After the schools are closed, Palestinian teachers face Corona with lessons on Facebook

Mervat Sadiq-Ramallah

It became available to students of science at the Qabatiya Elementary School for Boys south of Jenin in the West Bank, to follow their daily lessons through Facebook, where their teacher Thamer Sabaana announced the provision of daily video lessons during the compulsory vacation in which Palestinian schools entered for a month to avoid the spread of the Corona virus.

Sabaana, who has been a teacher for 17 years, expressed his willingness to receive questions and inquiries to answer them by phone or over the Internet, and called on his students not to waste the holiday and prepare an appropriate study program during the emergency period.

He said that a one-month dropout from students will distract them from their daily lessons, and they, as all of the world today, are following social media and electronic games, a platform that can be invested to complete their study plan.

Daily lessons via Facebook
Sabaana was investing in social networking and electronic games to interact with his students during regular school days, but with the Palestinian Authority’s decision to close educational facilities for fear of an outbreak of corona, he decided to transfer his daily lessons to broadcast on Facebook.

On Thursday, the authority declared a state of emergency in the West Bank and closed schools, universities and kindergartens for a month. It also prevented gatherings such as weddings, sports patrols, festivals and conferences, after discovering 19 cases of Corona virus in the city of Bethlehem alone, along with the introduction of dozens to quarantine after they contacted delegations A foreign woman who had symptoms of the disease after she left Palestine.

He teaches the seventh and eighth grades and has permanent contact with his students through the "Science Teacher" page or their active school page, and he was one of the candidates for the Best Teacher Award in the West Bank last year.

He said that he had received positive feedback from the parents of students who supported the idea, along with other volunteers who were willing to provide technical assistance in producing videos and providing multiple platforms for their dissemination. And the approval of the principal of his school to circulate it among the rest of the teachers and in various subjects.

Restore popular education initiatives
These teachers ’initiatives bring to mind what was known as“ popular education ”during the first Palestinian intifada at the end of the 1980s, when the Israeli occupation decided to close Palestinian schools and universities for long periods, and teachers resorted to forming class groups outside educational institutions to bypass the ban. The teacher, Sabaena, had a role in providing educational lessons for the Palestinian prisoners during his many periods of detention in the occupation prisons.

In addition, social networking sites have discussed the initiative of teacher Ashraf Adwan, from the town of Awarta, south of Nablus, and he works at a nearby male group school, to teach her students remotely.

Education by playing
Since his appointment three years ago in teaching the first basic stage, Adwan avoids the traditional method of education and resorts to "education by playing" and uses in his classrooms an interactive board that explains educational lessons through electronic games.

Educational duties on Facebook
On his Facebook page, Adwan provides educational duties that parents follow, and he has a communication group, during which he receives homework pictorial from them, corrects them, evaluates them, and returns them back to them. It also receives videos from parents of their children during their studies, in which it follows the duties of students in memorizing songs, lessons or mathematical operations.

He says that students in the basic stage will be more affected by dropping out of class, especially as they are vulnerable to forgetting important mathematical operations such as addition, subtraction, and basic knowledge in other sciences.

He pointed out that schools and teachers in different governorates have used his experience and circulated it for education through communication and electronic interaction, especially with the announcement of the emergency holiday recently.

The aggression mentions models of distance education used by Chinese teachers to confront the Corona crisis that began there since last December, through the allocation of electronic educational lessons. But he adds that Palestinian teachers are also able to be creative in this field.

Formal orientation towards distance learning
The Palestinian Ministry of Education tends to study the generalization of distance education by making use of modern technical means. And its educational directorates announced initiatives such as schools as distance learning centers, and the Qalqilya Education Directorate announced in the northern West Bank. The directorate said in a statement that it will design electronic classes in the computer centers located in its schools.

The Director General of Technical Education at the Palestinian Ministry of Education, Jihad Deridi, estimated, in an interview with Al-Jazeera Net, that his ministry will go to adopt e-learning during the emergency period.

The Palestinian Ministry of Education offers a systematic program to train teachers to employ technologies in their educational lessons. According to official data, the number of school students in the Palestinian Authority areas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and their educational institutions in Jerusalem amounted to about one million and three hundred thousand students.

According to Palestinian statistics, more than a third of Palestinian families have a computer, and about 65% of them have access to the Internet at home, other than the Internet on cell phones. And that more than 80% of individuals possess the basic skills of information and communication technology.