We just finished another project, and it’s reflection time! So, this project was called “Revolutions through the ages”, and what would you know, it’s about all kinds of different revolutions! By the end of this blog post, I hope to answer the driving question: “How do ideas drive change?”. Before I talk about the first milestone however, I should also mention the things we had to do alongside the milestones, which was all about the book Revolution.

I don’t want to spoil the book, as it wasn’t bad, and I would recommend you give it a read, but I will talk about the activities we did with it and how they affected the project. Basically, every week we had to have read to a certain chapter, and fill out a rolesheet that corresponded with what we had just read. We were put into groups, and them shared what we did for whatever role we were doing with the group. There were four different roles, Smart summarizer (someone who summarized what happened in the last portion of the book), discussion director (someone who comes up with thought inspiring questions), creative connector (someone who connects things in the book to other media or real world experiences), and the artful artist (someone who draws a picture about a part of the book). Here is one example of a rolesheet I did:

Getting onto the milestones, the first milestone was called exploring evidence, and it was all about different methods of research. There were several stations with different methods of research we rotated to: Library books, YouTube, website, textbook, and newspaper. We had to write down things about each source, like the type of source it was (primary or secondary, primary being first hand accounts, and secondary being second hand accounts), one interesting fact about the event covered by each source, a reason why we trust the source, and what may be potentially untrustworthy about the source.

This activity was mainly to help us with our research of the different revolutions in this project, but our next milestone was getting into the revolutions themselves. Before we move on though, there was an activity that wasn’t a milestone, and it was concerning Crane Brinton’s graphic.

We learned about it so that we could understand all the revolutions better, and to help us answer the driving question, and we were also expected to mention it in our videos. But moving in, in milestone one we were put into groups that we would have for the rest of the project, and my three fellow group members were Noah, Rhiann, and Kaia. The revolution we were doing for this milestone was the French Revolution. We had to make an informative video in one of the four formats: Song/rap, John Green, Explain Everything, and Heritage minute. We did research on the French Revolution itself and made a storyboard and screenplay, as our group decided on doing a song fairly quickly. We decided we wanted part of the song to focus on Louis Charles (the king’s son who was locked in a tower and left to die by the revolutionaries) point of view, which Rhiann did, and that we also wanted a part in French, because, y’know, the FRENCH Revolution, which Kaia ended up doing. We also put in a part in the beginning with lots of rhymes about the revolution of a whole, which I did, while Noah composed the music and edited it all together into a song. Here was our final product:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZXIHVDGRrE&list=UUqJcEm84M1KCsxoCAYY-VfA&index=1

Yeah yeah, our singing wasn’t the best, but I think we did a decent job at explaining the French Revolution through song, but there was definitely room for improvement, with the inconsistent audio, and the French part where we forgot to put subtitles so that people would know what we were saying. But since we had to move on right away to our next milestone, we didn’t have any time to revise it, but I think it was alright for a song made by ninth graders. Moving on to the next milestone, the American Revolution! We started out with usual research, storyboard, and screenplay, we decided to do it John Green style this time. I’ve already posted a link to one of his videos, but in short he puts fancy animation into his talks about history or science or whatever he is doing. This video was an overview of the American Revolution as a whole, highlighting many key events, with Rhiann as the role John Green would fill in one of his videos. I mainly did acting and research like Kaia, who also did some animations, and Noah kept at his awesome editing skills and also did some acting and animating. After lots of instances of Rhiann dropping things, we finally reached our final product:

In my opinion, this was definitely better than our French Revolution song, as it was way more clear in explaining the revolution, and included specific events in clear detail. I think this one was actually pretty good for the amount of time we had to do it. But before we knew it we where already on the next milestone, and the next revolution! That revolution was the Russian revolution, and we decided on a Heritage Minute type video. We did the appropriate research, storyboard, and screenplay, and got on to filming. We also wanted this video to be an overview of the revolution as a whole, while still focusing on important events, and I think we did a good job of it. Everyone in our group did acting, filming, and writing, and Noah edited once again, and we had our video on the Russian revolution:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvBRq_DjMAc&list=UUqJcEm84M1KCsxoCAYY-VfA&index=2

