Hi and welcome to my reflective blog post for the “Greatest Canadian” project. This project is one of the projects this year that will be based around podcasts which I think is pretty awesome. although I definitely haven’t mastered making podcasts yet, and it can be very frustrating trying to edit them sometimes. Every time I make a new podcast episode I get better and better so I can’t wait for the next podcast episode I will be making, hopefully it’ll be easier. This project definitely had a lot of work and learning in it. All the in class notes, stepping stones and milestones meant that this project had lots of writing and use technology in it. This also means I had plenty of time and opportunity’s to demonstrate the competencies to ms. Maxwell and also answer our driving question. Speaking of the driving question for this project, it was quite different then other projects driving questions in the past. The question was simply, “who is the “greatest” Canadian?” Normally our driving questions are more abstract and aren’t answered directly in the project. This driving questions answer was the base for our podcast episode and our job was to convince ms. Maxwell and other listeners that we were right. My answer to the question was, “Todd Fiander, AKA Digger, is the greatest Canadian because of his contributions to the community’s, development and evolution of the sport of mountain biking in BC, Canada and the rest of the world”. You may also notice my answer to the question is focused around mountain biking  and this is because our answer is based of the podcast we designed in our early project called project podcast. So with that in mind let me tell you how I came to this answer through my work, learning and understanding of the competency’s. 

Our first point of focus in this project was all about Canadian history, and the significance different events and people had on it. We started by taking lots of notes on different Canadian events throughout history. This was apart of a series of stepping stones based on 5 of the chapters from our text book, as well as a variety of videos about who other people considered to be the greatest Canadian. Not only did we learn about where, when and why these events or people came about, we more importantly, for this project,  learned about what made them historically significant which helped start my understanding about a part of one of the main competency’s for this project, establishing historical significance. So know I knew about some historically significant events and people throughout Canada. What I had to do next is learn how to establish for my self if an event r person was significance. The main thing that helped me do the worksheet we did about the people we thought might be the answer to our driving question. 

Significance worksheet.

As you can see this worksheet gave us a base idea of the three main things that make an event or person significant, how notable it was at the time, how widespread and long ;acting the effects of it were and how symbolic it now is. By putting the different people I was thinking might be the Greatest Canadian mountain biker through these three criteria I narrowed it down to Todd Fiander. This was start of how I decided upon and began to prove my answer to the driving question. By combing both this worksheet and the knowledge I already had about significant people or events in Canadian history I could really demonstrate that I understood the competency for establishing historical significance. I also think that this is on of the biggest areas of learning that I had this project. 

The next main part of the project that I moved onto was the writing and planning stage of the project. I knew who my greatest Canadian was, I knew the main things that made them a great Canadian but I still needed to gather information about them and then layout the facts to convince my listeners I was right. I started by doing lots of research online about my individual so that I had the greatest understanding and comprehension of their life. Of course this was the main place to demonstrate the competency comprehend text. I got to show that I had indeed applied different strategies and used different resources to comprehend text about my individual. Now I just needed to lay the facts out in an engaging story. I did this in a rough draft of my podcast script. But it was still missing something, the second part of the comprehend text competency, express an understanding of how texts use features. Usually text features are pictures, graphs or quotes. I was writing a script not an essay though, and that meant that I had to be a bit more creative to demonstrate my understanding of text features. This brings us to another major part of the project, the interview. Although this interview looked like a text feature on paper, in my podcast it would obviously be a recording. So I had to find someone to record. Originally I settled on Brett Tipie, a pro mountain biker and friend of Digger unfortunately he never got back to me after our first conversation. Luckily I got in touch with another amazing interviewee, Sean Brassil. I tried to be as prepared as I could be for the interview but I still made some mistakes. The location I chose had a garbage truck that came by and created some unwanted ambience. The biggest mistake I made though was messing up the recoding for the start of his introduction on who he was. Every time I do an interview I always think I will get it perfect but I always come out thinking I should hav prepared more. This is a skill ill have to work on in the future. Overall all I still came away with a great feature of text for more script and eventually my podcast.

A section of my script.

Finally all I had to do was use my technology, being garage band, to construct all my interview, research and writing into a podcast. This task almost perfectly fits the description for the empowered learner competency which made demonstrating this to to challenging. Making podcast is knew to me and the rest of my class mates for this year so their was definitely quite a learning curve. I think the funniest mistake I made was assuming that the numbers in garage and were seconds, so I worked really hard to make my podcast 8 minutes long. In reality they were bars not seconds, so I need up with a 16 minuet podcast which was on longer side. I spent lots of time editing but I now consider my self a Garage band expert, not quite as good as Anders yet though! I definitely learned a lot about making podcast and editing and I ended up with a podcast I’m proud of but think I could improve a lot in next project. 

Here’s my podcast:

Overall this was a great and challenging project. I think you can clearly see that I demonstrated all the competency’s for this project as well as answered the driving question very well. This is possibly the longest blog post I have written in all of my PLP history an dI think that this is because of how much learning and information was packed into these five weeks. Thanks for reading my blog post, the next one will be coming out in no time.