Posted on September 21, 2017
Science 101
So we just finished our first science project of the year. The project was based around lab safety, what not to do and what to do. The films had to include three or more example of what to do in a lab, and the film production (angles, lighting etc…) had to fit the criteria.
Before hand we had to complete a safety worksheet that could help us get a good idea of what we had to include. Some of the safety questions where kind of obvious, but there were some that we didn’t know so in the end it was probably pretty useful.
Once we finished the worksheet, we got into groups and figured out what three situations we wanted to use. Obviously the video had to be fun and entertaining, so we also had to brainstorm some ideas. In the end we decided to have the video about kids experimenting and there mom correcting there mistakes. We thought we would stick with that theme because it would make it easy to incorporate humour and at the same time be informational. For our three (four) situations we used…
-Watch out for electrical cords and water because they could spark and create fire.
-Wear safety goggles and tie hair up.
-Don’t mix random chemicals, taste or smell them,
We used our iPads to film everything, and as far as the script goes we did improv most of the time so it would seem more natural. Afterwards put all the raw clips into iMovie, and created the fire effect using explain everything. Take a look!
Everything turned out pretty well in the end, although we could have improved our lighting and angles everything else seemed to have gone well. During class we showed them and critiqued, here’s our criteria sheet the teacher filled out:
Overall I was proud of my project, and it really seemed to teach us some important rules in the lab!
Posted on September 17, 2017
What Started WWI?
Many people have came to the conclusion of some very contreversial theory that started WWI. There are some very bizarre theories out there, but i believe it was caused by the “arms race”, for three reasons. One being, it caused major tension between larger european alliances ,another being because it created the want for power and stronger machinery and weapons between countries, and finally because the small war that was sparked before hand, led into WWI.
Before we get into all those reasons, lets talk a little about what the “arms race” actually was. So in the last quarter of the 19th century (1875 and onwards) is when industrilization was becoming stronger and stronger, and it was safe to say the that Germany was leading the empire of steel production and Great Britain was there competitor. All this was starting to improve the development and expansion of fleets, railways and many other forms of transportation. With that feild starting to develop, it created a ripple effect and soon the production rate of weapons where starting to grow. This created a type of competitive spirit between alliances and an outbreak of fear across the countries.
As I was saying before, the arms race caused major tension that could have been a leading factor of why WWI began in the first place. Think about it, when two great nations are competing to find the most powerful, mass produced weapon that could potentially wipe out a nation, would you be scared? For much smaller nations that fear created tension, which created unwanted and confusing alliances.
So now that everybody is feeling threatened because of the powerful navies of Great Britain and the strong and effecient army of Germany they are feeling the need to produce stronger weaponry. Countries like Serbia were creating very powerful machinery but not at a fast enough pace, other smaller counries started doing the same. Soon enough almost every country was feeling threatened and felt a need for power and control. With many cases in our everyday lives the need for power and control is never a good thing, and can always spiral out of control. By now you may be wondering, but why is everybody worrying about control if nothing is happening? Why does everybody feel the need to protect themselves? What does any of this have to do with starting WWI?
What actually happened next was what lead armys and nations into The Great War. Most of the strongest empires like Germany and Great Britain felt there army was the strongest, and the only way to prove this was, well a war. So it was decided, the two nations (Germany and Great Britain) would have a war to see who was stronger. Although the German government needed some influence to agree, in the end they followed through on the plans. Once the small war between the two nations began, the smaller ones started getting even more nervous and felt more and more threatened which is more of a reason to increase there weaponry production rate, armys and navys. So now all the sudden you have the beginning of a small war between two large empires, countrys that have large armys mobilized and allainces between practically every country. All those things are tools that nations can use to wage war, without them no country would even dare to think about any sort of war. The small war and tension sparked an idea of a bigger war, known as The Great War.
No war is ever started without strong countries and powerful weapons, and what was the motivation for those powerful weapons and empires? The Arms Race. It all comes back to exactly that, and everything leading up to it.
To visually explain the events, causes and other theory’s of what caused WWI, I got into a group (I will link there posts here) and created a video. We used a whiteboard and iPad tripod to film, then we cut everything up in iMovie, and also recorded in iMovie.
Enjoy 🙂
Posted on September 15, 2017
Camp Capilano
In my other post called “SMART Goals” I talked about how last year we focused on visual videos (movies) and this year we are focusing more on the audio component (basically podcasts) Camp Capilano was an Intro to this years podcast projects, and also helped us work on our teamwork skills.
