Hey guys, welcome back to another blog post. If you have read my last post, you would know that this year I will be making a podcast. This blog post is going to be about the first episode of my podcast, so without further ado, welcome to PLP 10’s first podcast topic, “The Greatest Canadian.

Who is the greatest Canadian? That was the driving question for this project. Our task: answer this question in the form of a podcast and provide evidence for why this person is worthy of the title “greatest Canadian”. But how do you figure out if someone was the greatest Canadian?

Well, this was actually one of our core competencies for this project. How can we establish historical significance? There are five main categories to establishing historical significance. Importance, profundity, quantity, durability, and relevance. Using these five categories was useful when deciding who my greatest Canadian is. Once I had decided who my greatest Canadian was, I would rate their significance in the sheet below. Doing this helped me establish how and why they are the greatest Canadian. 

Once I had my greatest Canadian, I would then have to learn about the person and conduct research about that person. This was another competency of ours. Comprehending texts. I had to decide what was significant to the person, what was significant to the case of why they are the greatest Canadian, and what wasn’t significant. To help us, we learned about major factors of Canadian identity, and what was significant to Canadians. My greatest Canadian fell under one of the topics we had learned about. Globalization is “The process by which businesses or other organizations develop international influence or start operating on an international scale”, and my greatest Canadian has founded a foundation that tries to help undeserving kids around the world and British Columbia. 

I had done the research. I had established historical significance. Now I had to write the script. Writing the script was interesting for me. I had fallen behind due to an appendectomy, so I didn’t have the time to write two drafts of my script like everyone else.When I wrote the first draft of my script, I was happy with it. I thought it was a good script that captured why my greatest Canadian was historically significant. But then we watched an episode from CBC’s “The Greatest Canadian” about Tommy Douglas. After watching how they structured their episode and how they told Tommy Douglas’ story, I completely rethought how my episode was structured. I went home and rewrote my script, basing it off of CBC’s episodes, which I was watching at the same time so I could see how they connect the persons childhood to their accomplishments. I was a lot prouder of my script afterwards, and was finally ready to record. 

But wait! Before I tell you about my wonderful adventures in Garageband, why don’t I tell you who my greatest Canadian is. I chose Steve Nash as my greatest Canadian for a number of reasons. First off, if you knew me, you would know I play basketball. So Steve Nash was a big inspiration to me, and actually introduced to basketball. He also helped popularize basketball in Canada, being one of the first Canadian basketball legends. And as I mentioned before, the Steve Nash Foundation does a lot of good around the world. I know there are Canadians with more important achievements to Canada, but personally Steve Nash has had a real affect on who I am as a person. Not just a Canadian. That is why I think he is the greatest Canadian.

Recording and editing this podcast was a major step for me. I learned a lot about podcasting features, and improved on the third and final competency. The last competency is being an empowered learner. That includes using the ipads capabilities to its fullest potential. In Garageband, I learned a lot about different features I could use. One of them was learning how to adjust the audio of a clip in a certain spot. This was very useful for me because I could now fade in audio and, if the audio for a certain clip was too high, I could just lower the volume for that one section. Podcasting features was another big thing I used in editing. Terms like hit hot (play at full volume), bed (a track playing underneath another track, usually music), crossfade (fade out one sound while fading in another), and buttcuts (to place one actuality after another. An actuality is a voice that is not the narrators, like an interviewee) were all new to me, and helped me understand a lot easier what I needed to edit and where. I could just read the script and see that I wrote crossfade here, and I would know to cross fade. 

I learned a lot in this project. There were times where I was frustrated due to tech failure, or I couldn’t edit something to my satisfaction, but now that the project is finished I can see that I really learned a lot. I think I learned the most in editing. My confidence in editing voice clips and audio has improved a lot thanks to the last few projects, and I look forward to the next episode. Speaking of… why don’t you guys listen to my podcast episode. You can find it below. Feel free to leave a comment with any questions or comments about this post, the podcast, or anything else you are wondering.