My Learning Portfolio

 

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The Declaration of MPOL

I, the student, thank you for coming to my presentation on learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.

Projects I’ve Succeeded On:

One of the projects that I believe I have done well on was “The Power Play”, which was the project that involved the winter exhibition and our learning about The Crusades and the Renaissance. I think that our group worked well together and were able to cooperate and get things done in a timely fashion. I believe that I personally was able to work well and did my best to be as dedicated as possible to the efforts of the group. During this  period, I had been going through some mental challenges and this had effected my work; however, I was able to build up enough resilience to conquer those struggles and get my marks up to where they should have been at the start.

The other project that I believe that I have succeeded on was destination imagination. I again was able to work well with that group of people, I attended meetings with the group and contributed as much as I could. I tried to be as dedicated to the project as possible, helping to build, paint, and contribute ideas to our team challenges. I believe that we, as a group, worked well together and I am very proud of our accomplishments and our teamwork as a whole.

What I need to improve on

I need to improve my timeliness of when I hand things in. One of the things that causes this to happen is I have a hard time starting an assignment; however, when I do start the assignment I tend to get it done. My parents and I have discussed this and we are creating a schedule of my assignments and their due dates to keep me on track.

Another area of improvement that I can work on, is the quality of my work that I submit. For example, I can improve on my spelling and work towards meeting the assignment’s criteria. The way I am planning on improving this is by spell checking my work more often and making sure that I can spell things properly. Another strategy that I am going to use is to re-read through the criteria and requirements, that way I can go through my work so that it is what my teachers would have asked.

Habits and Strategies

One of the habits that I can work on is t0 be engaged, For example, if the assignment isn’t appealing to my interests, I may spend less time focused on the project and that impacts the quality of the work. I can improve on this habit is by staying optimistic and also trying to engage in the work and or discussion.

Reflections

Humanities

I have enjoyed this class very much. The lessons and teachers have been great and the projects have been quite fun to work on. History is the topic that I am most interested in as part of the humanities block. I especially enjoyed learning about the Crusades because it was a new area of history that I wanted to learn more about.

Maker

I enjoyed maker as well. One project that I particularly liked was the first maker project with Mr. Harris. The WordPack and Memoji were very fun to create.

I wanted to learn more technology so that information came with open arms.

Science

I have enjoyed science so far greatly, the teachers are very kind and I have especially enjoyed the labs. Also getting to study specimens under the microscopes in the classroom. I have had difficulty’s with the final assignment but I was able to adapt and get it done with what as required of me. I have always liked science, my dad being a teacher of several “sciences” I have been somewhat surrounded by them, so I was very happy to start science.

Thank you so much for listening to my presentation of learning, I hope you all have a great day and to many more successful projects. Frank, cue the curtains!

Introduction

GOOD MORNING VIETNAM OR WHERE EVER YOU ARE! For any of you that have lived through the 80s you will get that reference. I know, I’ve been gone for a long time, but I’m back, and I have a new topic I’ve been required to tell you about, mysterious things like coding and the Kinetic Molecular Theory! I know, big words right, well that’s why I’m here! Your own personal dictionary just longer and more mind numbingly boring.

The Kinetic Molecular Theory

So, what is the Kinetic Molecular Theory? Well to give it to you in short, the kinetic molecular theory states that all particles are in constant motion, and that can depend based on how much kinetic energy the particles have, that can determine what kind of state of matter the material is in, for example if the material was a solid the particles would have only so much energy to vibrate in a certain amount of space. Now you might be thinking, why would that have anything to do with coding? Good question! PLP as you know has its ways of integrating technology into the learning, and what my teachers came up with was… A GAME! And to make it with… I give you Scratch! The buggiest thing I’ve ever used!

Coding… AHHHHHHHH!

