So to start the year off in PLP, we worked on a World War 1 unit. You may have noticed a post earlier in the year about how it started and that was a small part of the unit. The unit went from Canada leading up to the war, all the way to the end of World War One and the start of the League of Nations.

To start the unit off we leaned about what Canada was like before the war started. Touching back to the end of last year when Canada was created, and then right up to the beginnings of the war.

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the mini projects we were assigned throughout the unit was a little project on how we believed the Great War actually started. We worked in groups of approximately 3 people and had to make a visual to represent our thesis. For this project I worked with Ethan and William. If you want to learn more about this project just hop on over to the separate blog post I have on it here.

We then got into looking into the war and specifically on the battles where Canada had an impact on the result. The 4 main battles we looked at were The 2nd Battle of Ypres, Vimy Ridge, The Somme, and Passchendaele.

We were then assigned our project for the unit. We had to find a Canadian Soldier from WW1 using this website. We then had to do research on him and connect him to the unit’s driving question: How did WW1 shape Canada’s identity as a nation? We then had to create a podcast about said research. I picked a soldier named Hugh McDonald McKenzie. He was a recipient of the Victoria Cross which made research a bit easier for me. Here is my first draft of my podcast:

After critique from the teachers came back kind of negatively to most of the class, we started learning about different types of podcasts and ways we could make our podcasts more interesting. We also had to do a little assignment where we listened to the first 30 seconds of 10 different podcasts to find good ways to start off a podcast. Alex and I decided that a podcast with 2 people talking and having more of a conversation would be quite a bit more interesting to listen to. So we decided to work together to make one great podcast.

To do with the fact that we listened to the introduction of a bunch of podcasts we had to do the same. We had to make the first 30 seconds of our podcast:

After some critique on it Alex and I realized that we really had to make the whole thing more conversation-like, because what we had done for that intro could be very easily done by one person. So we re-wrote our script and went to record the whole thing.

Overall I am pretty happy with the podcast. There were a few times where if Alex and I had known our own script a bit better it would’ve sounded better. However I didn’t think it was super noticeable. Anyways that’s it for the unit on World War One, I expect to see you again shortly on our next big unit.