Take 2, Nationalism!

Hello and welcome to my final blog post for this project. If you haven’t read my first blog you should stop to read that HERE. Well, now that you’ve read that let me catch up on what I’ve been doing since January 19. Last time I was still far away from answering the question but now I have answered this question in some fun ways, let me tell you how I got to answer the question…

Just in case you forgot the question is: How can an understanding of nationalism help us to understand today?

To start this half of the project we learnt about Louis Riel and the Indian act. I had a lot of previous knowledge on the Indian act however, I never knew that nationalism had anything to do with the oppression of the indigenous peoples of Canada.
To show our learning we made an explainer video, this explainer video had to show the continuity and change with the Indian act. Part of continuity and change is identifying different groups of people so it really helped me when we did a debate about Louis Riel in class. It brought up both sides to the story and how Louis Riel impacted different groups of people. We also watched an episode of “8th Fire”, a documentary about continuity and change with the first people’s communities. Most of the information I knew before watching the video but it was good to re-learn it and hear about real people’s experiences and stories, it gave me a better perspective as to what some people’s opinions are on indigenous issues.
Because it’s a sensitive subject I made sure to check my sources. Throughout this entire project, we have been citing all our sources which I’ve never done much of, it was hard to remember to save the websites I would get information from. I still have to work on making it a habit to save my sources. We also had to put all of our sources into MLA format, I was not very good at doing them and I would often forget a part or put it in the wrong order so I started using a citation machine and I found that very helpful.
Even though I never fully finished my explainer video I feel like I could finally see my progress with video making skills. I feel very confident I using keynote to create videos now. Using keynote to even just make parts of my videos has proven to be the most helpful tool on my iPad. You can see my rough cut here:

Now to finally sum up our videos and information as well as answer the driving question we made a final cumulative video. And a great bonus we got to pick our partners, me and Annie look at each other immediately when we heard and we ended up making probably one of my favourite videos ever. It took us a little bit of thinking to come up with the idea to create a music video, to sum up, our learning. I was hesitant at first because I knew it would be a challenge but we dove in headfirst and got right to work. We split up the work which looking back was a GREAT idea, I would create the song and Annie would create the video. Since I’ve only ever made a song once last year with the help of teachers and peers I had to do a lot of problem-solving. The first challenge: finding a song to recreate. I knew I should write a song with simple lyrics that our parents would like, now you might think that this would narrow it down but it did not at all so I kinda just had to pick at random and hop right in. I ended up picking the song “Ain’t no Mountain High Enough”, it had a good beat wasn’t hard to sing and had clear lyrics. Now came another challenge: written the lyrics. They had to make sense but they also should rhyme and work in the song. Trying to fit a month of learning into a three-minute song was already a struggle but now having to make it sound good… let us just say it was a long weekend. This is what our brainstorm looked like:

Now it was time to record the song, lucky my dad has a podcast and already had a professional microphone. So I set up in my room and recorded my own voice for 4 hours. You can see my set-up here:
I got the song recorded and sent it to Annie to start to line up our previous clips.
I feel like this video is a time when I really showed how I was an empowered learner. Annie and I stepped out of our comfort zone and used resources to create a video I would have never even thought to be possible to create at the beginning of this quarter.
And I feel like the video we designed is also a great example of our learning because we fit so much information into a 3-minute song, and I feel like we used our previous clips really well and they made it a lot easier. We only had to make a couple of new clips to use in our video.
Now you’ve heard all about how we made the video you probably want to see the video, well good news! You don’t have to wait anymore, here is our video:

If you remember way back at the start of this project I interviewed my mom and she didn’t know much about nationalism ( and if I’m being honest I didn’t either) but now I’ve been showing her all the videos I’ve to create and this time I got her live reaction to my music video. In filming and making this video I don’t think I learned anything but I think it was one of my favourites to create. Watching my mom react and getting to edit it was so much fun. I’ve also seen how much I’ve improved since the beginning of this project. This video in my opinion is the most entertaining, I enjoy watching but I don’t know if it’s because it’s my mom or if it’s actually funny. I will let you decide for yourself if it’s funny or not. Here’s my reaction video:

Here you can see another example of keynote is the best app on my iPad. The title sequence I made at the start of the video was all made in keynote. I also loved getting to zoom in on my mom when she made a weird face, I will definitely be using that skill in my future videos.
Now that I’ve finished the project I can answer the question: How can an understanding of nationalism help us to understand today?
This is not one of those questions you can just ask Siri, we had to go on a learning rollercoaster to answer this question.
Understanding nationalism helps us understand the world we live in, by teaching us about the impact and influence it has on decisions made today and in the past.
It also helps us understand why there’s still division within nations today.
And understanding our past helps us to understand how our world today came to be.
Nationalism helps us understand today by helping us understand different nations and how they affect us and the world we live in.

So now we’ve made it to the end of the longest project ever, lets recap..

That’s all for this project! See in next project:)