See, to give you some context I had no knowledge of coding so I was confused from the get go. I had also made the mistake of getting rid of the tutorial before I knew that it was a tutorial and it didn’t come back so… yeah, I was off to a great start. And to keep PLP to its core it needed a story so I began by making characters, I had settled on the quiz type of game. In short you would answer questions and then if you got a certain amount right you would move on to the next level and repeat until you won the game. The story was that all of the oxygen molecules had disappeared and a nitrogen molecule had to save them and the world, a.k.a your average Disney movie plot. Anyways, after I had settled on a theme and characters I could then move on to the coding, and as I stated before, that did not start well. The hilarious thing is that in all that time, a guy pretty much glued to YouTube in my free time never thought to look up a tutorial! Anywho, I started to code and after a while I had a good start and then my nemesis arrived, THE BUGS! Dun dun dunnnnn!!! One day I get to class and open up my project and just like Heath Ledger as the Joker says, “its, its gone”, it had disappeared! Worse Scratch wouldn’t let me back into the website, I tried opening a new tab, nothing! With that option done I had to improvise. I went to the teacher and asked if I could turn it into a board game and it was approved.

The Board Game

Now, in terms of construction it was fairly easy to make. I had found a relatively large piece of paper and had draw a course out, kind of like a CandyLand path. Then, I set about making the questions, that if answered correctly would help you move forward a space. Answer wrong, and you would lose your turn. There were also bonus questions, for example, who created the Saturn model of the atom? We also learned about atoms to an extent. I got my pieces together and scrapped the idea of the nitrogen molecule because I wanted to have a multi-player game. I settled on a proton, a neutron, and an electron. And with that, to put it in the words of Shackleton, “I’ve done it, dammed the admiralty!”

Exittro… I don’t know I lost the word!

The way our attention spans are waning, if you have made it through this Catholic wedding ceremony, I’m proud. I thank you for reading my post. I hope that you have a very good day. Frank, cue the curtains!

I Attempt To Be Tom Cruise For A School Project.

That’s right! You’re finally getting it! This project actually was easier then I thought, now don’t get me wrong, the preparation for the Winter Exhibition was long and it was a lot of work but the actual presentation was quite easy.

We Prepare…  A LOT!

It all started with preparation, we as a group spent hours on it, our first job as a group was to go through all of our art charts (which was an assignment from the last project that was sadly resurrected) picking the best images for each category.  The categories were as follows geography, values, belief, knowledge, society, economy and time. After a while we planned out our first tableau for our triptych. See, the way that the triptych was going to work was that we were going to take all of the learning that we had gathered over the corse of the semester and put it all into this so we were going to have three sections, medieval for The Book of The Lion and the Crusades, Renaissance, for the learning we had done most recently, and finally the modern or contemporary section as we liked to call it.  We had on the first day about planned the medieval section and was going to start to build some of the elements we were going to need.

The next day we continued to plan, and over the corse of the next couple of day were just about done planning everything out, now we just had to build it. Now I would like to give a huge thanks and shout out to some of my group members who while we were planning, at home were spending hours working on the props that we were going to use, thank you, we would have not been able to do it without you guys! 

After we had planned out everything now it was a race against time to build everything!

 

The first photo (medieval) shows a peasant paying taxes to a tax collector in the form of a goat which we resolved by the finding a straw goat. Then we see a master teaching his apprentice how to use a sundial which was made out of cardboard to show how they learned back then. We have a church which was also made out of cardboard showing values. Then we have me, the king holding a spear (also cardboard) which i used an old costume for. Lastly we have a river which represents geography and how they got around… ALSO MADE OUT OF CARDBOARD! Look if you see a prop that were not wearing its made out of cardboard.

Then the second photo (Renaissance) shows a peasant buying an indulgence which was a way you could erase your sin. Then we have the same river with a boat also representing geography (also cardboard). Then we have me representing the Catholic Church to show the value and power of the time. We also have a clock representing the invention of the time and a way that society lived. Finally we have a peasant praying to the church and a person reading a book because it shows how they passed on knowledge during that period.