To start off this trip, we where given an hour to complete a challenge. This challenge was based on reality show intro scenes. Basically before hand we were shown 4 different reality intro scenes (the part where they introduce characters) there were lot of patterns throughout the intros. For example they never had any audio, each clip showed the characters interests, hobbies, careers. With that knowledge, like I said before we had an hour to complete an intro of a reality scene, using ten different characters, under 45 seconds and the character hobbies and interests had to be clear.
We had a group of five so each person got to play two characters each. Our ten characters were:
-sporty
-shy
-yoga
-nature lover
-energetic
-foodie
-tech guy
-jock
-flamboyant
-flaky guy
Some of the characters were super easy to represent, like for the nature girl we just made her hug a tree. But some others like foodie or flaky guy were a little harder to represent. Another challenge was the time limit. Although we made it in in time, it helped us improve our team work skills because we had to work together to figure out everybody’s jobs to finish in time. Besides that I think it worked out pretty well, obviously we can always revise but I think for the amount of time we had it went pretty well.
Afterwards we got settled into our dorms, ate lunch and then were given another assignment. The assignment this time was to do the exact same thing but through audio. This was obviously a lot more difficult, but less time consuming. The biggest challenge was trying to represent the characters interests and emotions through audio. But once our group brainstormed for a while, we thought we could represent each character through there tone of voice. This ended up working pretty well! We had some trouble coming up with each characters lines, since each person only got 6 seconds of time. Overall I think the point of this exercise was to learn how to not only represent characters visually but also through audio.
Our final project of the Camp Capilano trip was a little different. We had to create a podcast on identity, and a story that makes your identity. This time the time limit was a little longer, we had the whole night. At first my group decided to talk about story’s we could talk about. We decided to go into the more sad direction by talking about times our family members could have died, and how that changed us as people. It was a hard topic to talk about since we didn’t know which direction we wanted to go. But overall we had good ideas and if we had a little more time it could be improved.
This trip was a great start to the year, because we not only got to do some projects but we also got to improve our team work skills and bond with our class. The trip also helped us get a good idea of the year to come!
Posted on September 15, 2017
Smart Goal Setting
We just finished the first project of grade ten, now this one was a little different from a lot of the projects we did last year because this time it was an audio not a visual. An audio project is basically a podcast, whereas the visual was more of a movie or video.
This project was apart of a planning class, and was based on the topic of goals and smart goal setting. This project started out by setting a goal we wanted to attain throughout the year. It could be anything from improving work ethic to your attitude during school. My first goal I set was about having more confidence in my work, we then brainstormed and worked off of those ideas to create our own SMART goal.
What is a smart goal?
S- Specific
M- Measurable
A- Attainable
R- Relevant, Rigorous, Realistic, and Results Focused
T- Timely and Trackable
Once we got a good idea of what smart goals were and how to create them, we created three. One for our “in school goals”, another for our “character growth” and finally for our “out of school goal”.
We started with just a sentence for our main idea, then we shared them, and brainstormed until they fitted the SMART goal criteria.
My first goal was about staying focused during school. The tricky part about coming up with these goals is that you have to have a cause for them, to find a solution and a goal to fix the habit. For example since my goal was staying focused, my cause for being unfocused was stress and not enough sleep and my solution was going to bed earlier and staying on top of things.
Now that you pretty much understand how we create our goal, you can take a look at my finally copy of the written part.
The next step to this process was turning the goals into audio. I used SoundCloud to record, and put together. Once my audio was complete the teacher assigned us to do a visual to go along with our goals, it could have been a picture, video, drawing or collage. I chose to go with the drawing, which I then inserted into the SoundCloud so everything was together and you could visualize it while you where listening.
Here’s the final audio and visual product!
Goal #1 (inside of school)
Goal #2 (character growth)
Goal #3 (outside of school)
Overall the project helped us see what things we wanted to improve in our daily lifestyle. Hope you enjoyed following me through my first project of the year!
Posted on June 20, 2017
Greatest Moments in Canadian History
Today I’m going to talk little bit about “Great Canadian Moments in History”. Over the past month or so we’ve been talking about moments in important moments in history. I think that most of the time history is defined by something that effects the future, ex. World War II. To make great history something has to be given up in some sort of heroic way in order to make it great. for those reasons i believe that the greatest moment in history was the confederation.
I don’t think many people remember what the confederation is so i’m going to start off by explaining that before i get into anything more confusing. Lets start at square one, so what does confederation really mean?
