So with MPOLS coming around, I am going to dedicate this post to discussing my learning so far through this year and see what I can improve on and how.

I have had my best first term in PLP and it has been so much fun. We went to Calgary on the second week of school and it was without a doubt the best trip I have ever been on. This is one of the main reasons I do PLP, I get to go on these amazing trips to some of the most amazing places with some of the greatest people I have ever met. Trips like these are things I will never forget and the things I have learned and the experiences I have had will stick with me for life. It really makes me consider how lucky I am to be able to be in this program. After this we did a few really cool projects until winter break, which is the second reason I joined PLP. In my last year of elementary school our teacher made us do three POI’s or projects of interest. This was like Blue Sky and the Winter exhibition except the topic was open to pretty much anything. I really enjoyed that class and I presented three projects and all of them went amazingly. From black holes to cheetahs, I got to choose a topic I wanted to learn about. Then I got to go home and use an iPad, and some cardboard and paint to put it together in a presentation of my learning. I was amazed by how fun it was and working on the projects are some of my greatest memories from Elementary School. I remember using iMovie to create a video detailing black holes and the physics behind them using a combination of me performing experiments on camera and some voiceover on some images. I didn’t go into considering PLP because I was curious about the iPads or trips, I went in with the confidence and enjoyment of three projects behind me and I was hooked by the prospect of learning through projects.

First thing I would like to bring up is a project that I found really difficult so far this year. That would have to be my metaphore machines project. For this project we were given the task of learning about revolutions and steampunk and putting it together into a Rube Goldberg machine. I understood half of this project really well and the other half not so much. For the steampunk side of things we had to read the book Leviathan and I really did enjoy reading it and even continued on to the next two in the series. This helped me get a good grasp on a steampunk ascetic that we were required to theme our machine with. The other half of this was researching revolutions and Craine Brintons theory of revolution. I didn’t really understand the whole theory part and I feel like it shows in my blog posts that I written. For the actual project we needed to make the machine and have a complete run through of our project. This went really well and everyone contributed equally between myself and my group members. For the revolution part we needed to have our machine feature a revolution, we chose the American Revolution and so we showed the events through metaphors. You can read about the entire project in a bit more detail on this blog post. (Link)

The next thing I would like to bring up is a piece of work that I am most proud of. This would definitely have to be my work in and on Calgary. This trip was filled with a ton of work to complete and I definitely had fun doing it. This included four videos that needed to be scripted, recorded and edited. Some were individual and some were in groups, we most often had a location to explain in detail over a three to four minute video. I made one on Cave and Basin which I consider to be the best out of the three. I made one with a group while we were visiting a ghost town. We all acted out characters in a murder mystery where the killer is a pineapple. I also made one at a dinosaur museum where I had to choose a dinosaur and make a video about it in one hour. These all took a lot of effort and the end result is some of my best work in a while. I would happily show off all of these videos to anyone, which is something I can’t say about a lot of my previous work.

For another talking point I would like to discuss the question of “If I had the ability to change some of my work what would it be.” For this I Think that the best answer is all of the stuff I didn’t have handed in on time over the coarse of this year. I am still trying to fix it but I realize that I need to try a lot harder. If I want to keep the good grades I obtain e from this first term then I really need to spend more time doing homework and focus a lot more on completing it.

QUESTION TIME!!!
So I also had to pick a question, well not so much of a question as it is a conversation starter. For this I chose to ask “How could I become a more focused and less stressed learner”.

Anyway thanks for another amazing half of a year, can’t wait until the next MPOL or TPOL or SLC or whatever they call them now.