Yesterday was a busy day (as they all seem to be on trips like this) – however only the last few hours of the day were conference related!!

I got up in the morning to look out at the fantastic view from my room. I am on the 20th floor of the 22 storey building and have a fabulous view right up the beach. By 9am it was already 29 degrees and it got progressively hotter as the day went on! After breakfast I ventured to the pool where the deck fans out over the sea – it is very much a scene from the Love Boat – pool in the middle and deck chairs along each side – bar in the corner (Just expecting Isaac Washington to pour the aqua!). 3/4 of an hour there was enough – and by last night I had a nice ‘glow’ on!!

When I decided I had had enough sun I thought I’d catch the hotel bus to Salvador mall. While waiting on the bus I met two lovely teachers from the UK – Jane (who is actually a judge) and Mandy who is also in the Teacher’s Forum. We had already waited for 30 minutes for the bus, so the 3 of us got a taxi to the mall. The mall itself was recommended by the Hotel staff, however was very ‘westernised’ and terribly expensive. A pair of jandals would have been NZ$60. We wandered for quite sometime, and then decided to catch a taxi back to the beach and walk down the beach to our hotel. We did this, however were ‘chased off the beach’ by some guy – and we still don’t know what he was saying to us!!! We walked alongside the beach for a while, and decided to have another go – however when we looked down at the sand, although it was looking beautiful, it was full of bottletops, glass and god knows what else – so we continued our ‘beach walk’ alongside the beach. We found a little ’safe looking’ place to have our late lunch and ordered what we thought were toasted cheese sandwiches (Surely that couldn’t be ‘unsafe’ food!!) – however what we got was a huge chunk of toasted cheese!!! My Portuguese phrasebook didn’t get that one right!!! So we had a bit of a laugh and headed back to the hotel. On the way we stopped at a pharmacy to buy some water. Obviously it is wise to avoid the tap water, however unlike in KL where our room was full of bottles of water – the only water at this hotel costs 5 Real (about $4.50) for 200ml!!! At the pharmacy I was able to purchase 3 1.5L bottles for 7.5 Real (about $6) – so a bargain!! The UK contingent are really neat and it turns out that Ollie from Scotland flatted with a guy from Dunedin for 3 years!! He was very excited to think I came from somewhere near there!
Late this afternoon the conference started proper with a school’s display of innovative ideas and programmes – what a diverse group of presentations. It is really interesting to interpret what each school views as innovative, with some of the presentations from some of the most developed countries being years behind where NZ is. I think it speaks volumes for our NZ curriculum and the ability that our NZ teachers have in interpreting the curriculum and then just using the ICTs as a vehicle for letting the learning happen. I got the feeling that some of the schools had been handed technology or shown a programme and told that they had to make it work. What was also really bizarre is that most of these presentations had taken a good part of the afternoon to set up, were available for us to view for two hours – and then pulled down so that we (those on the Teacher’s Forum) can put our presentations up for the rest of the week!!

At these school presentations we were bombarded with gifts – I have (amongst other things) acquired pins from schools in Scotland and Malta (amongst others), as well as bag tags from Japan, Keyrings from Scotland, pens from places around the world, a cap and a travel mug from a girls school – somewhere that I can’t read the name of, a small paperweight from somewhere called Baku, and two stuffed koalas.

After that there was the official conference opening and we were entertained by some fabulous Brazilian acrobats, singers and drummers. The drummers were incredible and had everyone in the courtyard moving to their beat! The acrobats were doing things with their bodies that didn’t look physically possible – and the wee guy who would have been about 7 was unbelieveable!

I put up my presentation up last night and am a bit disappointed as we were told we would have a table to put some things on – it turns out to be a cupboard – half the height of the poster!!! So all of my ‘meaty’ stuff almost seems hidden. I’ve moved it forward and I’ve managed to dress it up with a NZ flag and my pamphlets and goodie bags, so hopefully the message still gets through! Sometime tomorrow afternoon we are being judged. There are three keynotes in the morning – the first being in Portuguese (I’m not that fast with my phrasebook, so I’m hoping there is an interpreter or subtitles maybe!!!), followed by a workshop, and then the judging.

The Aussie contingent have taken me under their wing tonight and I am joining them for dinner tomorrow night. Thank goodness they did, as I expected this to be like Chch and KL and all the ‘bits’ for attaching the poster to the board to be supplied -but NO they weren’t. Luckily Jane (the wonderful Aussie Microsoft rep) came to my rescue with rolls of double sided tape! How is that for building Trans-Tasman relations?? One of the Aussie team did mention something about the Bledisloe Cup AND double sided tape going to NZ in one week being a bit generous!!