PLP usually has two exhibitions a year, a Winter Exhibition and a Spring Exhibition. This blog post is all about the Spring Exhibition, and my experience with it.
I initially thought that the Spring Exhibition was going to be a lot like the Winter Exhibition- PLP 9 showcases one area of learning in a performance, and everyone spends the majority of their time waiting around. However this was not the case, and it was actually quite the opposite. PLP 9 had centre stage at this exhibition, and it was our job to design pretty much half of the exhibition. PLP 9 was divided into stations and rooms and on top of this we also had the grade 8’s to work with, so we had a lot on our hands.
The station I was assigned to was Technology for Learning. The people in my group were Ben, Cale, Erik, Faith, Ines, Noah, Patrick, and Theryn. We were to showcase our learning in the annex, which is across from the main PLP room ( the “fishbowl” ).
Technology for Learning is a broad topic, and is important in PLP. After all, we use technology to learn everyday. The first thing we did was make a story spine, which is like a justification for the validity of our station, in story form. We explained a “story” about how PLP students grew to learn to use technology to learn.
Directly following the story spine were the planning forms. We made a pitch form, which is a basic list of everything we were planning to do, and how we were going to do it. We started by creating a story to tell question, basically a driving question for our station. Our question was “How do we use technology to deepen our learning?” We then proceeded to answer that question with this block of text:
“We’ve used technology in all of our projects from making videos to keynote presentation. Technology allows us to present our understandings and learnings in different ways to reflect on a multitude of different projects such as our documentaries, animations, and medium is the message and overall enhance our learning for the better.”
I’m not sure this entirely makes sense, but at the time it seemed good. We had a bunch of other questions to answer on our pitch form. Here are a few:
– What food will you provide?
This was a highly controversial topic of discussion, and at times it seemed like the most important part of the exhibition. We ultimately decided on “Pagerade” and “Keynoterade” ( orange and blue water flavouring in the colour of the apps Pages and Keynote. It did not taste good. )
– What costumes will you wear?
Ines proposed that we all dress like the late Steve Jobs, and the decision was unanimous. Unfortunately, not many of us seemed to have the statement pieces he wore ( Black turtleneck, jeans, New Balance 992’s ) and so everybody wore a mix of Steve Job’s-esque clothing.
- What interactive experiences will you have?
Our interactive experience wasn’t very ambitious, but we knew we could do it, so we did. We dedicated a part of the annex to a green screen, and let visitors take their own green screen photos or short movies. You could even blow yourself up with a missile in the “Action Movie” app. ( This is only an assumption. I wasn’t assigned to that part of the room. ) I think we could have done something more inventive or original, but to be fair it was good idea at the time.
Our room was finally beginning to take shape. Most of the exhibits were based on our video skills that we used in our latest project, and the rest was given to the grade 8’s to do whatever they wanted to do ( It was kind of a mess, and not many of the grade 8’s topics were related to video skills ).
I was responsible for very little in my room. Unlike most others in my room, my job was to stand in the general area of the exit and, uh, thank visitors for coming. On the night of the exhibition my role was eventually changed slightly so that I was helping at the music table, and explaining how we had used GarageBand in our project, Your First Film.
For all the preparation we did, the night passed by really fast. To be honest it kind of felt like my role was kind of inconsequential, and a lot of the night was just saying the same things, and doing the same actions. I’m assuming there was more to the exhibition outside of the grade 9’s part, but I didn’t really take the opportunity to go around and see everything.
There’s not really a driving question to the exhibition, so I’l be answering my stations driving question, which is “How can we use technology for learning?” PLP kind of revolves around using technology to learn, so this question is kinda relevant. To answer this simply, I’ll just say that using iPads to learn has been convenient, and in comparison with regular schooling its been so much better. There is also the element of trust. PLP trusts students to learn effectively with iPads.
Ultimately, the Spring Exhibition was kind of uneventful. Compared to the Winter Exhibition it was much larger and on a grander scale, but I think some of what PLP 9 did was overlooked. I liked the Winter Exhibition more because I had an important role, and because PLP 9 kept our exhibit simple, and in a performance format. I think I would give this Exhibition a 4/10. It sounds harsh, but for the amount of hype and preparation leading up to the night of, it just seems like too little individual involvement.