I’m a Podcaster Now

Dr. Bonnie Henry has made a widespread impact with her experience in public health and empathy, making her the greatest Canadian.

Hey Blog, who do you think the greatest Canadian is? You should see a recording and a bit of text above which both have reasons for why I opened with them. The short peice of text or my thesis statement is really the answer to the driving question. Driving question for a project which I haven’t introduced yet! The project was called “Greatest Canadian” and of course asked, “who is the greatest Canadian?”. The recording above is part of an activity where I reflected on this project which I will also be doing today in this post. How did I answer the driving question?

The final product of this project was a full podcast episode that focused on one person who I was arguing is the greatest Canadian. This is definitely a big question because I could choose anyone who is Canadian. Well, not necessarily anyone. This person didn’t just have to be Canadian, they also had to be considered great. What makes a person great?

That’s the definition but I had to go further than that to prove how great the Canadian I chose to focus on really is. This worksheet divided the different aspects of significance. Significance and greatness ties into the competency Establish Historical Significance.

Fast forward from the beginning when I chose who I would focus on as the greatest Canadian, to my completed podcast episode where I talk all about that topic.

Click here for my final podcast!

Now you know where this project started and finished, but how did I get there?

After choosing and proving who the greatest Canadian is in the significance worksheet, I started planning my podcast. When I listen to podcasts they sound like not a lot of work goes into pre-production but the truth is it involves quite a bit of planning. Luckily I could organize all this planning into one document.

While planning the podcast, I also continued to build knowledge about things like Canadian identity and Comprehending Text.

For a majority of this project at the back of the class was a whiteboard titled, “What trends are shaping Canadian identity?”. This is just one example of the work we did with text. Each section was part of a textbook that we followed. I read and wrote notes about the social media part.

I’m showing this because it connects to how I’ve been learning about comprehending text and part of that focuses on text features. Text features are anything that is not the main part of the text. Learning about this helps with understanding but also creating text. One place that I tried to use text features was in my final script for my podcast. There were the words that I would be recording in the episodes as the main body but also features like time stamps, parts which show different actualities, and voice notes.

Once I had my final script I could move on to what might have been my favourite part, producing the podcast episode. This involved recording, mixing, editing, and being an Empowered Learner.

The perfect podcast didn’t come easily. My first draft went through a lot of critique before becoming the completed copy it in now. I think that critique and using feedback to improve is great proof of being an empowered learner. In this case I construct knowledge from feedback given by my peers and I share knowledge by offering them my feedback. Like I said, after all this feedback I had a complete episode. At this point I had answered my driving question.

Who is the greatest Canadian? Throughout the process of this project I have answered this question and was finally able to share this in the podcast! I didn’t just learn that my answer is Dr. Bonnie Henry, I learned how she and others are historically significant and of course, great.

-Asha