Now finally we have the modern tableau, it has me as an Apple Store which we tackled by making the back side do the church look like an Apple Store so that all I had to do was flip the church around during changes. Then we have a pedestrian purchasing some food from a grocery till and we have a person studying on Wikipedia which shows how knowledge is passed down and attained. Then we have the river, which on the backside we painted a road to make it easier during changes with a car on it representing geography. Finally we have a scientist showing values and how we have grown to value science more then in the past. Unfortunately i do not have a photo of this on presentation day but you get the picture!

The Explaining!

So, you may start to remember something’s from the previous post, such as the  art chart and several of the subjects that we used for this and you would be right, this was the total and final presentation of our learning! As I said before over the past semester we were to put all of our learning into this. So I have been instructed, COUGH, excuse me, I have decided to add in both of the paragraphs that I wrote on what I had learned about both subjects, enjoy!

Medieval

This book taught me that many things today are very similar to back then and things from back then in medieval times have carried over to modern times in force. For example the. Way we run the economic has barely changed from what it was back then, except for some minor modernizations. This has changed how I understood how the medieval world view was back then and how it worked, it also changed how I saw the way that things have changed since then and what has stayed the same, this was a great and eye opening experience and would love to do it or something similar again!

Renaissance

Learning about the Renaissance worldview helped me to understand how they thought and what they knew, also it showed me how lucky I am not to live in a society like they did then. The Renaissance was a “golden age” of invention and thinking, while it was a golden age, many horrible things happened, such as the witch hunts and the schism of the Catholic Church. It makes me feel lucky not only live in a society that tears itself apart multiple times, not to mention the sickness at the time, with the plague. On the bright side it also showed me how much we owe to them in the creation of modern society. Such as laws, medical care, and the inventions to help us navigate the world, such as the telescope, and the clock. This showed me that the Renaissance was crucial to us today and I am thankful that there are still people out in the world that are like the great innovator and inventors of that time that are changing our world!                   

Conclusion

I know, I know, your probably board of herring some guy talk about his school project so I’ll spare you. Despite all of my complaining I really enjoyed this project and i was with a great group! I own them so much so I would like to give them a huge shout out! Thank you to Danny, Eloise, Isaac, Elsa and Robin! You all did such a great job and i am so thankful for it, now I don’t have there blog links on hand but I will like a website where you can find them all, just look under the PLP 8 section and you’ll find them… until next time everyone!

Links And Resources

here is a link to my previous post that were involved in this! Have fun reading them!

The Power Play!

 

here is the link to the website, again just click on learner profiles, go to the PLP 8 section and you’ll find them all, have fun reading about there experiences!

Learner Portfolios

Finding my terrible art talents with drawing!

 

Do you want to find out what these abominations is? Keep reading to find out!

This was part of the newest completed project in school, the goal was to learn how to use an app we got at the start of the year called Sketch’s Pro. We were to make a series of drawings about various topics that our teacher listed such as three-dimensional letters, an emoji, a logo for a brand and a robot made out of shapes. See images here.

When we first walked in I thought that I was going to enjoy this project, despite my terrible skills, it was better than ANOTHER NOVEL STUDY! The first drawing that we did was the three-dimensional letters of our name, we did several 3D drawings but this was the first. I ended up coming up with a sort of bubble letter design because I am not terrible talented with 3D but I did try. The second drawing was with shapes that we were to make into a robot. Above you can see what I came up with, I’m not terribly skilled with a Apple Pencil but I tried to make the best shapes on my own, we also were taught how to use a tool to get perfect shapes but I thought that it might be a good opportunity to draw them on my own, but that’s my loss. I call him Rob The Worker Bot, yes that’s his whole name, even The, don’t ask. The second to last drawing was the emoji, we were tasked with making our own emoji. I decided to make my Memoji mad face because I thought that it would be quite funny and it was with my group anyway so mission accomplished? I thought that I did a good job trying to get the colors and outlines for it all thought I could have done a better job with the shading because I wasn’t very good with the tools. I’m running out of starts for sentences so I’m just going to use this, our last drawing was the logo for our business, we were to create a business from a template see here,

And then make a logo for it. This drawing was perfect for me because several years before, at another school we had had an entrepreneur fair where we created businesses and made products to sell at the fair. Mine was called Priceless Postcards, so I basically copied what I had done before and made a logo for it which I am very happy with. In this drawing this was basically like the final big project, we had to incorporate most of the techniques we had learned and put them all together, for example you can see that I used several shapes and a cool text box and font tool to help create the final project. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this project and would gladly do it or something like it again, and if my teachers are reading this, please, PLEASE! Don’t make us do another novel study!