So all of this started with a man called Lord Durham, he initially mentioned uniting both in his report on the 1837-38 Rebellions. The British Government agreed with Lord Durham’s idea, which sparked some inspiration of a confederation. The act wasn’t to popular in the maritime and french speaking colonies but never the less the British government agreed with the plan and followed through.
The decision to unite was contemplated during the Quebec Conference, during this conference there was a agreement formed called “72 resolution”. A little while later many provinces had passed the agreement and Canada was formed! Overall basically a group of people start to figure out a way to attach the two Canada’s, upper and lower. What you just read was just a summary of the confederation, but If you desperately would like to read a little more about some specific events that took place during that time click here.
Everybody may have different opinions but i think that the confederation was the greatest moment of Canadian history. There are many obvious reasons like for example it’s basically what brought us together as a nation, brought more land, resolved a lot of differences, got rid of all our debt and brought way more resources to our market.
Like i said before history is made up of events that effect the future of a nation, community or small town. So the confederation not only brought our nation together and effected the future but also got rid of all the debt that some communities where holding on to. The confederation was also what payed for the Railroads that not only brought transportation but also provided more recources for them.
Beleive it or not the Confederation also provided peace and saved many resources and lives of militants. You may be wondering how this was possible, well as may know America was involved in a civil war. Since British colonies didnt want anymore war confederating created a strong independent government that had a strong military defence, ending in less of a chance of wars.
To represent how confederation effected history I created a representation of some positive outcomes of the confederation that helped lead a path of great history. To put this all together I used wordification:
During this whole process we had to create a character card. This character card could be a person of your imagination or a real historical figure. The only criteria was that it had to be somebody that effected the Cariboo Gold Rush. My character was a bartender that worked in a small town that was effect by the gold rush. For this project i put all the text and pictures in pages, and i edited my face into the persons in eraser and superimpose
Posted on June 19, 2017
T-POL’s
You may not recognize the word T’POls but there basically just SlC’s, now if you still don’t know what SLC’s are you need to do some catching up.
The only thing different from the other years is that the driving question is…
Why do you feel you are ready to advance to the next grade?
Anyways let’s get on to the information, so before I get into my growth mindset, what I’m most proud of, future goals and what I learned I want to talk a little bit about my goals I set during my last SlC’s. So last time I talked about how I wanted to read at least one book a day, I want to update my blog posts more often, and I want to improve my writing. If I’m being completely honest here I only really followed through with one, updating my blog. I felt like over the past few months I have been uploading posts at least a day or two after the assignment or event. Although I didn’t follow through with reading one book a month I did end up reading at least 4 books. Now honestly that doesn’t seem like a lot to the normal human being but for me, it’s an immense improvement.
Anyways enough about that, now I want to talk a little about why I think I should “graduate” grade 9…
Not only have I completed many assignments I have grown from each one and revised as I went along. For example, the Franken stuffies project, the end result of this project was meant to be an iMovie this was a contribution to both humanities and Maker block. From various projects, I have seen a pattern in my work, my audio. Each time I make a video especially this one, I seem to somehow mess up the audio. If its stuttering, tone or volume something always goes wrong. Now I have never really noticed this until I reviewed all my work from the past few months. This proves that I know what I need to work on in the future and that I have grown and taken my revisions and turned them into a positive learning experience.
In Math and Science, I have felt that I have grown as a learner in many ways. For one I have become more and more independent in studying for both math and science. I have also realized that a lot of the time I have found myself looking at math problems or science labs in different perspectives, this not only improved my grades but also left me more independent as a learner and individual.
The ‘What I carry project’ which was basically a keynote presentation for health and career where we had to explain 10 things that make us up. This has opened my eyes up to the tools I carry every day and has also shown me that every piece of your personality makes up you. For example, when I was listening to one of my peer’s presentation she talked about her anxiety and how she sees it in a positive way. She said that if she didn’t have her anxiety she would be a totally different person, maybe it would be a good thing or bad thing but either way she felt happy the way she was. Aside from that I also learned many everyday presentation skills and how to use Keynote.
I also have shown leadership skills this past month by taking on a challenge. This challenge was blue sky. As you all already know I went to talk to little kids about the challenging subject of why the bees are disappearing and what will happen to our world without them. Many people may not see this as a challenge but I do. It was challenging for many reasons, for one because I had to translate all the knowledge I had gathered into a simpler form for the kids to understand. I also had to make sure that what we were discussing wasn’t too hard hitting for them, or somehow depressing because it was talking about how most of our crops would disappear. Although all of those factors were a reason not to take on this challenge, I thought of it as the exact opposite. Overall I was impressed with the outcome and proud of the challenge I had taken on.
