The Farewell Party

Report on the Farewell Party

Our farewell party was on the 19th of June. It gave the parents, teacher and especially the students the opportunity to say thank you and goodbye. It took place in restaurant in Diekmannshausen which we could luckily use because it belongs to one student’s parents. The official language was English so that our Indian guest could understand us and the other way around.
The organization team for this evening did a great job planning it. There was a team of students which was responsible for the setup and one for tidying up afterward. The setup team arrived an hour before the remaining guests. They arranged tables and benches in the garden, decorated them and distributed cola, orange juice and water.

For the dinner each family added one dish so we had a great selection of salads, bread and sauces. Additionally we made a barbecue. When it was time for our dinner most people started to eat outside but later was a thunderstorm so we all had to finish our dinner inside. That did not spoil our good mood. We had enough space inside and the presentations were inside anyway. 
The presentations were the main part of our evening. Groups of four to six students, including at least one exchange student, prepared several presentations to different subjects the last three days. Each of them dealt with one aspect of our main subject “Mobility”. Every group prepared either a video or a power point presentation. 
One group dealt with mobility in sport. They made a video of important moments in the German soccer history. To make that more interesting they switched between original footage and self-made video in which they took the roles of the players. Another group built a soapbox. They showed us different episodes of the construction phase and the final test run. Of cause they brought the soapbox with them so we could admire their hard work.
On top of these presentations the female exchanges students performed a traditional dance to Indian music in colorful saris. 

But eventually there was the farewell. It was the last evening we could all meet together because the next day our Indian guests left for Berlin with their exchange partner. So it was the last change for the German students to see our guests until we meet again in Indian this fall. As farewell gifts key chains for each Indian student and teacher were prepared. For the partner school the German students had a special gift. In groups of two they designed a piece of fabric with symbols for our great exchange program. For example there were the shape of our countries or a flower with leaves in the colors of our flags.
Rieke Bohemann

Project building a soapbox

Report of the project "building a soapbox"

We learned that it isn’t that easy to build a soapbox without any experience and guidance, especially without the material and that one has to make compromises sometimes, like we had to do when we knew that idea with the motor wouldn’t work in such short time. We also found out that it is important to not give up too fast.
About the communication with the Indian students we learned, that it is not very easy to build something, if one does not really speak the same language. And it is very individual how the Indians behave when there is some work to do and they are not together in their group, but separated and on their own. But it was fun to work with them and in the end we were a good team, because everyone had his own tasks, especially Brighu really liked to work with us and could help us a lot.
All in all it was a lot fun and to see the result of the work we have done together. We ourselves are very proud of our soapbox.
But we did not have enough time to build a long lasting one. Our soapbox would have been quiet better, if we had a few days more.
But especially for the relation to the Indian guys, the project work was a very good thing, because there were no divided groups of Indians and Germans, so that we all had to work together and to help each other. That made us to learn to know about the other culture and personalities very much. We had become a good team, when the project work was over.

The link to our presentation:
http://prezi.com/zx9bkf7yl8u7/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

 Ann-Kathrin, Brighu, Christopher, Jari, Johanna & Mehak

                                            First step: Procurement of the necessary materials

 

Second step: Put the ideas into practice with the available material

 

The result

 

Project communication between the youth

 Communication between the youth

For our group work we have chosen the theme “communication between the youth“, because in our opinion it is very interesting to see how Indian and German communicate, what differences there are and whether means of communication have changed in the last twenty to thirty years.
At first we talked to our Indian exchange students to find out how they communicate, which means of communication they use and whether  there are differences to the communication of German teenagers.
The result was that the Indian youth used mainly social networks to communicate and that they are in most cases the same social networks that German students used, such as Facebook or Whatsapp.
After that we have talked about technical means Indian and German used to communicate and have found out that they are also the same in both cultures.
Then we thought about how we can represent the differences and similarities we found out, and have finally decided to make a short movie. Afterwards we made a plan to clarify which informations and facts we want to record in our film, how long our movie should be, how we want to start our movie and which computer programs and technical means we need to record and to cut it. In the end we decided to start our movie with a little brainstorming, where we asked some students of the 11th year which keyword comes first to their mind when they think about the word “communication“.
After that we started our survey about communication and the ways to communicate at the weekly market of Jaderberg. We filmed our results, because we wanted to show them in our film. We found out, that nearly everybody uses electronic means to communicate, also older people, and that there are also communication means to advertise.
Subsequently we started to cut our film and put our results also into a power point presentation to show it at the presentation evening. There were some problems, because most people at the weekly marked were not able to speak English, so we had to make subtitles for our Indian guests and inserted music.