I though this was one was even better than our John Green video, as it did a really good job explaining the revolution as a whole, and had some better visuals, but of course there were a few things that could have been improved on, like a few events I thought should have been focused on a bit more, but all in all it was still pretty good. Remember that revolutions book I was talking about? Well, it was back for our fifth milestone! By this point we had finished the book and done many rolesheets, but know we had to do a creative book reflection. I chose to make a new cover for the book, as I felt that the cover of the book could be a bit more representative. I decided I wanted to do something about the protagonist Andi’s connection to the modern world as well France at the time of the French Revolution, as the French Revolution is an important part of this book. Here’s what I ended up doing:

I don’t want to spoil too much, as I recommend you read the book for yourself, but as you can see, I ended up making the modern world dark, and the French Revolution in colour, as Andi actually gets more answers from the depressing times of the French Revolution than she does the modern world. I also put in the key, which is an important part of the story as well. Like I said, I don’t want to talk about more because I hope you’ll read the book for yourself, but that was pretty much it for Revolution book part of the project. At this point I feel like I should mention how we started to learn about the industrial revolution, but we didn’t have enough time and it got scrapped. But back to the project, we still had our sixth milestone, the final revolution video! We to decide a revolution, which could be one we had already done or one we hadn’t covered, and we could reuse the type of video as well. Our group decided we wanted a shot at redemption at a song about the French Revolution, and although there wasn’t as much research to do, we still had to make another storyboard and screenplay. This time, we worked hard to make our song as best as possible, with Kaia and Rhiann working on animations, Noah working on editing, music, AND animations, and me working on new song lyrics and actually singing them, we were going to make this one count. We made better audio quality, better lyrics, we had a cause and consequence, and we talked about Crane Brinton’s graphic, while still having the overview of the revolution, we had our final draft:

Like I said, this is an obvious improvement. We met the requirements, and although some audio was a little choppy, I think I can say our final product met the criteria and competencies being assessed. But now that we’re done talking about the project itself, we still need to address the driving question and the competencies being discussed. After all the research and work we have done, the driving question doesn’t seem so intimidating anymore. So, how do ideas drive change? Well, that’s what it always starts out with, an idea. There is nothing that humans have done that didn’t start with an idea. And as more people hear about that idea, it gains influence, and it gains power. And eventually, once it has enough influence and power, people will start to take action, and action can lead to anything, more specifically, the start of a revolution. Look at the French Revolution, everyone was tired of being hungry and starving, but they didn’t know what else to do. But then ideas began being shared about overthrowing the king, or making him agree to their terms, until people started protesting, and then fighting, and then take power, and then you have Crane Brinton’s graphic. Now onto the core competencies.

These are the competencies for this project, all of which I think I have proven myself accomplished in. The first competency, cause and consequence, I think I have demonstrated throughout the project research and videos, for example in the final French Revolution video, I talk about the causes and consequences of the French Revolution, like how King Louis locked the third estate outside, which cause them to form the tennis court oath, and consequently began a new stage of the revolution. For the second competency, evidence, I definitely think I have displayed this during the first milestone, and during all the research I did for the videos, as I make sure to get information from reliable sources. For the third competency, create and extend shared understanding, I think I demonstrated it well when working with my group, as we did an excellent job of collaborating and coordinating efforts. And for the final competency, Text Comprehension and Appreciation Strategies, I think I met this competency while reading and doing rolesheets on the Revolution book, as in many of our book chats and my creative book reflection we talked about the genre and what it meant to the audience, and what messages it was trying to give and what purpose it was trying to serve. Well, thanks for sticking around this long, that’s about all I have to say about the Revolutions project!

