For this project that I am going to share today it started out kind of weird but as the project evolved,  it got better and better. I definitely learned a thing or two about not only about Canadian history and how Canada came to be what it is today, but also I learned more about video editing and green screening which may be surprising because those two 

topics have nothing to do with each other. It will all make sense very soon.

Like most other projects in PLP, we started with some background information. For this project we had to read some textbooks to understand what confederation was and why other colonies did and did not want to join it. This learning strategy (learning from text only) is more difficult for me to digest the information because it is just reading. It is, however, a lot more direct than learning the information through something like a video. Considering we only had three weeks to finish the project, I assume this is just the most effective way to understand our topic.

Next, our class was split into six colonies ( Canada East, PEI, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, and Canada West). My group was Newfoundland ( Thomas , Anders , and Jude ) These groupings would be important for the end of the project. Once we were more confident with our knowledge we had to put together a list of reasons why colonies should or should not join confederation. Since each colony also had individual ideas, demands and ways of living, each group had to take those things into account when making decisions as the goal of the project was to make it as realistic as possible to the original confederation conference. 

This is also where I can show that I used the Curricular competencies of Evidence. One very important part of this project was deciding whether or not the information we found was valuable and not just irrelevant facts. Using our knowledge on how to asses historical evidence, my group had to go and find articles, websites, and other resources that would support our colony when it came to the confederation debates.

As a group, our proposal for Newfoundland’s demands for joining confederation had to use historically accurate information and then make six demands for our colony that would benefit Newfoundland. If we decided that we would join confederation some of the demands had to be more important than others; for example protection from other invading countries that could try and take our land. Britain had protected Newfoundland for a long time, so now our group would have a decision to make. Do we join confederation and become a Province of Canada and lose our support from Britain, or do we not join confederation and continue to get support and protection from Britain? This part of the project was very interesting mostly because it made our group really think about how Newfoundland could survive challenges like economic troubles if we allied ourselves with the ‘wrong’ people. It sounds a bit confusing but what I am trying to say is that we had to think about how the actions we took at this pretend conference could impact the colony we were given in the years to come.

We complied all of this knowledge into a keynote document which we would then present to the other colonies at the Charlestown Conference; these would be our main reasons for joining confederation. I think our keynote also showed what we believed was the most important issues and concerns with our colony and personally it think it showed how we view the current state of our colony and how we could work to improve it by making these demands and working with others.  I was proud of the way my group was able to work together to find issues that we all thought could be fixed and then finding a way to communicate that to the other groups.

The next important part of the project would be the actual commercial that we then had to make. This would be shown in the final conference ( London Conference) and would include our revised demands. After the previous conferences we had more time to think about our demands and how we could change them to better suit our colony, so the commercial would have all of our carefully thought out ideas on what we want for our land. My group did a very good job of coming up with some better requests as well as video ideas. We only had about 30 minutes to film, so the planning that had to happen before we started filming was also very important and that is something I think we did well. We created a plan for how we wanted to present our ideas and demands that would involve every group member and be clear for the audience.

Then when it came to filming we were very effective. Knowing we only had half an hour my group worked quickly and efficiently to get all of our shots done. We worked together to create short scripts to help the people acting and gave feedback on things that could be better. We even figured out how to use the green screen effectively in our video to show our message to the class. It was difficult at first because we did not know how to film,  but it got a lot easier as the video making went on. Here is our final video.

Overall I think the video came out really well, our message to everyone else was clear and our demands fair. There were still parts, however, that could have been improved upon. For example our videos length was three minutes instead of two which was a requirement that we completely missed. We did go back and revise it, to make make it shorter and resubmitted the video. 

I think that my group worked well together to complete our given task, but we also did well in going deeper into Newfoundland’s history to better understand what actually happened and also to think about what could have been improved in the negotiations around confederation. We thought about the most essential elements and how we could format them into a video for others to understand as well.

That’s all for now.