Tagged: Identity

Who Knew How Sick Podcasts Could Be?

Ahem! Testing…Testing… Can everyone hear me? Good. I am pleased to announce that the first project of my grade 10 year has now been completed. What is this project you may ask? Well, in this project, we created podcasts. And yes, if you’re a typical teenager like me, you think that the only thing you’d like to listen to is music or tv. But, let me tell you, podcasts are a lot cooler than you’d think and way underrated.

We started off this project by focusing on two things: identity and the steps we’d take to get to our final product. Let’s start with identity. We had some in-class talks, talking about how we defined identity. The way I described it was mostly using the words that are apart of worldview (geography, beliefs, knowledge, values, society, etc). If you’d like to see more about our activities and class-discussions, click here to see my second milestone on identity. But, if you decided to stay here, here’s also a smaller look at the activities we did. 

Now let’s go on to the following milestones to get us closer to our final podcast. Our third milestone was our podcast plan. It wasn’t very eye appealing as I could’ve made it, but it got my ideas across. And, although I had a strong idea on what my podcast was going to be about, I had no idea what I would make my music like or what how my podcast was going to be put together. 

As I was brainstorming different ideas I could do for my podcast, I thought about what I think would appeal to a more wide range of people and in my case, teenagers. But, I finally narrowed down to the idea of creating a podcast that could give the advice to teenagers that they are missing from their everyday lives to make them even better. Because it’s always great to learn all this information early instead of in your 20s and 30s. 

The idea came to me when I was having dinner with my parents one night. Every once and awhile, I have these long deep conversations with them about different aspects of life. So, I thought, why not put all of that wisdom into a podcast? So that’s what I did. 

Next, we created a draft for our podcast trailer. A trailer being a 1-2 minute clip of us introducing our podcasts. Now, let me tell you, my trailer draft was mega rough, because I hadn’t created my music yet and had an okay idea of how it was going to be formed. And thanks to milestone 5, it helped make that a lot easier. In this milestone, we received critique from one of our peers (thank you Grace). This came very useful to me because it gave me a much better idea on how to form my trailer as I said it would. 

Next, came our final podcast trailer and final milestone. I also added somethings such as a small clip of a short interview I recorded with my dad. I asked him about 5 questions and picked which answer I found most “attention grabbing”.

And in the making of this podcast trailer, I successfully improved my GarageBand skills. Instead of knowing nothing at all, I now know pretty much all of the basics and how to work most of it. Which is a huge win for me considering the fact that  I was convinced I would never learn how to work that app.  

To conclude, I would say that this project overall was pretty successful. I didn’t start off quite as amazing as I wanted to but then later on and when it came to my final product, I can say that I am quite proud of how it turned out. It turned out way better than I thought it would and the steps in this project taught me how to become a real podcaster and get out of my comfort zone by eventually going out to bring and interview people to feature on the show.

Bye!

Identity again??!

Hey everyone! In this blog post, I will be talking about Identity. Now why exactly am I talking about identity you may ask? Because I haven’t talked about it so much since our first project from grade 9, This Land Is Us. Well, in our newest project, we are preparing to create our own individual podcasts. So, we started from learning all about podcasts and the most important parts that make them so interesting. Little details like formatting, editing and music all play a huge role in the making of a podcast. And, our podcasts are going to be based hugely on some certain aspect of our identities.

Side note: I challenge you to count how many times I say “Identity” in this post. Because I bet there’s going to be many. 

 

Identity is a complex and confusing thing. But to simplify it for you, it’s really just everything that is either a part of your life or something that represents you. As I said, identity has been a big part of our class discussions and activities. So, let me show you my own description of identity, and one that a few of my classmates and I put together as well.

Now the first part of our group description is pretty self explanatory, but let me explain the second part for you.

“Your background plays a role in who you are today and who you are today plays a role in who you are tomorrow.”

What that really means is that your past, present and future actions affect who you are. Or more specifically, your identity. 

It can be something big that represents who you are such as the place you live or even something just as small as your favourite ice cream flavour. Just really every little thing that’s apart of your life or could represent you, is part of your identity. Your worldview, (something that I haven’t talked about since grade 8!) is also apart of your identity. 

 

 

 

After having many in-class discussions and activities to help us better simplify the meaning of identity, we took it to the next level by creating something called a bio-poem. Even with such little words, somethings in this bio-poem can mean many things.

