Recently in Humanities we began a unit all about World War 1. Before we could get into the actual events of the war we looked at how it began.

First we looked at Canada’s position before the war by doing a group keynote. Everyone was divided into different groups and we had to create a keynote on a specific aspect of Canada during the Laurier era. My group was tasked with presenting about the economic during that time period. We focused on the influx of immagrats, natural resource development and civil labour.

After doing that we looked looked at the situation Europe by watching a series of three videos that focused on the key events and political feelings of the various countries involved.

Then we were all told to read through an IBook that described four historians different ideas on how the war started.

After reading the book we had to come up with our own idea on how the war started. Of course we had to put it into a blog post with a key visual to support it. We could create the visual with a group so since I was with Sydney and Claire in my IBook reading group we all decided to just stay in a group together. We made one visual and then we were all told to redo our visuals and that it was a competition on top of that. I stayed with Claire and Sydney and we decided to make a podcast/YouTube style video bringing in people from both sides of the Naval arms race and describe how that was the key thing that lead to tensions an later the war.

Here is the first visual;

And here is the second visual;

My thesis is: Everybody was to blame for the war. Technology was the main factor, everyone was fighting to be the best country and because of some tech races between the different countries tensions were high and lead to war.

During the years leading up to war many different countries were building up there technology and trying to get on top. One great example of this is the British/German Naval arms race. British had the strongest navy in Europe mostly because they wanted to defend their trade routes, without them they would not be able to survive.

Germany wanted to be the best country in Europe. They were the cultural hub of Europe and their economy was doing quite well. The only other front was military. Their main focus for this was their Navy. They spent one third of their military budget designing and building a formidable navy, one to challenge Britain.

Britian was very unhappy about this and decided to further their navy technology as well, to stay on top. This lead to the creation of the dreadnought and overall better ships.

Germany did a pretty good job of trying to create a solid navy but Britain could not be outmatched. When Germany decided to end the arms race and turn their attention to other things, most of their boats sat around and did absolutely nothing. It was a complete waste of money and resources.

Other events did lead to the war as well but I believe that this arms race and the other tech races was the cause of lots of tension between the two alliances and other countries and thus the main factor.

After making this post and showcaseing our first draft we were sent back to the drawing board and we made one more draft:

From there we were given some more critique with the main theme of making it more interesting. So we went back and refilled and added a ton of photos and explain everything’s as well as tweak the music.