Tomke S., Tomke P., Brit, Sophie, Aina, Jagrit

Project mobile despite disability

Report of the Project “Mobile despite disability”

Day 1
The Day started with a meeting where every group got an Indian pupil to his group. Our group is made of Falk, Neele, Rieke, Amandeep and Marie-Anna. Our topic is the mobility of disabled people. We had the room in the container to work at our project. Usually we are five persons, but Rieke was ill on that day. We started working on it at nine a.m. On that day we specialised our work on planning the next day of our project. We want to go to an interview on the next day and rent a wheel chair for the whole project week. With that we wanted to film scenes in the supermarket while trying to buy things in the wheel chair to feel like a disabled person in his everyday life. Every detail was planned by us. Especially the interview on Tuesday. The interview should be made with Josepha Busse from the social station of the Caritas in Varel. We collected questions for the interview. We made it up to nine questions we wanted to ask Mrs Busse. The questions are about disabled people, in which ways they are limited in everyday live, what the government does for an easier live etc. After that we drove to Rieke to talk about the questions and the plan oft he next day, because she planned to be fit on the next day again. Back at school again, we made a break of 15 minutes and prepared everything for our visit at the sozial station in Varel and the excursion to the super market, so the next day of our project week can come.

Day 2
Today our main actions were the interview with Josepha Bosse from the sozial station in Varel and we filmed a shopping tour in the supermarket. Our group met at eight a.m. in the container at school. Rieke was also there today, so after collecting everything we needed in Riekes car, we drove to the Hospital in Varel where the Caritas is as well. There we met Josepha Bosse, leader of those who care for old and disabled people. We sat down in an eating hall and asked her our questions. She answered all our questions very well and in detail. We had a camera so we were able to film the whole interview. That has to be switched to the right length after the ending of the interview. After the interview we were able to ask questions emerged from the interview. She knows about everything very much. From the seniors residence we rent a wheel chair for our excursion. Being at school again we made our experiment with the wheel chair. We started at the school building, trying to manage the way up to the supermarket to buy things so one can see the difficulties disabled people are confronted with in everyday life. We found out that most thing weren’t easy. In fact our tour with the wheelchair was very exhausting. We followed the action with the camera, too. Rieke doesn’t fell very well so she went home again to be fit on the day of presentation. Falk, Neele, Aman and Marie-Anna alternated so everyone was able to drive with the wheel chair. In the supermarket we tried to get products also from the higher shelf. It was difficult and sometimes we were needed to use our lags what usually isn’t possible for disabled. On the way back we all also alternated, which was very funny and hard for us. That experiment raised our respect for people in the wheel chair. Back at school we mixed our filming material and switched the right scenes together. From the interview and from the excursion we built a short film we want to present tomorrow at the presentation evening. Till the end of the day it was only a little part of all that done. The rest has to be mixed on the next day. At 1.10 p.m. we stopped up our group work for that day. We were proud to have done the most of our group work, we planned on Monday. On the next day we just have to end up the cutting of our film sequences.

Mobility in the way to school

Mobility in the way to school:

Participants:

Laura Gebauer, Jule Brunken, Ines Brüling, Chahatpreet Kaur Sarao, Tomke Borchers

Our project is about the way to school. At first we think about what we want to do in our project and what we could show our exchange partners that they are not bored. We build some questions and want to ask around the hole school for short answers and than we ask our Indian exchange parterns. Our questions are:

• How long does it take to get to school?

• How do you get to school?

On the first day we went in all classes which were in the school on Monday. This is how we started. After we had noticed every one of the German students we calculate the opportunities in percent. On Tuesday we finished our survey with the Indian students and had now all the results. But we noticed too that some of our students are not in a position to decide for itself and/or choose just one thing...

In that case we started to tinker different vehicles by which the students can get to school on Tuesday. We build a car, a bus, a bicycle and a person who walk to school. It took a long time. But after finishing that we had the plan to make pictures with these things for our presentation on Wednesday evening. Also we wanted to take them into our presentation. We planed that some of the guest should take the vehicles in the order: what is used the most to what is used less. Furthermore we made some pictures for our presentation for showing the percentages from the German students and the Indian exchange partners. For that we spend the hole second day.

