The Meraka Institute from South Africa organized an annual international educational conference from the 18-20 April 2007 at the CSIR Conference Centre in Pretoria. The ‘Innovate Conference’ was attended mainly by teachers and education specialists. The main focus of the conference was to highlight innovative teaching practices both from the educators and learners perspective.  

Parallel to the conference, the GTP was invited to hold an online discussion from April 6th to 20th to capture the diverse perspectives of the GTP coordinators, teachers and students from all over the world combined with the Innovate Conference participants’ opinions. The discussion was hosted on the DGroups platform and facilitated by Poncelet Ileleji from GTP The Gambia and Justin Mupinda from GTP Zimbabwe.  

“It was a wonderful project and a unique experience and I am very happy I could participate in it. The project gave us the opportunity to explore the culture of another country and to meet new friends. The Romanian group was great as they all were very kind and nice people not only to have fun with, but also to learn from. We are still in touch exchanging e-mails and maybe we will be friends forever.   I liked all the activities because they were very varied and really interesting. It was so exciting to learn about Romania and about the Hungarian language and culture. I cannot think of any negative moments, but even if there were some, I know it was my fault and I tried to correct it. Now I know that I can communicate in English (we spoke English even with our team members) and I want to know it better, so next year I will study harder. I hope I will take part in other projects like this in the future again. Thank you for this unforgettable week!”