Hey guys, it’s been almost a year but now the time has come for mPOL’s. The driving question for this year was: What is your learning goal that you want to reach by the end of this school year, and how will you meet it? Well, to answer the first part of that question, I’ve found that when completing an assignment I’ll spend more time thinking than actually doing. you may think that that is actually really good for my final product but sometimes that’s the exact opposite. For sure when I have enough time this helps a lot so I can get all my thoughts in order and complete the assignment in the most efficient and well thought out way. However, most of the time this isn’t the case, usually what actually happens is I’ll end up staring at a blank screen thinking about what I could do. And once I decide on something I’ll start to do it but then either come up with a different idea and restart what I was doing or loose my train of thought completely leading me to change my idea again. Now that you know the big picture, how about we take a look at the different subjects individually and see the affects of this up close?
Firstly, I’d like to talk about Maker and the project that has probably caused me some of the most psychological pain in all my years of PLP (about 1 1/2 years). The reason for this distress? We weren’t organized at all, and the best example of this disorganization is our call sheet. For this sheet we were supposed to have all everything that would be happening on the day of shooting from responsibilities to the shots we needed. But that was hardly the case. I feel like this is one of my best examples of a competency that I want to continue to work on throughout the year because of it’s close relation to my learning goal. The competency is Computational Thinker and it talks about employing strategies to understand and solve a problem, which is exactly what I want to work on for the rest of the year.
Next I’d like to talk about scimatics, probably one of my eternal woes is the correlation vs. Causation project. Why? You may ask, well for this project we were being assessed on the communicating and representing competency which was about how we communicated our finding from this project to the rest of the class. I feel like this was a great learning opportunity for me because during my presentation I kept remembering random notes for my presentation which ended up leaving me with a jumbled presentation that probably didn’t really make sense. I think that I can improve my use of this competency by organizing that main point I need to talk about onto some sort of cheat sheet so I can communicate everything in a very organized manner.
The next subject is PGP, and for this I’d like to talk about the Alberta reflection post. This post is probably the best example of how I could have used the computational thinker competency to achieve my learning goal. When writing this post I was continuously thinking about how I would answer the question of this post in what I was writing about but I never actually wrote my whole ideas down. I was just trying to remember what I wanted to write which actually lead to me answering the question but never actually telling the reader what question I was answering. Because of that mistake I had to rewrite some to my post so it was obvious what I was answering through out the post. However if I had used the computational thinker competency this whole ordeal could have been avoided.
Finally, I’d like to finish off by talking about Humanities, or more specifically, the Land is Us Pre-Trip Plan. I feel like this learning artifact is a perfect example of the work habit I would like to start using regularly based on what I’ve been talking about. First of all, if you don’t know what this is, you can see my post about the Alberta video here. Basically what we had to do was create a plan of everything we wanted to cover in our video, from interview questions to different shots we wanted to get. Everything was on this document, and I strongly believe that it helped me creat a better end product because of that. This has helped me realize that when using the right tools, I can create great things!
So to answer the driving question, my learning goal for this year is to get into the habit of writing down my thoughts while thinking of what I can do for my assignment so I can organize them all. And the way I’m going to meet this goal is to use the computational thinker competency and use the tool provided to remember to create this list.