On Wednesday we made the last pictures of the real vehicles that we had tinkered and some pictures of a scooter, school crossing guard and a picture on which we are waiting for the bus because we think a school crossing guard and waiting for the bus was a really important fact to the way to school. After we took all these pictures we started to make our power point presentation which we want to show in the evening. We had some problems with the laptop of Ines why we had to change the computer. So we went to the media library and finished it there. After finishing the presentation on power point we split it in five parts and everyone of us choose one of them. We practice our presentation two times and were ready after that. All the time we had a lot of fun and we laugh often.

At the presentation evening on Wednesday we were the first group. Chahatpreet began to say hello to everyone and introduced us. Then Laura explained our survey and what we done the three days before. After that we started our quiz with three volunteers. We requested a German student, a parent and an Indian exchange partner to bring our images in the correct order. Both students were right and the mother was wrong. Tomke show them our results of the most popular and less popular vehicles to go to school. Then Jule explain the differences between the German and Indian students in their time they need to go to school. Ines finished our presentation with the school crossing guard and the waiting for the bus thing and said thank you to all for listening.

Project soccer

Report of the project work days

On the first day each group got two Indian pupils, so our group consisted of 6 people – Christian, Jan, Sören, Fynn, Gaurav and Nishant. After being told what rules are given for those three days, each group went to their room and started to do the project working. We started to plan how we create the video we wanted to present at Wednesday evening, which already took a long time. After two hours we thought we were finished and started a table soccer tournament. The match plan and the table are here: 

While playing our tournament, we noticed that we just have not enough scenes, so the video would be too short. So, after the tournament, we went on planning the following days and thought of which famous scenes we could enact. After writing the daily report, the first day was finished.

On the second day we met at 8:00 am at school and went to the sports hall, where we put our clothes and shoes and the laptop in the conference room. We had more than 15 jersey kits there. We started the first scene – it was the second goal of Helmut Rahn in the 1954 world cup final. We thought of which players are important for the video, then allocated everyone to his role and started to enact this maybe most important event in German football history. After some bad attempts we had a very good one which we wanted to put in the final video. So we went back to the conference room and suited other jersey kits for the next scene – which was the most controversial goal in football history in the 1966 world cup final, scored by Geoff Hurst. We decided to make this scene into two, the first would be the cross and the second the attempt on the goal. Again we had many bad attempts, but we also made a good one for both scenes. The third scene was the goal of Gerd Müller in the 1974 world cup final. Just like the two scenes before, we had bad attempts and good attempts, and finally decided while suiting the clothes for the next scene which attempt should be presented in the final video. The last scene of the day was the penalty kick of Andreas Brehme in the 1990 world cup final. We worked like we did the scenes before and finally just had to write the daily report to finish the day – almost. Because at home Jan cut everything together we did so far, that took a long time.

The third day was like the second one, just with other scenes. First we enacted the goal of Fabio Grosso in the semifinal of the 2006 world cup, then the goal just one minute later in the same game by Alessandro del Piero. Both scenes took a very long time until we had a good attempt. The next scene was the second goal of Mario Balotelli in the semifinal of the 2012 European cup and his famous celebration. We did this already in the afternoon; also we did a little addition for the scene of 1966. After finishing our work on the sports field we were driven home and Jan cut the video material together, inserted the original scenes and the audio tracks.

Here are some impressions of our work on Tuesday and Wednesday:

Project work tourism

Report about the project work tourism

Our team included 6 persons, two of them from India, Paramveer and Arjit. The others were, Constanze, Jan-Ole, Phil und Jan-Philipp.

We decided to work on the theme Tourism, because we Germans wanted to know, what is Tourism for Indians? And what are the big differences between Germany and India?

On our first day we started to work on a timetable, what we wanted to do on all three days. So we started with work on the differences between Germany and India. In this work we started to speak about typical German and Indian tourist places. After that little speech about tourist places we went to the computer room, to show each other the typical places on the internet. Indians showed us a lot of religious places like the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort or a lot of temples all around India. We Germans showed more political places like the Brandenburger Tor, the Reichstagsgebäude or typical German castles. After that short start of the day we started to make some questions for interviews with students and teachers of our school. For us were the important questions, how are you traveling? With who are you travel? And how often in the year do you travel?

On the second day we started to make interviews. This took a lot of time, because at first not so many students wanted to be part of an interview. So we started in the first break to interview teachers. After the first one gave the interview, a lot of others wanted to be part in too. At the end of the second day the Indian students went to a practice for some acts for the presentation evening. On the last day of project work we had a big problem, because three of our six members were ill. After a lot of work for the last three we finished a presentation with a little movie, a PowerPoint Presentation and a selection of our interviews.

