"Hartelijk welkom in Sundern aan de Sorpesee" at Pleincollege Nuenen, The Netherlands

Video conferencing in the internet is one of my favourite tools I use in my chemisty lessons giving my students the chance to communicate around the world about global issues. Or they just tell teachers, classes or librarians around the world what they have learned so far about a certain topic.

After I had the chance to meet my internet colleagues from Sweden, Russia, the USA, from Austria and Hungary personally the years before I got the chance to meet another fellow teacher, Bart Pardoel, and his students "live". I travelled to my neighbour county, the Netherlands, to teach German in two German language classes at the Pleincollege in Nuenen.

I prepared a slideshow about my hometown. I named it "Hartelijk welkom in Sundern aan de Sorpesee" (Welcome to Sundern at Lake Sorpe, in Dutch) and we discussed some local German cultural traditions at a grade 8 GFL class and a grade 9 GFL class, learning German by a mother tongue speaker. After the presentations we played a Kahoot! game in German about the presentations to make sure what they have learned that lesson.

After the lunch break I had the opportunity to attend and help Bart and four colleagues at this school in a PBL "OPEDUCA" pilot course. The European OPEDUCA concept means "... developing Open Education regions for future- oriented learning and teaching." A concept which is very new to me. The main topic was "buildings" and the students started to prepare a moodboard after they had created a mindmap at home. This project is a moodle based project at Pleincollage and the students have to digitalize and upload all material and must type in at a virtual diary. They have to fix in a protocol what they have done that day and what they plan to do next time. The students left the room that day to extract some research questions from their moddboards. The teachers adviced them about how to evaluate different reliable and non- reliable sources to get sufficient answers to their questions.


In the late afternoon I left the Pleincollege after lots of gainful discussions with the German language teachers and the school`s principal.

Thank you very much to Bart, his colleagues, especially Hermine, and to the principal to be a guest at Pleincollege in Nuenen, the Netherlands. I hope to welcome them at our school as well sometimes.