain moments. Luckily, the worst thing that could happen did not happen; we had pictures and sound almost for the entire time (before the battery ran out).

The part of the group that did not go into town to record is going to do that tomorrow. Having learned from what the first group did right and wrong will make the recording of the second day much better. It is great to see how everyone starts making plans on what and how they are going to record tomorrow.

This project is very unique, which means that it even gets some attention from the press. Today Erik van Muiswinkel came by to see how everything is going. He went to school here. He is a famous comedian/actor in our little country (though the children did not seem to know him)