Hello everyone, I’m very sorry about the Napoleonic wars blog post and how long it’s taking me to complete it. I have decided to also make an animated video on it so the project will probably revolve around when I can make the video, in the meantime how about you read about this blog post regarding the most recent project that we have been learning about in school. 

The project, which shocked me too, was about something historical!!! This project was about the Crusades, specifically the first crusade. It was an improvement in my book anyway. We started the project with, you guessed it, another novel study! This one wasn’t as bad though. It was actually quite interesting. The book, titled The book of the Lion by Michael Cadnum, was about a boy who was eventually conscripted into the crusades. It is quite a good book and I advise you check it out.

The Driving Question

The driving question made me think about things that I hadn’t considered so I have decided to add its own section, the actual question itself was “What can we learn from the past and why does it affect us today”. I believe that the past and our history are very important. We can learn things from the past that can help us prevent mistakes from the past happening in the future. I believe that learning about the past can help people in ways we might not know yet. The  thing about the past is that it does have affects on us now, some for good and some for worse. I think that it affects us today because we have chosen to remember things in the past, wether to prevent them from happening again or to try to remember them, in any case, I believe they affect us because we let them.

 The Novel Study… Again!

The way we did the novel study was almost exactly like the way we did the earlier novel study in ITEOTWAWKI, if you don’t know what that means, check out that blog post. The role sheets were very similar to those used before and they were used in the same system: we had a week to do them and do the reading then we would have a discussion in our group and repeat. For example…

We did the role sheets as we read the book. Once we had finished the book we then moved one to the main point of this project, we were to create a medieval art work with our face as its center.

The Image

 The first step to starting the final image itself, was to learn how to use an app called SuperImpose, which is an image editing app that we got at the start of the year. We started by learning the basics and exploring its features with some images that we had in our photos. Once we had learned how to properly use it we took the main image from our medieval art work chart, which was a previous assignment to help us with understanding medieval world view. After we had chosen our image our next job was to add our face on to a person was in the photo. There were many different ways of doing this. I decided to erase the person’s whole head then add mine in from another photo that I already had.  With that out of the way, I then moved on to one of the more tedious parts of the project. See, when we first started learning about world view, there were several main sections that were shown to us, time, belief, value, geography, society, economy and knowledge. I had to incorporate three of the photos from my artwork choice chart that represented three of those categories then add them to my photo that fit the theme. I decided that I was going to try and add as much as I could, I ended up choosing time, geography, value, belief and society. I selected the photos from my choice chart, put them in the photo, made it fit the theme and with that my project was complete! Or so I thought, see the truth was that it had a bigger purpose, which everything in PLP has. What I learned was that we were to create a new photo for the renaissance (which is our next topic), make a triptych about it and to top it all off, a skit that we would present to all of our parents and even some of the school… aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! For the record, I am no Tom Cruise, for that matter, so in my mind… this isn’t going to end well! However, I’m still going to try my best. Stay tuned for that blog post!

The Reflection

This book taught me that many things today are are very similar to back then and things form back then in medieval times have carried over to modern times in force. For example the. Way we run the economic has barely changed from what it was back then, except for some minor modernizations. This has changed how I understood how the medieval world view was back then and how it worked, it also changed how I saw the way that things have changed since then and what has stayed the same, this was a great and eye opening experience and would love to do it or something similar again!

links and Resources

Here are some fun documentary’s about the crusades if you would like to check them out!

 

There are four other parts to this amazing series done by Extra History, hope you enjoy!