For example, Covid-19 has hugely impacted my identity and the way I live, as has it with everyone else in the world. Where I live also impacts my identity a whole lot because it impacts who I’m friends with, my values, my beliefs and what my day to day schedule is like.

In this project, another assignment that applied a lot to our identities was the “Letter to myself”. These letters were to be written to ourselves at the end of this year. We wrote about goals that we’d hope to have accomplished, things that we would have liked to have made changes to and of course, incorporated points on our own identities as well.

While and after creating my podcast, I’m going to focus on having it push me to grow and improve as student, teammate, friend, daughter, sister and just a person overall. And so I’m hoping, when I do look back at that “Letter to Myself” in June, that I would have achieved those goals, not only from just my podcast, but from my experiences, actions and opportunities to come.

Another part from the milestone that is this blog post, was making a GIF. This GIF had a picture of ourselves and included symbols that represented our identities. Here’s mine!

 

Albertans & Identity – This Land Is Us Project Reflection

Hi! It’s Alex and welcome back to my blog! This project’s driving question was “How Does Place Impact Who We Are?” And, to answer this question, we went through this whole project and went to do a nine day trip to Alberta! 

Milestone 1: Power Of Place

To start off our project we first explored deeply into what place means to us and how it impacts us.

To reflect on this activity, we completed a “Creative Response”. Here is mine!

I think that I did a pretty good job on my creative response because it was nice and organized and represented the assignment very well. 

Milestone 2: Using A Lens

Next, we learned about looking at things in a different perspective, which we call, using a lens. The different types of lenses were Political, Economical, Geographical/Environmental and Social. To practice our lens using skills, we were put into groups and were assigned an article that described a recent event. My group was assigned the event on the Trans-Mountain pipeline with Alberta having a great dispute with British Columbia. Here was how mine turned out:

Since I chose to use an economical lens for this activity, I was able to find lots of examples on how the pipeline impacts the world economically. Therefore, it was a little easier for me to do this activity. I think I did a pretty good job at it still; it was the perfect length, had great examples and was formatted like it was supposed to be. 

Milestone 3: Pre-trip Plan & Research

For our “This Land Is Us” project, we were assigned people groups such as, students, business owners or tourists, which would make our answer to the driving question a little bit more specific and that our final video will turn out different than all of the other students. My people group was Albertans. Each group was given “first dibs” to interview someone at select locations which would also give us a better chance to research on the places and figure out our questions, which is exactly what we did for this assignment. Here is how mine turned out:

I was pretty proud of this assignment because it was pretty well organized so I trusted that it would be a great thing to go back to right before interviewing someone at those locations.

Milestone 4: Daily Note

During our Alberta trip, my class and I each had a document where we we had to answer certain questions based on what we learned and did that day. They also had to be all very well formatted with pictures from that day that were optional.  Here are some examples of a few days:

I was pretty proud of my Daily Note because I found it very eye appealing and organized. Also, for each day, I was always caught up and never had to work on something from the day before. 

Milestone 5: Alberta Video (version 1)

Next, we did our first version of our Alberta video. The day that it was due, in class we presented our videos to a partner and received feedback from them. Later, I also got some feedback from Ms. Maxwell on Showbie. 

Here was my video:

https://youtu.be/TxbVCA5g9yE

Here was the feedback from one of my classmates:

Here was the feedback from Ms Maxwell:

I struggled a lot with the 4 minute time limit because I wanted to be able to include all of my examples/evidence in the video but ended up just picking the interviews which I thought had the best answers to what I was looking for. The two lenses that I was mostly looking at were social and environmental which the people that I interviewed answered pretty well. The guy at Lake Louise was looking at more of a social lens, the guy at the Minnewanka boat cruise was a little bit of both and the guy from The Lake Louise Gondola And Ranger Program was more focused on an environmental lens. 

I think that my interviews were very good and the points of what I said were very good but I still think that I had a lot to fix in this video and was lucky enough to get some amazing feedback from both my classmate and teacher. I decided to work on:

  • Adding music perhaps making my own to the video
  • Adding more clips so that the others were shorter
  • Evening out my audio to make sure all the clips of me speaking were consistent
  • Slowing down some parts to give my viewer time to process information better

Milestone 6: Final Alberta Video

I think that my video improved a lot compared to my first version and I improved on everything that I wanted to improve on. It was also very well organized and was more clear. 

I really enjoyed doing this project and the type of opportunities I got to have during this project such as learning about a lot of different points of views of a lot of different Albertans with completely different lives.