Before we talk about this weeks blogging challenge, let’s go over the answers to the puzzles I did for the last week’s blogging challenge. For the first puzzle, the answer was 15, and or the second puzzle, the answers were sunshine, chemistry, and illustrate. Anyways, onto this week’s challenge! This week’s challenge was all about festivals and holidays, and there were several tasks to choose from. The first task I chose to do is talk about the holiday that my family celebrates, and the one I chose to talk about is right around the corner, it’s Christmas. It takes place on December 25th, and it is one of my favourite holidays. Every year, my family will put up Christmas lights, a Christmas tree, and other decorations, and we put gifts under the tree. Occasionally, we will go to Alberta to celebrate Christmas, because my grandma lives in Alberta, and we’ll stay at her house. It always snows a lot in Alberta around Christmas time, and there is a huge hill right by her house, which makes for some great sledding and/or snowball fights. Sometimes we would even go to Edmonton mall to look around or play mini golf. I’d even say having Christmas at my grandma’s is actually better than at home, mostly because of my grandma’s awesome cooking. Now, the second task I chose to do was the photo spark.

The picture above is an old TV my grandma has at her house, and it means a lot to me because it represents pretty much all the great experiences I’ve had in Alberta at Christmas time, and Christmas in general. Anyways, that was this weeks blog post, but the blogging challenge isn’t over yet, so stick around for next week!

This week’s blogging challenge was all about emojis, and there were several tasks we could do, so let’s get right into it! So the first task I did was the emoji guessing game. This is a fun little puzzle, so comment below how long it took you to solve it!

☁️+☁️=20

☀️+☀️+☀️=15

☁️+☀️+☁️-🌈=10

🌈+☀️+☀️-☁️=?

The next task I chose to do was the guess the word puzzle. Basically, you have to look at the emojis for hints at what the word might be. Comment below what you think the answers are!

☀️⬆️⬆️ S____se

👩‍🔬🧪🔬 _h__i_tr_

🖊🖋✏️ i_l__tr__e

The final task I did was the emoji art. I used a website called emoji.ink, and I made this monstrosity:

That’s right. It’s the laughing with tears emoji made out of several of its smaller counterparts. Your welcome. My artistic inspiration came from this image I saw a while back:

So yeah, that was my week 6 post, comment what you thought the answers to the puzzles were, I’ll be posting the answers to all the puzzles next week, so stay tuned!

Well, we just finished another project, and as always, we had to write a blog post on it! So, this project was called running a remake because we had to remake a short film, in the hopes of answering the driving question, What technologies, tools, and strategies can we utilize to create short films? The short film in question was RUN, an award winning, one minute long horror short film.

Our final video was supposed to be a carbon copy of this film, and there were a lot of steps involved. The first milestone didn’t actually have much to do with RUN, or the filming in general, but since this was a group project, we did it to see who we might work well in a group with. We did an online personality test, and then we had to write how some of the advantages and disadvantages of that personality in a group scenario would affect us in a group:

This ultimately helped decide who would be in our group, and it was pretty interesting to see what you got on the test. I would recommend you give it a try if you have a bit of free time. When it came time to be assigned our group members, I got Liam and Thomas. The first step in actually making the film was a screenplay. This is kind of like a script, but there isn’t any talking in RUN, so ours was a little different. We read a screenplay from an actual tv show to give us an idea of what it looked like, and this was our first draft:

Yeah, I know, it kinda sucks. We didn’t really have much time to do it because we couldn’t share the document with each other, so that was the best we could do. However, we did get a chance to revise it soon after, so here is our revised version:

It’s definitely an improvement, and although I think we could have done a little better, with all the things we had to do later we just left it as it was, so it was good enough for us. The next milestone was a also a planning thing, it was a moving storyboard. A storyboard is basically a series of pictures that show the main events of the story, except ours was different because it had to be animated, and I used keynote for all the animations that you see. Story boards also don’t have to be immaculately drawn, they just have to show the basic concept, so keep that in mind while you watch it. The one you see is the second draft I did, because I built on top of the first draft when making it, but the first draft had less slides and no time stamps, so don’t really worry about it.

