This week we have a post by Luzan Mattar, a teacher at Beach Elementary Co-ed (C) UNRWA school, Beach Camp, Gaza who has been coordinating HUP sessions in her school for a long time now. Luzan is very interested in using drama activities and her students performed one of my favourite plays in last years's competition - 'I will wait till they open the gate' .

As two English teachers , we like the idea of connecting our students together to help them improve their English language and make new friends at the same time. We believe that using zoom sessions on the internet can be the best way to do that. Our students can hear, see and interact with each other easily and effectively. Therefore, we decided to write our reflections of this wonderful experience from our different points of view. By Erica Napoli (in Milan) ....

For about a year now Manal and Rinan, two English teachers at Beit Hanoun Prep School have been doing weekly online sessions with Julietta Schoenmann, a HUP volunteer based in the UK. Here's their account of a session they conducted which involved parents and children working together.

Last year, thanks to generous support from the Eddie Byers fund, Greenall Florent Books, Wendy Arnold and Walter King, I was able to go to Palestine on several occasions and run some short courses for UNRWA and Ministry of Education teachers on establishing and running English drama clubs in Palestinian schools.

My talks in 2017 and 2108 at the annual IATEFL conference in the UK included live remote plays performed through Zoom by children in Palestine. This year we did something different.

At the IATEFL conference in Brighton last week, and again at the Hands Up Project conference at Westminster University which immediately followed it, Rida Thabet and I gave a talk about the special type of drama that The Hands Up Project is enabling Palestinian and Syrian children to perform through Zoom to audiences around the world. We have termed this form of drama Remote Theatre.

One of the things that I find most moving about the work of the Hands Up Project is the relationship that develops between the remote teacher and the classroom teacher. Alex Guzik in Russia and Sahar Salha in Gaza have been working together for well over two years now, planning online sessions together, feeding back to each other after the online session has taken place - even negotiating together what will happen next while the session is going on.

In many language classrooms around the world teachers generally ask a lot of questions to students. They do this as a way to generate chat and discussion, as in 'Did you have a nice trip?' or 'What do you think Jbene should do now?', but they also do it to test the knowledge of the students, as in "What's the past of go? ' and 'How do we say سمك in English?'Recently, in my online sessions with groups of kids in Palestine, I've been experimenting with a technique that encourages the learners to ask the questions.

We are excited to inform you that Saturday the 14th April will be the Hands Up Project conference at Westminster University in Central London. As you'll see below there is a fantastic line up of speakers and the climax will be a live performance by the winners of our playmaking competition - 'Inner Thoughts' from Khan Younis, Gaza.

The Hands Up Project isn't really very good at 'teaching' language. After three years of running this project, I've come to the conclusion that with all the power cuts, the often weak internet connection and the lack of physical presence, working online like this is actually quite an ineffective way of teaching anybody anything at all.

There is something very beautiful that's been going on between Brazil and Palestine.It all started last summer when I was sponsored by Cambridge University Press to go to Brazil to do a series of talks all over the country. I was talking about the use of images in language learning and, since images are such an integral part in the way we work, I mentioned the Hands Up Project a lot. The talks went down well but the Hands Up Project went down even better!