Jornada de Promoció i Valorització de Projectes Internacionals

Today I have been to Serveis Territorials in the "Jornada de Promoció i Valorització de Projectes Internacionals." (Conference on the promotion and assessment of International Projects) I had to do a "ponencia" or a speech about preparing a preparatory meeting. The Jornada took up the whole morning and I went with Anna.

When we saw the programme we were a little dismayed as I had to do my bit last. I had visions of everyone having gone by then and having to present my ponencia to an empty hall. In the end this was not the case.

The morning started with the presentation by Joana Vidal who explained the situation of PAP in Catalunya at the moment and also presented, ta da da daaaaaaaaa the PAP page which is finally available. This page, www.xtec.cat/pap has been a long time in the coming and finally has arrived. On it you can now find all the necessary information about PAP and the different projects that are being run, Gruntvig, Comenius, Da Vinvi etc. It has all those things that we spent weeks looking for and had to find on our own or through links on weird and wonderful pages within the EU system.

After her presentation there was the coffee break which for me was a bit of a waste of time as I hardly know anyone. Having only been in the state system for three years I don't have the enormous range of contacts and ex-colleagues that makes any of these conferences fun for the vast majority. Nearly everyone else had 8-10 people they knew and with whom they wanted to catch up.

Then there were the various presentations about Comenius Projects that had been run by primary schools. Of course for me this was not terribly interesting even though it was obvious that the schools involved had worked extremely hard and obtained some fantastic results from their projects. The only problem was that it was all a little uphill, a little long and involved, all of which made the whole thing a little slow and boring.

When my turn finally came Joana presented me and I got my powerpoint presentation going, only about five or six slides, and off I went.

When I looked out over the room I could see quite a few familiar faces, faces of people I have had in class at some point, that were all smiling at me and it occurred to me that these people were waiting for my presentation and anticipating that it would be funny or amusing. My style of teaching obviously leads people to think I will always be funny. I didn't really have an awful lot to say, what can you really say about the actual organisation of a preparatory meeting. The organisation side was comparatively easy. I mentioned making the virtual tour blog, reservations and things like that. The nuts and bolts of what I had to do. Then I spent more time giving people a feeling of the sort of problems we had to resolve, the conflicts that appeared, the surprises that there were. I won't go into all of that here but I will write about it in different entries in the future. I did make it amusing in places and I could feel how people were relaxing.

As part of what I mentioned had a lot to do with the enormous difficulties we had had to overcome in terms of just simply finding things out, what comenius was and what we had to do, finding partners for a project and a coordinator, when I had finished (and I got a few laughs which was good) Joana Vidal came up onto the stage and congratulated me and then picked up on some of the points I had made, reinforcing how things have improved now. All in all it went well and I made a good impression whilst keeping things light and interesting.