When you hear me mention second draft, I take it you figured out that we had to revise our first draft, for the reasons I stated above, and same as the storyboard, I think if there was more time it would be better, but it did it’s job for what it was. Anyways, the next milestone was a call sheet, which basically says when and where you’re filming, and what you need to bring. The callsheet wasn’t really that hard to do, as we had already planned everything out and just had to write it down, so it was a mainly just to keep track of our plans. The callsheet, and everything we had done so far, was mainly planning, but we finally got to actually filming, the only problem we really had was that it was raining a bit, so we had to wait for it to clear over. The hardest part was editing, and it took a while for me to actually put it all the clips together, but I finished it and here is the first draft:

https://youtu.be/s0b1uA9kXcw

It looks alright, and I think our group thought that, but when it came time to revise, boy did we have a lot to do. We had another group give feedback on our video, and this is what we got:

So yeah, the main problems were the costume of the characters, the music was supposed to be made by us (we didn’t know then), and the timing and angles of the shots were off, among other small details you see in the picture above. So we went to reshoot it, and this time we brought the correct costume, and got the correct angles. That was the easy part. The video editing wasn’t that bad, but the music editing was a nightmare, and where the title of this post comes from. Getting the birdsong and footsteps in was pretty easy, as Liam had recorded footsteps, and there is free bird song in iMovie and GarageBand. The real challenge was making the music. It was really hard do get the jarring drum noise, plus when I put the video in YouTube the drum noise turned into this, so I had to remove it all together. At least I got the rising and falling music done, but it took me a really long time. After all that, we had our final product:

https://youtu.be/kvyOztzKUfY

As you can see, there is obvious improvement in the costumes and camera angles, as well as the timing. However, since we had to make our own sound, the music was a definite downgrade. In my opinion, the second draft was better in every way except the sound, and even if we had more time I still think the sound wouldn’t have been as good as the original short film. Overall, I think we did pretty good for the time and resources that we had, but if we had a bit more time I might have been able to slightly improve the sound. So, now that we’ve covered the project, what technologies, tools, and strategies can we utilize to create short films? Well, we can use screenplays, storyboards, and callsheets to plan and prepare, if you have that you will be able to get all the footage you need, and then apps like iMovie and GarageBand can be used to edit and polish the shots, as well as add music and sound effects. I should also reflect on the ISTE standards for this project, as they are what I’m being marked on.

For computational thinker, I think I have fit the standard, because I have used strategies such as all the pre planning we did, and used technology to develop and test solutions when I was making the music and editing. For knowledge creator, I definitely think I have met the standard, as me and my group have created the various preparation documents like the callsheet or screenplay, which culminated in the final video, and it has definitely been a meaningful learning experience for me and my group. For the final standard, the innovative designer, I think I met this one as well, because I used many creative solutions to problems I had with creating the music, and I used a variety of technologies to do so. So, in conclusion, I learned a lot about filming, especially pre-production and that it is just as if not more important then the filming itself, and I was also able to gain more experience using video editing and music creating skills.

It’s the fifth week of the blogging challenge, and this weeks tasks were all about music! There were many tasks to choose from, and the first one I knew I wanted to do was the survey. So yeah, I made a survey to find out what kind of music you like, and maybe with this survey data I’ll make a song in the genre that you guys like the most in my next blogging challenge post! The next task that I chose to do was talk about an instrument. I’m going to be talking about the trumpet, because it’s the only instrument that I ever really learned how to play.

The main reason that I learned to play the trumpet in the first place was because I tried it one time and I liked it, so I joined the elementary school band. I did it for a year or so until I quit, but I still know the basics of the trumpet. Playing the trumpet is pretty simple, it takes a lot of practice to master. Basically, you have to purse your lips a certain way and press down on the valves down in certain combinations depending on what note you want. It starts out pretty easy, but gets harder to play the more complex songs you do. If you’re thinking of trying out an instrument, I’d say give the trumpet a try. And the final task that I decided to do was make a song. I don’t really have much to say about it, but I ended up making it recently when experimenting with GarageBand:

FullSizeRender

So yeah, that’s my week 5 post, make sure to do the survey and comment what you thought of my song, and stick around for next week’s post!

