Things get underway, we got max points!

Today I have received the first mail from our coordinator that is really to do with the project itself proper.

Dominika has sent all of us a reminder about the meeting that is planned in Poland this November. She has asked us all to think about dates for the week long meeting and will send us details of hotels as soon as possible. She has asked that we all arrive and leave on the same day together so that her task of meeting us at the airport and arranging transport will be that much easier. When I organised the preparatory meeting I didn't arrange to meet anyone at the airport! The meeting is in her town of Czechowice-Dziedzice. We have to fly to Katowice so I can get my skates on looking for flights right now.

Apparently in our application we received the maximum points possible for an application, the full 100 points. That can only be a good sign and proof that we did our job during the week of the prep meeting.



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What now?

Now what I have to do is some preparation for the start of term.

The project has to be presented to the students of 1r Batx to find out who is interested in taking part. This means that I will prepare a powerpoint presentation with an explanation of what a Comenius project is, what it could mean for them and what they would have to do if they wanted to take part in it.

I will also have to prepare some sort of evaluatory process in case we get too many people wanting to take part in it. Considering that we only have to trips abroad with students and theoretically I will be limited to 8-10 students on each I can't realistically have a group much larger than 20.

Then I have to go over the contents of our new textbook for 1r Batx and marry up its contents with what we want to do in the project as my class in 1r will be made up of all the Comenius students and we will have to follow the syllabus and carry out the work of the project at the same time.

Work but I am actually looking forward to it, it should be fun.

Success confirmed, more or less

Life is weird sometimes, here I have been mentally wringing my hands awaiting the outcome of the Comenius selection process, Dominika tells me that we have all been passed but still I have to wait as our agency is closed in August (of course). Then I run into Mª Jose in the supermarket this afternoon and tell her that our coordinator thinks we have all been approved and she off handedly replies that at the end of July she spoke to Nuria Estrada and was told that we had been approved then!

Apart from feeling a bit knocked back I suppose that at least it is some sort of confirmation. Mª Jose did also add that Nuria said that we were lacking some of the documentation that our coordinator had to supply.

This I will check out with Dominika when I can.

A hint of future success?

I ran into Dominika on Facebook last night and she was able to send me the link to a page from her national agency in which our project figured as one of those that has been passed. In truth, as she pointed out, of the 800 or so projects that had been presented only a handful failed, so this is not perhaps the best guide as to how well we are doing.

She also told me that someone at her agency has said that we won't find anything out until at least the end of July, this is in a way what I suspected, we won't find out till it is just late enough not to be able to do anything in the way of preparations. Ah well, c'est la vie.

In the end I will end up doing all the presentation work on my own over August and then springing it on Francesc at the beginning of the school year in September, at least he won't have time to argue.

I have to remember to take all the details of the project home with me so I will have it all to work on.

Not quite the end of our coordinator

Yesterday I was able to chat to Dominika via the Facebook chat facility that they have introduced. She has told me that whilst she is determined to change schools at least, if not give up teaching altogether, this won't be for at least a year. It seems that she has been in the same school for the last ten years and wants a change. However at the moment she has a group that she likes a lot and wants to take them through to the end of their time at least.

When I asked her about the project and what would happen to it, if there is someone else in the school who would run it, she said that if we get the project she would probably stay in the school the next two years to see the project through to the end. This is a relief as we now don't have to look for a new coordinator although perhaps it is a lost opportunity as the responsibility would have come to me and perhaps it would have been a good chance to get some experience in directing a project such as this. Still it is early days and there is a lot of time ahead in which I can run my own project.

The really good thing is that we won't have to look for a new place for the first project visit.

Ups and downs

Here I think is the perfect example of what can happen in a Comenius project. My project coordinator, Dominika, from Poland has just sent me a mail in which she has told me that she is looking for another job, and not just a different school but also perhaps in a different field, project management or as a flight attendant.


What that means at this point for our project I really can't say. I presume that there is another person in her school who would take over the project from her, although I don't know. If that is not the case who takes over the role of coordinator? In addition what will happen to the visit that was planned for Poland? On the papers of the application my school was put as one of the schools that would take over the role of coordinator, I can't however remember if it was only us or another school as well.

It is just another good example of the ups and downs of these types of projects.

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.