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Amstelveen College: first experiences with ‘What do you eat?’Last year Ria de Lange graduated at Amsterdam Faculty of Education (EFA) as a biology teacher. During the part time courses she has been teaching biology already in different schools. Last march she started at Amstelveen College, a school located in a residential area very near Amsterdam.
During her last year of study she followed a course about Science across the World. One of the activities was writing an implementation plan for introducing a topic in the school. Ria discussed the idea with colleagues in the school. The result was four classes and six teachers working on ‘What do you eat?’ in September 2002.
The school Amstelveen College houses 1140 students and 120 teachers in two buildings. Both buildings are represented on the schools website, at www.amstelveencollege.nl .  The students are split up in different streams (montessori, vmbo, havo, vwo and gymnasium). The location where Ria is occupied with her duties, is the building with two education streams: the VMBO and the Montessori levels. It is not a large school; in opposite: with approximate 530 pupils, each and every person counts, and there is a lot of attention for everyone’s welfare. This year there are six groups in the first level and each group is not bigger than 22 pupils. For the project Science Across the World, Ria asked the co-operation of four groups in the second level. Those pupils are in the age from 14 to 16 years.
ColleaguesRia collaborated with six other teachers. Apart from her, two biology teachers took part: Henny de Lange and Sarie van Noorden. The first lessons were rather theoretical: some science of nutrition: what are the main nutrients?In what kind of nourishment’s you can find them? What is a healthy nutrition? Then they started with the table on the daily diet and activities of the students. After Ria summarised and discussed the results with the class, the teachers of English, Eska Doube, Annelies Heijnis and Jet Schokker took over. They helped the students to translate their table into English.
Information TechnologyIn the preparation of the project, the system operator, Jarno de Haan, had made e-mail accounts for all the participating students. Ton ten Holder, the teacher for the information technology skills, showed him to be an enthusiast helper by continuing the project after the English translations were made. He could do a good job because he is teaching all the groups in the second level. At first sight, he thought that the students could exchange on-line their results with students from another school. Probably they could discuss their results in a chat-box, he expected. But in practice, the SAW-site doesn’t offer such features. So Ton helped the student with sending their results to the mailbox of the partner-school. The pupils were asked to explore the results of a Japanese school. For this exploration Ria made a worksheet with questions on which they had to find the answers.  The working skills in this lesson were from the ICT area, but the content of the material was purely biological. While the communication was in English, for these Dutch students, pupils, the educational profit was three in one! Ton was very busy with helping logging in, translating and showing the way on the site of Science Across the World.
ExchangeRia consulted the Science across the World database and found a school in Denmark to exchange with. With the teacher over there, Lene Nielsen, Ria exchanged the results of the students. Because of not properly functioning the school email boxes, the exchange of records had to find place by private e-mail addresses. That’s why the pupils could not reach the information from Denmark in the lessons of Information Technology. The solution on making some kind of exchange practical working for the students, was to take results from any of the schools which was available on the site of Science Across the World. A request form a school in Italy, to send over information about the results on “What you eat?” was honoured. Ria, content about the result of her students, sent the information from the Amstelveen students, by e-mail, to Italy.
Evaluation of the projectRia started with the preparation of the project before the summer holidays, in order to make it possible to start the project right in September. A sudden crash of the mail server of the Amstelveen College during the summer, and thereby loss of information on one of the used e-mail addresses, hindered the communication. Once on the way with the project, working together with the colleagues, it was satisfying to see the students working with enthusiasm on their tasks. After all, as a new starting teacher on the school, this project was also a nice opportunity to get to know colleagues in a short time!
December 2002
Text: Ria de Lange
Pictures: Ton ten Holder
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