More official invitations

I have had to take the afternoon off classes today to run around and send more official invitations for the people who have to come to the week of meetings that will be from the 13th onwards. Stella Lantsia will be coming but only from the 16th, the Wednesday because she can't come sooner.

Nikos will be coming together with his colleague Georgia and it turns out that the Swedes will be three people Nina, Susanne but also Susanne's husband. Apparently he is coming with them to play golf!

Now it only remains for everybody to receive approval for the visits from their national agencies.

Another school drops out, but another joins

We have just heard from Dominika that now her friend in Malta, Tatjana, will have to drop out of the preparatory meeting and participating in the project altogether because now she has changed schools her new school doesn't want to start a project like this and she feels she is too new to do so on her own and in her old school they can't find anyone willing to take it over. This is a shame as, to be honest, I would have loved the chance to go to Malta!

It is swings and roundabouts however as in the same mail she has told me that we now have a new partner, Stella Lantsia from Cyprus. She is applying for the grant for the preparatory meeting so we hope to see her here with us not too far in the future.

Money and invitations

Dominika has just written to me forwarding to me a mail she has received from Nikos in Greece asking me to urgently send a written invitation to him in Greece, it appears that his agency will not accept the application unless they have a written invitation from our school. Nikos needs this by the 20th.

I have checked that an e-mail from me is not enough and that it is only an official school mail that will in fact suffice, then I had to explain to Tere (the school Secretary) what I needed and that she had to let me use the school's official e-mail. This in itself was not easy as she wasn't really sure how to get into it, apparently this is normally only Francesc's (our director) job. Finally I was able to write the mail and send it, I can only hope that it is in time for him to complete the application.

Until now I haven't really received any information about the partners we will have in the project but at least now I have seen that he is from Thessalonika, in the part of Greece that is Macedonia. I really would have been nice if Dominika could have sent out info about the rest of the partners to all of us but from what she tells me she is very busy with a Moroccan exchange at the moment.

He has included this image of the island of Nisyros.

Additionally I have spoken to Nuria Estrada about the visit and she has informed me that curiously the host school on the preparatory visits doesn't receive any money towards the visit. I had had ideas of using the money I thought I would receive to take the people on a couple of visits and for buying something for them. Now I will have to think again, I suppose the school will foot the bill for some things and I can always ask the local council and the parent's association for help in funding the visit.

Nesrin won't be coming

We have just heard that Nesrin Kacan from Turkey will not be attending the meeting, apparentlyher national agency (which being outside the EU does not receive any EU funding towards visits) won't pay for it, so obviously she can't come. Luckily they have said that she will be able to participate in the project so that is good.

I have sent her a message expressing what a shame it is that she won't be able to come.

Preparations for the 13th

Dominika has asked me to send her details of IES Roquetes, legal name and address, where the school is exactly so that people can include this in their applications for the grant for the preparatory meeting. I originally thought they would come over for only two or three days but now she has said she would like the meeting to last all week, the week of the 13th to the 19th. I have no problem with this if she feels it is necessary.

At the moment we have schools from Sweden, Greece, Germany, Poland and Spain (of course). We are also waiting on Malta, Cyprus and Turkey for school which should be able to attend the meeting as well.

She has told me that all the participating schools receive a standard grant of about 1000 euros that has to cover all costs during the visit. I have been asked to find out about hotels and flights and if there is somewhere we can use for meetings. Hotels and stuff I think I will include in the blog so that they can look at them at leisure, though I think it would be easier if everyone is in the same place. As to a place to meet the IES seems the logical place, I first thought of the library but that is too big and we won't be that many people (though if two come from each school I don't know) so perhaps just the foreign languages department itself.

I have sent the link to the blog on and am waiting to hear what they think.

Preparing for the preparatory meeting

As part of the work towards the preparatory meeting that will be held in January I have created a blog page that will act as a guide for the people who are thinking of attending the week of meetings here in Roquetes.

The Roquetes virtual tour is just a way for them to situate themselves as to where Roquetes is and what our school is like. This comes as a result of a few rather confused mails in which people expressed their doubts as to where Roquetes is and to which airport they had to fly. I have already sent detailed instructions but I do appreciate that it can all be really confusing and after all, no one is going to meet them at the airport. I have also done it out of concern that the problems we have been having with trains recently may well make their journey more than a little interesting.

There are maps and photos and even a couple of simple videos.

Information on our partners

Dominika has sent everyone some information on the partners we have, however it only goes as far as names and e- mail addresses, nothing else.

Our future partners are;

Nicos Economou - Greece - mailto:Greece-nikecono@yahoo.gr
Susanne Kallanvaara - Sweden - susanne.kallanvaara@gbgsd.se
Nesrin Kacan - Turkey - mailto:Kacan-Turkey-nesrinkacan@yahoo.com
Tatjana Chircop - Malta - tatjana@nextgen.net.mt

She has also forwarded the information I have sent out about hotels and things to everyone, it seems that not everyone has seen the blog with all the information.

I have sent a mail to say hello to everyone introducing myself and my school to them.

Offering to host the Prep visit

I have written to Dominika and offered to host the preparatory visit on the 13th of January. This I have checked with Mª Jose and she is in favour of us hosting it as, just as I thought, it gaurentees our participation in a project this academic year.

