Monthly Archives: January 2018

SCLs the 3rd: mPOLs

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This presentation is based on the driving question, ‘How am I going to progress as a learner before the end of the school year?’. I think that’s a good question, and one I had to think long and hard about.

What is something you worked hard on and revised several times, but the end product turned out better than expected?
For my maker example, I chose the all about me blog post. This is because of the process in which it was created, and how I think there was a lot of PLP essence. My first draft was ok, but there weren’t a lot of pics. The video wasn’t the greatest either. So I got critique, and went at it again, this time making it a whole lot better.

What project did you struggle with? Why?
For my math example, I wanted to use the metaphor machine project. When we were doing the circuits side of things, I kinda got controlling. This was because I found the circuits very interesting, and I didn’t really want anyone else to do it. Because of that, some of our group didn’t have anything to do, so they were off task a lot. Group work is something I haven’t always been good at, and I need to work on it.

What skills did you use and what skills do you need to continue to develop?
I wanted to use the Frankenstuffie project, a project from science and humanities to answer this question. In this project, we learned a lot about film techniques, which is a key part of PLP 9. These skills will continue to help me throughout the year, so it is important to me to keep working on them, learning more and more all the time!

And finally, another example from humanities. In the metaphor machine project, we had two different parts to it. We had the book wok, learning about all the revolutions and such. We also had the actual building of the machine. I find it interesting to look back and see the contrast between them. The actual building was really fun, so I think the Easter Rising revolution will stay implanted in my brain a lot longer than the stuff we learned sitting in a desk taking notes.

In conclusion, I have three goals for the remainder of the school year. Firstly, I need to improve on my group work skills. Secondly, I would like to become more familiar with all the filming techniques we’ve learned about in class. And finally, I would like to be better on the first draft, rather than not trying as hard because it is the first draft. How do you think I can improve other than in these three areas?

Winter Exhibition

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Every year in PLP, we have two exhibitions; the winter exhibition and the spring exhibition (which isn’t really in the spring but whatever). We just had our winter exhibition. And I’ll bet you’ll never guess the theme! Star Wars.

Yeah, it sounds a bit funny. But the actual project made sense. We had to come up with an inquiry question to do with Star Wars, and relate it to the real world. This was the first step in our inquiry star plan.

There are five points on the inquiry star; connect and wonder, investigate, construct, publish, and debug. So guess what? That’s how this blog post is gonna go!

Connect and wonder

We started the journey by talking about what makes a good inquiry question. We talked about how open ended questions and closed questions are good, and bad. Then we had to come up with some of our own questions, to do with a picture of a red robot.

Then, we labeled the questions, and explained them. Our assignment after that was to come up with questions on Star Wars that we’d be interested in doing a project on. I made a document using Pages, and got a bunch of ideas. I ended up using the question ‘What is the way of life for gungans?’, but I adapted it to fit with the real world. My final question was ‘How can we learn from Gungans how to better balance our environment?’. I chose this question because through a little research, I found out that Gungans are very environmentally conscious.

After we got our questions approved, we had to complete a project pitch form. This was just a summary of what we project was going to be about, and so forth. That also had to be approved. There were a whole bunch of forms in the process, but they were in later parts of the project.

Investigate

At this point we had are questions, bu no answers. That’s what we had to find out next. So using our ever-useful resources, our iPads, we got to doing just that! I found out lots of information about my topic, tons of which I didn’t end up needing. Wookiepedia was a huge help to most everyone’s project. I found out so much about gungans on there, is crazy.

But then we had to relate it to the real world. I had to research humans effect on our environment. So I headed on over to Green Peace’s website! I got tons of information from that, but then dug a little deeper. I emailed Green Peace to ask them a few questions. They answered, and redirected me to an article they had just published. It was very interesting.

Construct

At this point, the exhibition was only a week away. And, as the name explains, we had to exhibit something. We took all our research, and made it into something. I wanted to show how gungans use their environment to their advantage, while still protecting it. For example, going back to the ‘Phantom Menace’, you can see the gungans city, and some of their vehicles.

I chose to build a model of the ship that Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi Wan Kenobi and Jar Jar Binks took into the city of Naboo. I chose this because gungans based most of their technology off of things seen in nature. You can see that the ship kind of resembles a stingray.

I used cardboard, paint, and hot glue to make it. I also created a diorama-type thing for the ship to sit in.

But as much as that explained my question, it didn’t relate to the human side of things. So I decided to make a car. This is because cars resemble nothing in our natural environment. Except maybe a rock. Anyways, I made a car. The car is very boxy, but the wheels moved and it was great. I also had a diorama road thing for the car.

Publish

Now we get to the nitty-gritty stuff, the actual exhibition. Our teachers divided our classes into two groups: the Dark side and the light side. I was on the light side. So, we decided to make our classroom into the rebel base on Hoth. This took a lot of work, before school, during school, and after school. We had a bunch of trial and error, but it turned out pretty great.

With all this, we wanted to have costumes. So everybody dressed up. It was actually super cool. We had Jedi, an Ewok, BB-8, a Wampa, and a bunch of other awesome characters!

So of course, we wanted to act out some scenes. Then, we had this idea to do improv. No. Improv bad. We did it once, and cancelled the rest of it. But the scenes were pretty decent.

The night went great! Everyone was in costume, people ate food, it was awesome. I’m very proud of how it turned out.

In conclusion, this was an awesome project. There were some aspects of the group-ness that I need to work on, though. If I were to do it again, I think we should have appointed DRIs (directly responsible individuals) to different aspects. I also would have created more of a display that could run itself. I’ll know better for next time!