Friday 13 November 2015

Farewell

As the last day of the project arrived, participants were ready to go home. We hope they enjoyed their stay with us and learned many new things. Maybe one day we can meet again and share new experiences again. It was a great adventure, and we are happy we managed to organise it. 

Spanish organisation Idea wrote a blog about their experience in Plymouth. If you are interested you can read it here, to see how they liked the Plymouth and what they learned. We also want to share picture from international evenings. No Youth Exchange is complete without International evenings, where participants make a presentation about their, country prepare some activities and sometimes even cook their national food.










Day 8 - Practice

Putting knowledge into practice is one of the most important things ever. Talking about them is fine, but at the end it was great to make sure we learned something. So today, we asked our participants to show us how to create engaging and interesting profile, social page or professional profile.

As you know, the project focus is Social Media, we used different social media to disseminate the results of the project. We wanted to summarize all the concepts, skills and knowledge that we have learnt during the project and use it. For example, how easy is to create and promote a new profile in the social media. We divided the participants into groups and each group was responsible to create a new profile in one social media (Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) and posted all the photos that we took during the activities of the project. You can find one of them here on Facebook. You can also find more photos and follow us on Instagram.



Day 7 - Globalisation

Today all of us organised a trip to Mount Edgecombe. All work and no play makes a dull youth exchange. And because we want our participants to smile and explore as much as about Devon and Cornwall as possible. 

The participants took a ferry from Royal William Yard, went to Cornwall just across the sea front to reach Mount Edgcumbe. The old house and Country Park is situated in the parish of Maker on the Rame Peninsula, overlooking Plymouth Sound; its main entrance is in the village of Cremyll. The participants had time to explore the house, that was the principal seat of the Edgcumbe family since Tudor times.






Day 6 - Using social media for business

We decided to write down everything we know about social media, their rules and uses, to see the best way how can they be used for business. On the real examples we explored how these businesses manage to attract attention. 

The most popular websites are still these: LinkedIn for establishing and managing professional business connections, Facebook for making pages for your company that can be used as an easy marketing tool to reach wider audience and Twitter for quick and easy to read updates about your work. We also explored how to create and manage blogs, or learned more about picture and content sharing websites, such as: Tumbr, Instagram or Flikr. Did you know you can use Twitter hashtags to create an alert for people who are tweeting about things related to your business? This one is just one of the many things we talked about during the session. 

Later that day we discussed our English skills. The world these days is multi-bilingual, especially for professional business communication. We talked about most used words in language, about what is proper business language and its importance. 




Wednesday 11 November 2015

Day 5 - Searching for job continues

As searching for Jobs is important to many young people in Europe, we decided to expand on this issue with presentation from Spanish participants. The main topic of discussion was to focus on Exploring job market and recruitment strategies.

We talked about using EURES Network as a tool for look for a job in other European Member State. We check all the possibilities offered by EURES in terms of job offers, countries, education level, and contract type. In short, EURES is (European Employment Services) is a cooperation network formed by public employment services. Trade unions and employers' organisations also participate as partners. The objective of the EURES network is to facilitate the free movement of workers within the European Economic Area. We wanted to show participant how existence of a real European Job Market with real job offers that can be used by all the participants. We were comparing different job offers that can be found in the Eures Network, we also had a debate about using Europass CV for looking for a job in Europe.


This activity was organised by Spanish group, from IDEA - Agency of Local Development of Alzira. It depends on Department of Economic Promotion, Employment and Commerce of the City Council and works towards the improvement of the economic situation of Alzira, focused on young people affected by consequences of financial crisis. We are happy that they prepared this presentations for us, as they have practical knowledge about hos is it looking for work when you are young. You can learn more about them here.

Tuesday 10 November 2015

Day 4 - Using platforms

Today we decided to focus on exploring different platforms and media. Hungarian group prepared presentation about different media platforms. Later, the Spanish group led by José from City council of Alzira (where he works for the public job centre) made a presentation about Positive aspects of using media. 

Their main idea was to increase the knowledge and use of all the platforms, websites and social media. Participants were asked to perform a situation/make theatre and then act it out in front of the public. They were divided into groups. First, they had to figure out a futuristic communication tool, then they got a situation that they had to perform with their communication tool. 




We also focused on the Internet Job hunt. With the participants split into the groups, they analysed the different characteristic of the platforms focused on job offers and professionals profiles. Finding a job these days is proving out to be a big problem for young generation. However, internet can help us, but it is only useful for us, if we know how to use its full potential.  During the presentation, José highlighted the importance of social media. There are many resources that can be useful when we are looking for a job and we don’t use them because we don’t know how to do it. You can use LinkedIn, create a profile at About me, or include a link to your blog, or to other social media pages or groups you managed. It’s also very good to know which specialised website can help you to search for jobs, or teach you how to improve your CV. The session ended up with a group discussion, where we had a debate about the advantages and disadvantages of using the services of social.


After break, their session continued with Managing personal data and digital security. The main idea was to learn how to be aware about how much personal information we share on the social networks for free. Asking these questions: Did you put your name in Google? Are you aware about the results of putting your name in Google? Do you think that these results have a positive or negative impact in your professional profile? All participants had to Google names of other participants and show to the group the information that they found in internet for free. Participants put their names into hat and each group received names they put into Google search. Some were completely hidden, some participant willingly share their life online. It was also important to highlight who uses internet to market their work, or who only does it for fun.We need to check the privacy policy of the most used and famous social network like (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin or Google) and control all the tools that they offer to keep our personal information as a private information.

Day 3 - Introducing Erasmus programme

It’s time to introduce Erasmus+ and YouthPass to everyone participating in the project. Erasmus+, for those who were here for the first time, represents European Union programme for education, training, youth and sport. 

Part of their work is organising international youth exchanges and supporting learning across European (or European friendly) countries. For some participants this was the first time they participated in youth exchange, so at first we wanted to explain why and who is helping us to organise the event. 



Later, in the afternoon, we tried to answer these questions: What is social media? How to use it properly? How to work with the positive and the negative part to it? Participants had brainstorming session on groups, trust games. For the practical games, in rotation, every member of the group tried to prepare something for the project, related to the question we asked at the beginning. From workshop, food, music, videos to acting, public speaking and singing. It was a great opportunity to learn more while communicating with colourful people from different part of the world.