REPORT AND EVALUATION OF THE POLISH MEETING

                                        

Many roots, one tree.

Many people, one Europe

OSTROŁĘKA, POLAND

Teachers’ meeting, October, 6^th to 12^th 2011

NEW ITALIAN COORDINATOR:

• During the summer, the Italian coordinator Bruno Graziano Garelli had to give up the project after he was moved to a different school. All the teachers and the students involved in the project felt very sorry about this.
• The new Italian coordinator, Rita Tassone, was officially presented to all the participants, although most of the teachers had already met her during the Greek meeting.

DATES OF THE NEXT MEETINGS

• The schedule of our two next meetings had to be changed because of the different school calendars: The Turkish have a completely different holiday calendar; the Greek and the Romanian teams celebrate Easter holidays a week after the Italian, Polish and Spanish teams. What’s more, the Greek team is not allowed to travel after Easter holidays, so in the end we fixed the last meeting, to be held in Istanbul, between the 22^nd and 28^th of March.
• As a consequence of moving the Turkish meeting from May to the end of March, we were also forced to change the Italian meeting. We discussed the possibility of celebrating it between the end of January and the beginning of February; however, this option was not possible for the Polish and Turkish teams, who will be on holidays at the time. We eventually decided to bring forward the dates of the Italian meeting, which was agreed to take place between the 13^th and the 19^th of December.
• Rita, the Italian coordinator, asked all the partners to inform her about both the number and sex of all the students who will be participating in the Italian meeting, as well as the number of teachers, as soon as possible, since they have to look for accommodation for everybody and there is not too much time left.

STUDENTS’ FORUM

• We talked about the possibility of closing the students’ forum since they seldom visit it: as soon as they contact each other, they prefer to keep in touch through the social webs, which are not under the teachers’ control. However, Paloma reminded all the participants that we should keep on using the forum since this is what had been agreed to do in our application form, together with the blog for the teachers. She also reminded the need of keeping the forum open, at least to upload the different quizzes.
• We agreed that we need some volunteers for administrating the forum and making it more dynamic, because the only teacher who knew how it worked, Bruno Garelli, is no longer involved in the project.
• Rita suggested the name of Sasha Guidi, the Italian student that was the real administrator before the change of the Italian coordinator. He is abroad taking part in a Leonardo meeting, but, when he comes back to Pescara, Rita will ask him for help.

STUDENTS’ IMPRESSIONS.

• We should ask the students, who took part in the meeting to write about their impressions, send them to their coordinator and, after getting the corrected essay back, upload them on the students’ forum by themselves. This must be done as soon as possible (before November, 4^th). Later, each coordinator will upload these impressions on our webpage.

SUBJECTS FOR THIS SCHOOL YEAR

• During the Polish meeting all the partners showed a power point presentation with the headlines of their work for this school year. These are the subjects chosen by each country:

Greece: Greek Art

Italy: The influence of Latin in the languages of all the countries involved in the project

Poland: The comfort of urban life

Romania: Physics

Spain: Roman roads

Turkey: The city planning

• Paloma suggested that all the partners should upload a written draft including the headlines of their work on the blog, in order to avoid repetitions: sometimes the subjects dealt with are so closely related that the same topic may appear in different presentations.

OPENING THE QUIZ ON LINE

• We decided to publish the opening of our quiz-on-line both on the blog and on the forum during the second fortnight of October, after the coordinator has uploaded the report on the Polish meeting.
• As we did last year, each country will prepare a questionnaire about the subject they are going to work on by using hot potatoes application. This kind of application lets our students find the right solutions on their own as well as get a score, which will simplify our task.
• We agreed on dividing the quiz into two phases: Greece, Poland and Spain will upload their questionnaires before the 11^th of November, while Italy, Romania and Turkey will have to do it after Christmas.

TEACHERS’ BLOG

• Nicoleta, the Romanian coordinator, encouraged us to use the blog again, since we stopped writing on it during the summer holidays. She insisted that we shouldn’t let it die because it might be very useful for our national agencies to check what we are doing.
• We agreed on uploading all the data related to our meetings and on using it as a mean of communication, as we were doing during the last school year.
• We talked about the problem some of the coordinators had in order to enter the blog as contributors (a contributor can write not only comments but also posts, links, photos…). We did not manage to solve the problem in Poland, but Eleni has already solved it. Therefore, everybody can enter the blog, Paloma as the administrator and the other coordinators as contributors.

COMMENTS ABOUT THE STUDENTS’ PRESENTATIONS

We were reminded that the presentations must not last more than 20 minutes.

• The students should know what they are expected to do:
• They should not read the slide but try to present it.
• They should use simple language that everybody can follow.
• They ought to introduce the main ideas with a kind of presentation summary.
• The presentation should be well structured; each part of the presentation (even each slide) should have a title.
• The students should not put too much information on the slides, but they should explain the content: in this way, the audience will listen to the speaker rather than read the information directly from the slide.

REPORT OF THE POLISH MEETING

• Paloma promised the other partners to send them the official report and evaluation of the Polish meeting and to upload it on the blog after being approved by all of them.

EUROPEAN SHARED TREASURE

• Paloma reminded her partners that all the work done along the project must be uploaded on the European Shared Treasure. We can either start doing it now or later on, but we must have it finished by the end of the school year.

THE PROJECT ON E-TWINNING

• Nicoleta thought that it would be interesting and safer for us to upload our project on e-twinning and she tried to do it. However, since she forgot to tell Paloma that, being the coordinator, was the person to confirm it, Paloma did not know she had to give her approval.
• As all the partners considered Nicoleta’s idea interesting, Paloma and Nicoleta promised to arrange it and Paloma will do it as soon as she goes back to school in Padrón.

WEBPAGE:

• The Romanian team reminded us that we cannot use Internet Explorer either to upload material on the webpage or to see our work. Mozilla should be used instead.
• We were also told that we had to load the material on the appropriate folder (Project Documents, Photos and Videos…); otherwise, we would not be able to watch them.
• Paloma commented that, according to the project, we should upload all the material on our schools web pages. She added that the Spanish team had not done it yet, though, because their webpage had recently been changed and they didn’t know how it worked.
• Alexandra said that it would be enough to put the link to the webpage of our project on the webpage of each school.

MAGAZINE ON LINE

• It was agreed that we could give up the idea of publishing a magazine on line, since we already have enough means of making our work known.

POLISH WEEK

• Martha and Iwona promised to send us material to organize the Polish week in our schools.
• Alexandra commented that, because of infrastructure problems (as you surely remember, their school is very small and does not have facilities), the Greek team will organise all the weeks together at the end of the school year.

IWONA’S PRACTICAL COMMENTS

• Bus expenses: The Polish coordinator informed us about the price of the buses they had booked to take us from Warsaw to Ostrołęka and back.
• As for the certificates, Iwona told us that we would get not only a group certificate but also an individual certificate for each participant.