Happy Holidays

It's that time of the year again when many of us take leave and enjoy a well deserved break. From the Leave Applications that we have received in the office, I know people are off to Thailand, Japan, Australia, UK and some of you are taking the opportunity to explore some interesting places within Malaysia itself. I wish you all the best and trust that you all come back safe and sound and suitably refreshed.

You will be receiving hard copies of the 'PROjects UpDates' soon along with the latest pay slips. We did e-mail it last time, but as many of you have problems with downloading and printing, and we have a nice new photocopier/printer in the office now, we can do hard copies for you. Please share it with your colleagues as it has lots of interesting reading in it about what we are doing. If you need a soft copy, please e-mail Jan and she can send it to you in pdf or Publisher format.

Several of our people are presenting, or are participants, at the 5th Asia TEFL/MELTA conference being held at the PWTC in KL this year, June 8th - 10th. So I would like to wish them well and hope that they have a fruitful time. CfBT also has a stand at the parallel 1st MILE (Malaysian International Language Exhibition) so might see you there.

We are also pretty busy in the office at the moment with preparations for the Annual MoE/CfBT conference to be held from 2nd - 4th July. It was originally planned for Port Dickson but I was informed yesterday by CDC that they have decided to make it The Legacy Hotel in Melaka now. Apparently the resorts in Port Dickson just aren't big enough for all of us! Looking forward to seeing you all there and having a fun time. E-mails and letters to your school/office will appear in due course.

I don't know if you've been following the Malaysian news of late, but there have been several articles about education in Malaysia, not the least of which was one about pay rises. Another really interesting article was about a two-day International Seminar on Teacher Education held at Seri Kembangan recently. At the end of the seminar the teachers said that they want "...teachers' training to be redefined and redesigned." One of the teachers who attended had this to say, "A lot of us have been talking about bringing back the art of teaching, the creative side of it, so we can make our classrooms livelier." I would say that this what all of us in the project have been trying to do. If you would like to read the full article, click here: 'Teachers want training...' . Today's editorial also makes interesting reading as it talks about teachers' working hours and how much work they have to do. Again, you can read the full article here: 'Stayingin class'.

As many of us from the office will be attending a conference in the UK in June, and taking a few days leave, I may not have the chance to post on the blog for a few weeks. So we'll see you in Melaka early July. Take care!