So at the end of the year, every project was a positive outcome, whether I learned from it, grew as a learner or was overall proud of what I had accomplished. I think that if i could improve one thing It would probably be to have a little more fun with each project, I have found myself a lot of the time stressing over not being creative enough. I think the key to stopping this would be to open my eyes to new perspectives and ways of representing things. But overall I have felt that even though some projects might have failed I have put in lots of effort into each and every one. This is why I think I deserve to advance to the next grade level.
Posted on June 18, 2017
Cloudy Skies
If you’ve been up to date with all my blogs, you would have seen this one coming. This is the last official blue sky of 2017, click here to see the last one.
So this time we were given the topics of blue sky about a week before spring break (which was in March) This year was a little bit different from the rest, we were given four different age groups to target. Seniors, Pets, tweens and finally babies and kids. For each age group, we had to find a problem and try to solve it, the solution had to resolve in three prototypes. Each prototype had to be tested out by that age group that they chose.
A while ago I saw a Cheerios commercial, it proved that bees were an important part of our everyday life and that the world would change a lot without them. This got me thinking about how many people actually knew about what bees do for us. I thought this would be a great blue sky idea, the only problem was that it was probably impossible to solve the bee crisis in less than a month. I had to come up with an achievable idea that would target a certain audience group. With a little bit of help, I came up with an idea. The idea was that I was going to come up with an education plan for young children to teach them about the importance of bees. Since this project was slightly bigger than most, it ended up being a partner project with my friend Kate.
The first step to this was researching factors of an engaging presentation. Since we were going to have to present to young kids each time the presentation had to be extra engaging. Our first prototype was okay since we didn’t want to show up to a class not knowing if the presentation was good enough, we decided to peer critique the first one. Anyways, take a look for yourself,
Overall our classmates told us that everything was good it was just that we had way, way, way too many words on each slide. And that maybe getting rid of those words could help out with the engagement of the kids. With the research and experiences from people who have come into our classes, we found out that it’s actually helpful to break up some sections with some worksheets so that the kids don’t get disengaged. So, in the end, our presentation included a few worksheets, keynote and finally some seeds. We decided to include the seeds because we wanted to make the kids feel like they were helping out, and hopefully to spark up a conversation with their parents about what’s happening. Here’s the second prototype!
Finally the last prototype, for this one we were given a feedback sheet from the actual teachers of the classes we went to talk to. The feedback sheet basically talked about our tone of voice, engagement, kids understanding, and quality of information. Once they were done filling it out they basically told us our presentation skills (tone, clarity etc.) were very good and we kept the kids engaged. The only thing they recommended was to include a little more information about how the pollination works, and how crops need their nutrients (since that’s what affected them the most) So after we added a few extra slides about the pollination steps, importance etc… so here it is, the final prototype!
For the exhibition night, we decided to create a poster board which would include our trail of thought, ideas, and lesson plan. We also planned to include our keynote and seeds as a hands-on part of our presentation.
Finally like always we had to create a theme to the exhibition since our groups target audience was babies and toddlers we put together a little daycare themed room. We had everything from animal crackers and juice boxes, to toy story and Lego.
Besides everything else, this year was also a little different. In the end, we had to write a little journal about the whole process, it started at the very beginning of our idea process, to our very last prototype. When everything is done we will be adding it to a iBook, hopefully, it will be up soon so that everybody can read it!
Overall everything went really well, and I’m really proud of all the work we have done throughout the project!
Posted on June 8, 2017
How Safe Is Too Safe?
As you know from my many other blog posts we started a health and career unit. This time around we learned about workplace safety, and how safe is to safe. We actually talked about some statistics in class about work place injuries…
•On average, 27 young workers are injured every day in B.C.
•On average, 7 young workers are permanently disabled each week
in B.C.
•Young males, in particular, face a 48 percent higher risk of injury
than the overall working population.
Then we watched some videos with scenarios of accidents that could happen in your career. Along with that we answered some questions about how we think it happened, how to avoid it and also who caused the accident. I honestly didn’t even think about those things actually happening until I watched those videos, I also couldn’t even believe the statistics of the accidents that happen every week. That kind of proves that people don’t actually think about these things or think they even happen until they’re exposed to you.
In the end the information was actually really important. And it’s probably a good idea to do some more research on this topic before you begin a new job.