ITEOTWAWKI
You see that weird title above you, want to know what that means, well then keep reading. As you already know, I have talked about the first maker project that I made in PLP, in this post I am going to talk about my first Humanity’s project. In that project we as a group of four people, read an amazing book called the outsiders, learned about what is world view, and we created a song based off of the song, It’s the end of the world as we know it that talks about our world view, see here,

The Novel Study

At first, I wasn’t exactly thrilled to here that we were doing a novel study but I had to go with it. How we did the novel study was a way that I had never seen done or heard of. We were put into groups of three or four people, we achieved had roles, members one and four (A.K.A me) were to do a specific sheet with a specific area about the book, the same went for group members two and three, they both had their own sheet. We did this for a while, we would have benchmarks for the number of chapters we had to read in the book, then we would write our sheets based on the text that we read. We would then have a discussion every Friday and show what we had written. We did this for the entire book. During this project the class learned about this thing called world view and helped us find out what ours was. We were then told that we had to make lyrics about our world view that had to go with a song. I know! I was terrified to but I eventually made the lyrics with some help from my parents. The song we were to match our lyric with was Its the end of the world as we know it by REM or as we like to call it I.T.E.O.T.W.A.W.K.I. Once all of us were done that nightmare, then it got worse, our teacher told us that in our reading groups, we had to combined all of our lyric into one song, sing it, record it, and make a video for it, now here is what my Brian told me after I heard that, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! OVER LOOAAADDD! 

The Song

Now my song was not like the others, see I was sick at the time so I had know idea when I had wrote my lyric that they were supposed to be about our school transition which is what everybody wrote about, the message that I got before I got sick was that I was supposed write about my world view which is exactly what I did but mine and theirs didn’t mix.  So that bit was a little awkward but eventually we were able to agree on what lyrics to include in our song, now it came to the hard part, recording it and making the video. First, one person for the group had to download the backtrack to our song into garage band, then we could start recording the song to the back track. We sang our verses that we had chosen and did our best to record us singing it and that’s where our problems started. One of the biggest problems we encountered was that the IPad was having trouble picking up our voices unless we talked at a specific volume. We eventually worked it out so that the sound was decent enough that we didn’t sound like robots. The next step of the project was fairly easy, one person in our group was to create the video in IMovie. The whole group submitted photos of us at various ages and doing different things and where put into sections where we sang, after all was said and done the group member submitted it and we were done.    

 

Reflection

This project taught me that I could make my own song, record it, and make a video from it, it also taught me that I could work with a group to create something that we were all proud of then show it to the whole world! I thoroughly enjoyed this project and I am very proud of the product we created!

Links and Resources 

Here is a link to my YouTube channel if you want to checkout other videos.
https://youtube.com/@GriffinA-wt5jw?feature=shared

I Became A PLP Learner

I Became A PLP Learner!

When I came into PLP I had no knowledge of it at all. See I had come in several weeks after the school year had started so I was already behind. One of the first project we started was the Becoming A PLP Learner, this project heavily if not primarily used the app keynote which I had never used before. During this project I learned how to use the app and include other smaller assignments in to the project to create a slideshow video to be able to post on YouTube. 

I came into class for the first time and sat down, I had just gotten all of my app required for PLP and was hopelessly confused, thanks to Mr Harris I was able to catch up to where everybody was at that point. I started to assimilate my project and slowly piece by piece figure it out how to make the slide show presentation in keynote. Once I had figured out the basics I realized that keynote was a fairly easy program to learn and use. 

Putting together the slideshow.

Originally the first thing the class had started to work on was the WordPack. The WordPack was an app that took word that you would put in and would make the words into a shape. I had tried to use and make my WordPack but for some reason it wasn’t working to I decided to move on and do it later. I started on my I am photo, I had forgotten to take the photo but I had a photo with me playing my saxophone which I love so I edited the photo, added some text and I asked Mr Harris and he said that it was great so I put it in the slideshow. The next thing that I made or integrated was my user manual. This was a previous assignment depicting us as robots that the buyer purchased and we had to describe our selves. This I completed and added it to the slideshow. I also added emojis of me in various facial depictions that related to the part of the user manual. I also animated everything in the slides up to that point. I then worked on the actual Memoji itself or as I call it “the heart and soul and the purpose of this project”. The animation part of it was initially very confusing to me but I was able to do some problem solving with Mr Harris but after that I was able to fully complete the project.