We just finished our science project on correlation and causation, and as always, it’s time to do a blog post, so let’s hop right into it! So, the premise of the project was “correlation vs causation”. Before we were even starting our milestones, we were explained what correlation and causation where. Basically, correlation is a mutual relationship or connection between two things, and causation is when something causes something else. Now, the whole point of our project is that correlation does not imply causation, so that even if it looks like this causes that, it may not always be the case. Anyways, before we started the first milestone we were put into pairs, and my partner was Holly. Our first project milestone was mostly to help us get a grip on the concept, we where put into randomly selected temporary groups and had to come up with questions we had about the project. Then we had to make a mind map with a bunch of questions from our group and other groups that we would hope to answer by the end of the project.

The next milestone a little practice for us on conducting a survey. We had to get the height and hand size of everyone in the class, and once we did that to find out if there is a correlation between hand size and height. Long story short, there was a correlation, but we couldn’t confirm if there was any causation.

Our next milestone mainly helped us understand the concept of correlation vs causation better so that we could do better on our final project. We had to take a quiz that would supposedly calculate how tall we would be when we were older. As a class, we discussed the quiz and of the correlations in the quiz implied causation. We also were given a Wikipedia article to read more on the specifics of correlation and causation. Overall, this was a very helpful milestone as it really cemented my understanding of the concept.

The next milestone was the start of our final presentation, it was a plan on what questions we would ask in our survey. In our final product, we needed to talk about two correlations and one causation, so we needed to come up with some questions that we knew would give us those results. We also had to predict if there would be causation in the questions we asked and how we would use a chart to plot the data, but ultimately only four questions would make it into our final presentation. Our next milestone was similar, it was a basic layout of what our presentation would look like when it was complete, this was just so we would know what we were doing in advance.

Our final milestone was the presentation. With our survey plan, and our survey data we had collected over a few days with a google form, me and Holly finished our presentation:

I think we did well because we completed all the requirements, we had the two correlations and causation, we had a slide addressing any potential bias in the survey, and I think we made the slideshow look pretty good as well. Afterwards, we had to revise our mind map with all our questions answered, and my finished one is right here.

So overall, I learned a lot in this project, as I am confident in the concept of correlation vs causation, and I am confident that I showed proficiency in all the curricular competencies we were being assessed on. This was a really interesting project, and I hope we will do more like it in the future, as it really pushed my learning forward.

As you all know, Halloween is just around the corner, and today I’m going to be talking about some of the the things me and my family have prepared in decoration for Halloween! Also, if you were wondering what my picture sentence from my last blogging challenge post was, it meant “My dog ate my homework”. If you got it, give yourself a pat on the back, if you didn’t, say what you thought it was in the comments! Anyways, so for Halloween every year, my family likes to make decorations like jack-o-lanterns for our house for the trick-or-treaters. The first thing we made was a jack-o-lantern.

My brother Daniel made this one, I think he got some inspiration from Frankenstein because when I look at the top I think of the stitches that Frankenstein has on his head. The next decoration we made was pretty simple, you just get some coloured paper and cut out the shape of a pumpkin, bat, or ghost, and voila, you have an easy to make Halloween decoration that looks great on window or doors:

The final decoration we had we didn’t make ourselves, but we had it left over from last year:

It’s just a neat little sign that greets the trick or treaters as they come. Anyways, that’s everything me and my family have done for Halloween, is there anything your family likes to do in preparation for Halloween? Leave it in the comments below, and remember to have a happy Halloween!

