School Across Borders

We have finished our project with Schools Across Borders last week with our presentation in the Red cow hotel.Despite some technical difficulties it all went well and we even came back with a certificate which appreciated how much we concentrated on Millennium Development Goal 3.
We are delighted with how successful our NGO has been.
Please keep reading our different blogs!

Feedback from Romania

As you can see from our previous blog we skyped Romanian students. We really enjoyed ourselves and hope we can do it again sometime. Here is some feedback from them:

Petra 

Even though we met some technical problems at first, we were soon able to communicate properly. We were very happy to meet such wonderful children. They are respectful, cheerful and intelligent girls. We were also surprised to find out that one girl's parents are working in Bucharest. We were able to find out interesting facts about Ireland and we can.t wait to talk to them again! (E bine? :-ss)

Mihaela

Despite any difficulty that we have encountered in establishing the Skype session, it was a delight. The girls were cheerful and they seemed really excited, just like us, so it was a pleasure to meet them. We found out a lot of interesting facts about their school and their lifestyle. I hope that we will be able to talk again soon and find out even more about them.

Oana

For me, it really was a wonderful experience to meet such joyful, friendly and also beautiful girls and I doubtlessly hope that we will repeat this kind of activity! Besides sharing interesting facts about our lifestyle, our hobbies and our school, we also had a lot of fun and it was a pleasure to talk to them. They really seemed interested in what we were telling them and I think that this is a great opportunity for us to find out new things and also to make some new friends and develop our language skills. It was a win-win activity. I'm looking forward to the next Skype session.

Erwin

Despite having some technical problems at the beginning, I consider that it has been an interesting exchange of ideas. We found out a lot of things about them and their educational system. It was a pleasure to meet such nice teenagers and I hope we will get in touch as soon as possible. Thank you !

Alina

The Skype session was an amazing experience, despite the technical problems we encountered.Putting this part aside, it was an inspiring experience to meet and to communicate with such cheerful and respectful girls. I hope we were able to respond to all their question and that they found our session interesting.I, for one, I am looking forward to our next meeting (hope it will be very soon).

Ramona

Well, I think that every opportunity if using the English we have acquired already is extremely useful. It was my first encounter with such a school, only for girls, and I was anxious to see what it looks like. I was impressed, the girls were nice and communicative, so I would like to talk to them more and more…pity they are so far away…

Simon

The Skype session we were part of showed me that there is always something new over there, across distances, across borders, and that we must do our best to keep in touch, to socialize with the people out there more…I liked the idea and I think seeing while speaking is great.

Andrei

I had the chance of seeing some wonderful girls there and that turned into a very useful conversation, even if it was more of a written one…joking…I like to meet people from wherever they are…and this was a great chance for me, for all of us

Cosmin 

It was a nice experience in which we had fun and learned some things too. Even if we had some technical problems we managed to have a nice conversation thanks to the wonderful people that we had to 'deal with'. I hope we will be in touch soon to talk more. See you soon!..on Skype of course.
PS: sorry for the language but this feedback thing caught me off guard 

              For more pictures go to our pictures page which you can see above

Back to Business

So we're back after a lovely two week Easter break of sleeping, eating and relaxing and we are ready to get back to business!

This week we are very busy preparing our presentation for 'Schools Across Borders' on Thursday the 8th May next week about all we have done on raising awareness for education of girls around the world. We continue to work on the letters to our TD's on these issues as well as creating a brochure for our NGO.

We are still in need of help from everyone to continue raising awareness about girls and education, so please share this blog, comment on our posts or even just enjoy reading them!

We are also involved in a online petition which asks for equality for girls and help to do so from our ministers.

'The World' Petition  (please sign and support)

Plan Ireland Talk

Yesterday, Mary Hanlon from Plan Ireland came in to talk to us about development education and about her work with Plan Ireland. At first, we split into groups and read about a competition that was being held in Sierre Leone. The competition offered a university scholarship to those who kept their virginity until the age of twenty-one. We spent some time debating both the advantages and the disadvantages of this offer.
We then watched a movie called 13, and A Bride, this showed a girl who was only thirteen as was already up for marriage as well as showing other younger being pregnant and suffering from fistula (a hole in the bladder).
This talk was really informative and again spurred us on to keep on our quest for equal rights for girls.
(Pictures of this talk are on our photos page so take a look!)

What Are We Doing Now?

So we are now a month away from our big presentation for School Across Borders and we are getting ready to present  our NGO to the other schools involved in the programme but that's not all we are doing. Recently our class split up into 4 groups and each group was given a task.
The four tasks were:

• Writing letters to our local TD
• Making brochures to send around the area and for our Schools Across Borders presentation
• Making a video response to students in Malawi as a part of the Trócaire Lenten campaign  http://www.trocaire.org/education/lent2014/post-primary (This is Trócaire's video)
• Making a "Walk to School" video 

All of these things will be blogged about soon so keep an eye on our blog!

Our Logo

This is our new logo for our NGO which was designed by students in the class.

The meaning behind the logo is as follows, the shamrock signifies Ireland and where we're from, we then included the world within the shamrock and the girls gathered around as well as the hands to show everyone uniting together around the world.

We also included the name of our NGO (Cailíní Saor) which is the Irish for 'Free Girls'.

Skyping Romania!

On Tuesday the 25th of March at 12 o'clock following a few emails and after deciding a time that works for us all, we as a class skyped with a group of Romanian students who were of similar age to us. We did this to see cultural differences and ask them different questions about their school, their town and their lives. We found it very interesting to hear about their everyday lives and everyone in the class enjoyed it, despite a few sound difficulties at the start and through out.
We hope we will have a chance to get to do it again sometime as it is very worth while and we feel as though it benefited all.
To see more photos like this click on our 'Photos' page :)
Here is what everyone thought of the skyping session

Ms.  Bennett: The skyping session with the Romanian students was a fantastic opportunity for our students to learn about education in another country. It was a privilege to be part of the project and to observe how the discussion on the differences in education unfolded between my class Cornaro and the Romanian students.
Shauna: I found it was a great way to learn about schools in Romania.
Laura: I felt it was a fun way to see how other people around the world live.
Lauren: It was interesting to find out how there school was very similar to the ones in Ireland.
Aoife: I really enjoyed our chat with the students in Romania. It made me appreciate how lucky we are to have the access to the technology that allows us to do this.
Amy: This was a great opportunity for us as a class to learn more about how other schools work compared to ours. It was lovely to meet new people from different countries around the world.
Ailbhe: I thought it was cool how we had a chance to talk to people we would never have had a chance to talk to unless we did Schools Across Borders.
Katie: I think that talking to the Romanian students was a great opportunity for all of the girls in our class. I am glad that we are taking part in the Schools Across Borders project because if we hadn't, we would never have gotten to learn so much about students in different countries.
Niamh: I want to do it again as I feel like we learned a lot about the difference between our own school and the school in Romania.I think this would be a great thing for all schools to do.
Jessica: I thought that the skype session with the students in Romania was a great experience. I liked learning about their school lives and about the people who were skyping us as well.
Deborah: I really enjoyed talking to the Romanian students, it was a great way to get to know them and knowing what year they're in and knowing what their hobbies are and what careers they have in mind, I'm hoping that we do something like this again, it was great!