Finally we can say that tourism is for Indians and Germans nearly the same, because the Indians and the most of Germans said in our interviews, that they do tourism, because of learning something new from other cultures. The Germans often travel to other European counties for learning something about history and about others behavior. The Indians travel around their own country, because of learning something about the culture of other Indians in such a big country. All in all the Indians travel for their religion more than the German, because they have a lot of popular places in India.     

Project mobility in freetime and nightlife

Project Mobility in free time and Nightlife

In this project Luis and his exchange student Manik, Gerrit, Henriette and Friederike dealt with the mobility in free time and nightlife by comparing the Indian and the German point of view.

Our declared aim was the elaboration of a presentation for Wednesday the June 19th. It was the many points of contact which made this topic very interesting and our choice turned out to be right attention-grabbing and remarkable. Free time and nightlife combined with mobility is always a current topic in a teenager`s life all over the world, but we were interested whether there were differences in the way of organizing your free time in India and Germany. First we had to develop our goals and the way of reaching our aims for having a well prepared structure. What we also did on the first day were short interviews with Indian and German students to get an overview of our topic. To analyze those different opinions later we filmed these interviews. We also started a survey with German and Indian students for developing statistics. These statistics were drawn on big papers to show them at the presentation.  We got further information from a reliable source; an internet platform from the German government, the “Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung”. On the one hand we knew that young adults all over the world have kind of the same ideas of how to organize their free time and the nightlife. But it was obvious that there are huge differences in the mobility and the structuring of free time and nightlife on the other hand. The physical mobility for example: Living in Germany means that you generally have the opportunity to move around in your environment either individually or by public transportation safely, because the infrastructure is one of the most elaborated in the world. Students in India usually do not use the public transportation, but bicycles or small moppets. The infrastructure is not a modern and dense transport network, which is a handicap Indian students also have to deal with in their free time. This is a reason why big groups of students meet after school at friends` homes. They often watch movies or just hang out together. Manik and other students told us that they also have the social mobility in free time, which means that it does not depend on your religious orientation or other ethic or social backgrounds. Furthermore they told us that this fact becomes obvious in their free time because everyone meets each other. It does not matter where you are coming from. Comparing this opinion to the facts which we read on the internet site of the “Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung” we had to discover that there are huge differences in the way of thinking, because on this website the authors say that it does matter from which social group you come from and how the income of people looks like. Moreover you could read that this becomes obvious in the everyday life of the Indians. During these three days we realized that mobility is a topic which is very current and of importance for all of us. It was also interesting to analyze and work with statements and facts straight from the horse's mouth. These different points of view and the big interest from German and Indian students made our project very remarkable. At the end we had established a presentation, but it was more important what we really learned by making this project: Mobility is a topic with so many points of contact with human lives. Before this project we had not thought that it is so important, especially for the youth. In their free time and in their nightlife mobility becomes a big deal.

Wolfsburg-Autostadt

After arriving in Wolfsburg we went for a visit of

the Autostadt from Volkswagen.
The Indian but also the German students were very impressed

by the factory and the whole infrastucture. 

 A picture of the group in the mainhall of the Autostadt.

Later we went in the museum.

                    The students had the chance to see many important cars in history like this Bugatti, which    is one of the most expensive cars in the world.

 Mr. Gupta posing next to the T2 from Volkswagen. Later on we visited the different buildings of Porsche, Audi  and co.

In the evening some German students organized a evening with playing games. Everybody enjoyed the great day.

Our visit in Bremen and the summer concert

We just arrived in Bremen at the Universum.

After that we inspected the University Bremen.

Afterwards we explored the city of Bremen on our own.

Then we met us in the Böttcherstraße, listend together to the Glockenspiel and subsequently we took part of a harbor cruise.

At our summer concert at our school, the Jade-Gymnasium, the Indians presented some Indian songs.

Praneta also presented a song on her own. Everyone was impressed.

The official welcome

The first visit of the Indians in our school, the Jade-Gymnasium.

Our principal, Mr. Mertins, hold a salutation speech.

In the afternoon we visited the city hall of Jade and met the mayor, Mr. Kaars, and our donor, Mr. Hoffmann.

The arrival

The airplane is landing with the Indian exchange students on board.

They flew about 10 hours from Delhi, India, over Istanbul, Turkey, to Hamburg, Germany.

The German students are welcoming the Indian students at the airport in Hamburg.

 They prepared some posters of the name of their school and greetings.

The Indian and German students are finally united.

Everyone is really excited.

 

#exchange