The next thing we learned about kind of contradicted what we had just learned, it was about being too safe. We watched a TED talks about child safety, when i think back to when I was younger i realized that I lived my life just safe enough. What I mean by that is my mom and dad always kept me safe but they wouldn’t make me wear things like elbow pads or shoulder pads when I went biking, or put some type of leash on me when i went skiing. I think that what my mom and dad did was the perfect balance of safety, because obviously you want to have fun when you grow up and not worry about bruising you knee when you go biking but you also want to be safe enough.
I also read somewhere that the more things you are exposed to when you are younger, the more things you’ll be immune to when you are older. For example if you are exposed to certain bacteria when your older it could help you feel less sick when you get the flu. So I guess sometimes being too safe can be a little unsafe!
Posted on May 31, 2017
My Career Fairytale!
For our new unit on health and career we had to do some mini projects on our future, personality’s, traits and what our future careers will look like.
We just recently did a little project of things that we wish we where gifted, or talented at. We where told to wright a little bit about what we could do to achieve those gifts. Anyways here’s my paragraph, hope you enjoy it!
Many people feel that to them gifted is being intelligent, good at sports or gifted with the way you look. To me being gifted is being able to make peoples day, or make them smile. I think that maybe if i try everyday to not talk about people in a bad way, or say hi to people in the hallways and smile even when people don’t smile back, it could make a significant difference in how people feel. I feel if I just do one good thing everyday it could turn into a habitat which then would turn in to a talent or gift. To me this would be a great gift to have, and would benefit everybody in every way. This may not be a “typical talent” or gift that people would normally choose, but for me this is as important as anything else.
Next we took some quizzes about our future careers, we had to answer multiple questions in three different segments. In the end we got some feedback from the questions answered by us and the website gave us a career most suitable for our skills. In the end I got an avionics mechanics, aircraft instrument and licensed practical nurse along with many other things…
We had one last mini assignments before a end of the unit project. This one was focused on the events in our life and some events we want to take place in our future. I started out with making a diagram of some good and bad events starting with my birth. Next i started to think about the events i wanted to take place in order for my future to go the way i want it to.
I think the first event I want to take place is taking a gap year and see the world. I know that once I start school i probably won’t be able to travel as much as I want. Next I want to get into a good school and spend as much time learning about what I love, because just like the traveling I might never be able to learn again. The third event I would like to take place sometime in the future is to move to at least one new place around the world. I really don’t have any preferences to where I want to move to, I just know that someday I would like to experience what It would feel like to live someplace new. Somewhere along the line I would like to have an internship as a veterinarian to learn more about the skills needed and have some guidance along the way. My last goal for the future would have to be spending my life doing the thing I love, because if any of the events that I would like to take place don’t happen I know that as long as I’m happy I’ll be absolutely fine in the world. I know that all my goals are a long stride for me but as long as I am determined and focused with everything I do, I know my life will turn out exactly how I want it to and I’ll have no regrets.
Once we got an idea of our talents and achievements or future goals we where given an assignment to creat an iMovie of our fairytale future! The requirements are pretty simple, all we had to do is introduce the iMovie with “once upon a time” and “they all lived happily ever after” we also had to introduce ourselves and how we where going to get to our goals.
Since I was a kid i have always loved animals, I also really enjoy sciences so I put two and two together and since then I’ve always wanted to be a veterinarian. I also always wanted to have a career that would benefit the world and people or other living things. Anyways i decided to use explain everything to put the movie together then import it to iMovie to cut up all the clips. I decided to make my video a little more to the point so my goals where clear and my thesis wasn’t confusing. So here it is…
Overall throughout this project it really made me think about my future and what I want to do when I’m older. But then again the quizzes helped me open my eyes to other careers paths and helped me create a skill list and identify my strengths and weaknesses.
Posted on May 31, 2017
What Are Some Things I Carry?
As you already know, if you read my last post “I am what I eat” we started a unit on health and career. Part of this unit had to reflect on what we carry, these things could range from physical things to mental things like sportsmanship or leadership.
For this project we had to show 10 things we carry and present them in a keynote, we also had a few requirements for our project…
For my keynote I decided to have 5 mental, and 5 physical things…
Physical:
Water bottle
Earphones
Tylenol
Pens
iPad
Mental:
Optimism
Sportsmanship
Passion
Memories
Ideas
For each slide I decided to choose one picture to represent the slide, and a magic move for the picture to appear or disappear. I chose a colour theme and put everything together, here it is!
Overall this project was really cool because it helped us open our eyes and really think about the things that we carry on a daily basis.