No one could have predicted how the final months of this school year would play out. We had no idea that we would working entirely online, and from home. That said, I think that I’ve been able to create one of my best projects of this year, a podcast directly relating to current events.
Listen to my podcast HERE.
The driving question of this project was: ‘How has the world handled the Covid-19 pandemic, and what will the consequences of those actions be?’
For this project, we were assessed on a couple curricular competencies. The first one I’ll go over is Cause and Consequence, and to help make it easy to understand, I’ll also go over the milestones we completed for this competency!
Since this project was a podcast, our first milestone was to listen to a podcast and take notes. I chose to listen to and episode of The Daily called ‘A Historic Unemployment Crisis’, and I learned a lot about unemployment due to the coronavirus in the US. This eventually became a good source for my podcast, and I was able to get a great amount of starting information; information that was not only about the US, but also about how an informational podcast should be structured. This was also a great introduction to our first competency, which is all about causes and consequences of events. In this case, the cause was the Covid-19 pandemic, and the consequence was the skyrocketing unemployment rate.
The elected president of South Korea, Moon Jae-in.
For the next milestone, we learned about different aspects of the political spectrum. I compared four countries- China, Canada, the US, and South Korea, and their individual responses to the Coronavirus. This was a great way to understand the first competency, as I could chart what each country did to prevent the spread of Covid-19, and the consequences of those actions. South Korea, for example, acted immediately to enforce social distancing and had a much lower rate of cases. They were even able to hold an election recently, while still maintaining social distancing. The US, on the other hand, waited a long time to enforce social distancing, and this has caused much higher percentage of American cases.
A makeshift hospital during the time of the Spanish Flu.
The third milestone was when I finally began working on the podcast. I spent some time researching the American government, its response to COVID-19, and how America and the world had responded to the last pandemic, which was the Spanish flu all the way back in 1918. This research not only paved the way for my podcast, it helped me understand how immense change in the American Government could be a consequence of this crisis.
The next milestone was one of the most important, and it was the first part of the competency, which is Create. This competency is all about literacy and writing, which is perfect for this milestone, which was to create the scripts for our podcasts! I used a script template from buzzsprout.com, and I filled it with multiple topics from my research. I also included space for an interview with an American, who was affected by the crisis, and some more space to add some follow-up and facts I learned from the interview. I had to do a couple of drafts of this script, and ended up making it more detailed during the creation of this podcast.
The next milestone, which took a considerable amount of time, was the creation of the podcast! This milestone included both the recording and editing of the podcast, so it really embodied the ‘Create’ competency. One of the first things I did was interview Sarah, a high school student from Washington State. Sarah had a lot of really useful information, and her interview really helped bring the podcast together.
The final edited podcast, seen in GarageBand.
The next step was to record the other pieces of the podcast, and I found myself making lots of small edits to make the podcast easier to understand.
Then, I edited everything together, including Sarah’s interview, my recordings, and music that I created. I wanted the podcast to have an investigative theme, so I tried to make the music fit that theme. The editing process was difficult, and started to become tedious, but I’m really proud of the final product, and what I’ve created.
The last milestone was also part of the ‘Create’ Competency, and it was this blog post!
Overall, I am really proud of the work I’ve done on this podcast. I think that the way I’ve been able to focus on current events, and aspects of those events I’m interested in, throughout this project, has been extremely valuable. Looking back years from now, I will actually have a tangible product to remember this tumultuous time in my life, and proof that I was actually getting involved and informed. That’s more than I can say about many other important historical events that have happened during my life. I think this project has given me a good understanding of not only the curricular competencies, but also the state of our world right now.
Thank you for reading my blog post!