It’s been a while since our Alberta field school happened, but we’re not done with it yet! If you’ve been following my blog, you may remember some of my posts about PGP, which is all about self improvement, you can check out those older posts if you want to know more about PGP. You can also check out my post I did on the Alberta field school as a whole if you want to know more about that. Anyways, our first PGP post of this is a reflection on the Alberta field school, more specifically on what strategies I used to manage my time and impulsivity to make sure that I could complete my project and enjoy myself at the same time. Well, the first thing I’m going to do is outline what our days looked like in Alberta. We would usually wake up early, have a quick breakfast, and be off to our first location, do our research/activities, go to the next location, do our research/activities, eat lunch, next location, research/activities, then dinner, and then we would go to wherever we were staying for the night and go to bed. So yeah, most of the extra time we had was on the bus, and if you didn’t get everything you needed from a location, well, tough luck. So, needless to say you really had to make sure you were on task and getting things done in the time you had to do them, or might not get them done at all. So, let’s get on to some of the strategies I employed. Well, the first strategy I used was planning ahead of time. I would usually check the itinerary in the morning so that I would know what to expect from the day, and put tasks that required time outside of our activities to complete in Things, an app handy for putting down to-dos and such. With this advance planning I knew what to expect from the day, and could easily keep track of what I had to do. However, this tactic couldn’t help me if I was distracted during our stops at different locations, and lots of the information we needed was usually just at one location, so if we were distracted at the location we wouldn’t get our things done, so how did I manage myself at the locations? Honestly, it kind of just came down to common sense and knowing that if I don’t do it now I won’t get it done at all, an example of this was our Ghost town video. Basically, we had to make a random story in the ghost town at Three Valley gap and shoot a film of it. We only had an hour or so to shoot it, so we really had to be on task for the whole time. We were kind of goofing off at first, but then we realized we needed to get going, so we got focused and finished the film on time. In fact, we actually had a little bit of time left afterwards because we finished filming so quickly, and were able to explore the ghost town some more. This also happened with a few of the other locations, where I would finish the assignment quickly enough to have enough free time to enjoy myself more. Another example of my first strategy in action was our daily note. For our daily note, we had a question assigned each day, and we were given a bit of time to finish it, but I usually wasn’t able to get all of my thoughts down in the time we were given. So if fell to me to make sure that I completed the notes I planned when I was going to finish them, and instead of wasting time on the bus I actually used the time to finish the notes, and got them all done on time. Although I still think that if I was more on task during the time we had specifically for them, I wouldn’t have had to do as much on my own time. So in conclusion, while I did have some good strategies to finish things on time and increase my enjoyment of the experience overall, I feel like I could improve on working my best for the entire duration of the work period and not get sidetracked, so that way I don’t have to rush at the end, which greatly takes away from the the experience since you have no time to do anything but desperately try to finish on time.

So it’s the third week of the blogging challenge, and here is my entry for it. So, our first task was to educate others about using non-copyright images. “What do you mean non-copyright?” Well, lots of images you find on google and the rest of the internet are copyrighted. That means you have to get direct permission from the creator\owner, and saying who created the image isn’t enough if you want to use their image(S). So, how can you legally use pictures on the internet? Well, there are several different ways. The first is probably the easiest, just make your own image! That way it belongs to you, and you don’t have to worry about any copyright issues. The second way I don’t really recommend, but you can buy stock photos from places like shutterstock. The third way is to use a Creative Commons or royalty free image. If a image is royalty free or Creative Commons, you can use the image without permission and do what you please with it. You can use google to do this, but there are several websites dedicated to royalty free\creative commons images. My favorite of these websites, and the one I use for my blog, is pixabay. Pixabay is the one I recommend using, but there others if you can’t find what you want on pixabay. The next task of this week is the first thing I mentioned, creating your own image! I decided to create a visual depicting the pros of using Creative Commons/royalty free images:

Our next task was a bit different, we could make a slideshow of some cool Creative Commons or royalty free images we found, or we could use the pictures we found in our next task. I chose the latter, and our next task was also a choice. I decided to make a sentence out of the images I found or created, so let’s see if you can solve it!

Do you think you know what it means? Leave a comment down below, and stay tuned for next weeks challenge.

So it’s week two of the blogging challenge, and this is my post on what I did for the tasks. So our first task was to make a post on our blogs commenting guidelines. My post is here. Our next task was making a post on how to comment. That post is here. And our final task was to comment on other people’s blogs. The first blog I visited was Taylor’s blog.

I really liked the avatar made, but the poster didn’t provide one, so I put that in my comment as well. The next blog I checked out was Payton’s. He did a video about Utah, which had lots of interesting facts in it. The video left me wondering what the state dinosaur was, so I asked about it in my comment.

The final blog I visited was Jordan’s blog. He wrote a post on how to help the environment by cutting down on plastics. I really liked it, and told him what I liked about it in my comment.

Well, that’s about all the tasks for the week 2 challenge, I’ll have a post on week 3 soon, so stay tuned!