To facilitate this visit I have been preparing a blog in which I will put information about this area and where we are together with information about the school with photos and even perhaps video. I hope that this will be useful and give the people who will attend the meeting an idea of who we are. All of this I have commented on in a mail to Dominika, now I am waiting for her reply.

News from Poland

Today I have just received a mail from Dominika Owsiany in Poland. She is replying to my mail in which I said we wanted to be a part of the project she is organising.

In her mail she has said that she is delighted to have found a school in Spain to take part in her project. The idea of the project is for 15-19 year olds who will get to know their peers from other countries via certain activities that will include, CDs, posters etc. There will also be student exchanges involved and will probably centre on issues such as culture and stereotypes.

They had a preparatory visit organised for the 6 or 7th of January but that now she will have to postpone that as her friend in the partner school in Malta is changing schools and as a result will not be able to go ahead with the project. She has mentioned that it might be a good idea to have the preparatory meeting here in Spain, if I agree, but that either way we will have to hurry or if not we will not get the applications in in time to receive the grants for the trip. We will have to hurry all round anyway as apparently the completed application has a deadline of February 15th

I think that I will probably accept her idea and offer to host the preparatory meeting as this will be a good way to assure that the whole thing goes ahead and that we are included and reduce the possibilities of us not finding any project for this year.

She says she is waiting to hear from schools in Cyprus, Greece and Lithuania but that she already has some partners. Apparently she has already completed two Comenius projects in her school and has an exchange with a Dutch school that has been running for the last four years.

It would seem we have finally fallen on our feet and discovered someone competent with emperience who will act as a good coordinator.

Pandora's box

Our initial optimism at starting a comenius project was seriously dented when we started to see the volume of material that was out there on the web. Hundreds of projects that people have posted, thousands of documents about comenius. A seemingly endless list of institutions and EU departments that had something to do with it. It was daunting to say the least.

Our first meeting with Joan Serra at IES Joaquim Bau was a very positive and successful one if a little intimidating. He was very straight with us and immediately told us that a project meant an awful lot of work. Tons of paperwork and a long series of problems. We had already found a couple of pages where we had been looking for partners in a potential project and we had soon seen that what everybody was after was a project that someone else would coordinate and that was already up and running. Having sent a couple of hundred e-mails and having received only a few replies we were toying with the idea of coordinating a project ourselves. Joan's reaction was immediate, "don't even think of doing it," he said. It is too much paperwork for people who have not seen a project before. He explained to us that in his first contact with Comenius he had just participated in a project that was coming to an end, his school hadn't actually been involved but they had been invited by an English school to participate in a teacher's visit as observers. Then in the first official project in which they participated, along with their tame English school, they had just been partners while the English school had coordinated and it was only in that moment that they had actually taken the plunge and started their latest project as coordinators. He was very definite about the problems we would face if we wanted to coordinate a project and we left his school resolved to resume our search for a project that already had a coordinator.

I soon decided to create a new e-mail address, comeniusiesroquetes@hotmail.com, precisely for the purpose of mailing potential project partners. I was taking the addresses of people with project off the page we had found and mailing an average of fifty or more mails a week. I received replies to about 40% of the mails I sent. Over the next few weeks I actually got quite friendly with some of the people I was exchanging mails with.

Then we had the meeting we had arranged with Núria Estrada. Anna couldn't attend the meeting so I went alone. We talked over what we had discovered up to that point and how we were finding all the material. She kindly steered me in the right direction and gave me a few pointers as to where I should be looking for things that turned out to be very helpful. Curiously enough she also said that she saw no reason why we shouldn't coordinate our own project if we wanted to and that it shouldn't have been a lot of work really. That did make me puzzled in light of what Joan had said, of course now I know why but then it was strange.

Why don't we do a comenius project?

A long time ago, a little more than two years ago now, we were running a departmental meeting when the question came up, "why don't we do a comenius project?" The general reaction was one of yeah great, why not, that's a good idea, though I have to confess my real reaction was, "what on earth is a comenius project?"

On asking the question the basics were quickly explained and immediately I volunteered to have a go along with Elsa and Anna (I think). Time passed and as often happens nothing came of it. The next course, 2006/2007, the same thing was suggested, "hey what about that idea of doing a comenius project...?" Once again we said yes of course, let's do it and nothing happened.

At the start of this year you will never guess, yes that old chestnut of, "why don't we..." Only this time when it came up I spoke up and said that this time I really wanted to do it. I had heard of the project that Joan Serra had run at the IES Joaquim Bau and whilst I knew relatively little about what it was and what it would involve I wanted to do it this time, this year yes! Anna Llosa agreed with me and we decided we would do it between us. The rest of the department thought that would be great... and it was left at that. Initially.

Then, however, we actually started to do something about it. I was determined, as was Anna, that this year we would not just forget about it. We talked to our acting head of school, Mª Jose Montserrat, and she gave us the name of Núria Estrada at Serveis Territorials as the person responsible for these projects and also said we should talk to Joan Serra. We arranged to see Joan, easy as he is an ex-student of mine, and then also Núria. At the same time we started to roam around the internet in search of information about comenius projects.

Around that time we should have heard the sound, what sound? It was the creaking of the lid of Pandora's box!