An Erasmus+ Course for teachers attended by Philipp Moravi
Diary entry 24th April 2023
Today the course started for me at 09:00 am at the Center Hotels Plaza meeting room. Because so many people signed up for that course, I think all together we are 49 people, we were split into two groups to provide a better learning experience for every one of us. Manuel from Alicante, who is the teacher and the responsible person of my group, introduced himself to us. He works as a teacher in Spain but is also a technical engineer who has worked for many companies involved in energy gaining and smart energy using processes. Looks like that makes him a perfect teacher for the topics "sustainability" and "climate change". After a short overview about the contents of the course, everyone had to get to know their colleagues, introduce the city where they come from and of course the school they work at to the other participants of the course. Most of the people in my group are from Spain or Greece, some are from Germany and only one is from Italy. I am the only one from Austria.
After the presentations we had a little coffee break and started with the first class of the course. We got some basic information about climate and weather and of course what's the big difference between each other. We heard about global warming and the carbon-dioxide-circle. But the focus of that class was to bring the fact to us, that the greenhouse effect isn't a bad thing. After going deep into the topic of the greenhouse effect we got a little questionnaire to fill out to find out how environmentally friendly our lives are. That was quite interesting because I didn't expect my life to be that friendly to the environment as it came out that it is. At the end of class, we learned about the ecological footprint and had to check how big ours is. For that we used the website https://www.footprintcalculator.org.At 02:00 pm the class ended for us and we had some time to enjoy the sun. At 06:00 pm a guided city tour was offered for those who were interested to see some historically interesting places and get some information about Reykjavík. I joined that free tour that was unfortunately very short but even though interesting.
At night I tried to see some northern lights because the forecast was good for it ... but I wasn't lucky and didn't see any until 02:00 am. That was the time I decided to end my first day of the course.