The Reflection.

This project taught me that I was capable of coming into a new version of learning with apps that I had never heard of and was able to create something that I was proud of and that I was okay with. It also taught me that I could work with something fairly new to me and be able to problem solve and work out away and to be creative with how I solved a problem and to again be able to make something I am proud from scratch. I thoroughly enjoyed making this project and working with others around me to complete it. I hope to have many more fun experiences like this one in PLP. 

Links’s and Resources

Here is a link to my YouTube channel, feel free to check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/@GriffinA-wt5jw

Hi, I’m Griffin and this is my first post on my blog, (that I have no idea how to use). I have contemplated what to make this blog about and I have decided to make it about history. I have loved history for a very long time and have been captivated by it so I have decided to make this about what I do in school and informational posts about different topics in history every week. So without further a due here is my first blog post, enjoy!

The first topic I’ll do is ancient civilizations since that’s pretty much the first thing in human history. So I’ll start with the probably most famous one, the Roman Empire. The empire was Founded around 27 BC, the Roman Empire proceeded the Roman republic until the down fall of it in the year 476. The first Emperor Augustus, created the Empire part, Rome at that time was what is called a territorial empire, it was still somewhat a republic in the sense that the Roman Senate was still a functioning but at that point they basically became advisers to the emperor. The Roman Empire went through a series of emperors. Their point was to basically conquer as much as they could to enlarge the Roman state. Some of the rulers of Ancient Rome were murdered or died in battle, most of the rulers that were murdered let all the power get to their heads or in some cases were unfit to rule and new nothing of ruling. They also didn’t do what was best for their people and more like what was best for them selves. Several of the more famous rulers that were murdered were Julius Caesar, Commodus, Julius Nepos and more.

Now on to the conquers and wars of the Roman Empire. In this section I will go over the main ones or the important ones. I will start with one of the most famous, the Punic wars. It all started when Rome was still a fairly small country, Rome had at that point been very keen on quick and large expansion of their territory. But at that point the major power in the Mediterranean was Carthage. Carthage originally was part of a chain of Phoenician trading posts and colonies. Carthage then grew to be the main power in the Mediterranean. Both of the powers wanted to expand an both of them first set their eyes on Sicily which was right in the middle between them. Both of them started to amp up their forces on the island and started to engage with one an other. It was at this point also that the Roman’s started to engage in sea combat the Roman’s had accidentally captured a Carthaginian ship and copied the designed. The Roman’s were known for doing that but what they would always do was they would modify it and make it better which is exactly what they did with their ships. The Roman forces were also far better trained then the Carthaginian forces so the Carthaginians were already losing on land and now they were losing on the seas which they thought they had. Already end mastered. After several sea engagements the Roman’s set their sights back to the land campaign in Sicily. The Roman’s then pushed the Carthaginian’s to the breaking point where they only had two major city’s left and to make matters worse they were both under siege and were separated. After a while aka 9 years later the carthaginians and the Roman’s were at a stand still and neither of their campaigns were going any where so the carthaginians opted to surrender. That was just the first Punic war, in the second Punic war came along one of the greatest statistic minds the ancient world had ever seen, his name was Hannibal. I will be doing a post about him and his part later so follow my blog for that.

I’m going to make this part one and I will do part two later because I’m realizing that I don’t have enough room to do all of this so I hope you have enjoyed, I have put links in for the resources I used and have seen in the past just in case you would like to check. I will also put a calendar of when I will be posting next, again, I hoped you enjoyed and I hope you will check out my next post!

links and resources.
You can find a whole history of the Roman Empire on Wikipedia at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Empire

Here is a fun little documentary about the Punic wars that I highly recommend.

 

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