“Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.”
Why am I ready to advance to the next grade?
This year I have learned a lot, but in this presentation I will focus on three competencies I feel have improved this year and why this makes me a qualified learner for next year.
Self-Regulation:
During this project, I started a zettelkasten which has helped me remember ideas and focus on school more as well as keep me on track throughout other learning experiences.
During this project I worked in a group setting for a majority of it, and I found it improved my connections with other students in the class as well as my collaboration skills.
My evidence of improvement here is from the Great Debaters project that we completed at the start of the year. During this project, my work underwent LOTS of critique and I learned how to accept and apply critique much better.
In the latest PLP project, we explored how fear can be used as a tool for societal, technological, and governmental change; mainly through the lens of fear of nuclear weapons, in the quest to ultimately answer the driving question “How has fear been used as a political, defensive, and cultural tool to shape our society?”. So come along with me as I learn how nukes have shaped the world today.
This project started off strong with some over-the-holiday reading of the book Hiroshima by John Hershey. Once we were done reading and got back into school, we learned about a brand new PKM system called a “zettelkasten”. A zettelkasten is basically a second brain, consisting of many notes that can be made on anything you observe or learn throughout your day. It categorized notes into three categories:
Literature notes, which are summaries of a text and its message/themes without drawing your own conclusions
Permanent notes, which are specific ideas or concepts that you can create or learn
Fleeting notes, which are quick jots of any random thought you have that you should look back on again later and process into one of the other two types.
Now the notes are very helpful on their own, but the zettelkasten I used really shines because of the connections. Each note has a section at the bottom filled with my own thoughts, idea, links to sites or other notes, and much more. I found when I was making my final product it was easy to use this section to add more depth to my thoughts just by looking at the connections page.
I decided to make my zettelkasten a space in craft, as I already stored many personal notes in there before the project. I was actually able to convert many of my own “fleeting notes” into processed permanent notes after the project was over as well. I usually abandon most of the documents of my learning after a project, but with the zettelkasten system, I found myself actually keeping on using it after the project ended and retaining far more information than I think I would’ve normally.
The first processed note added to my zettelkasten was a literature note on the book I mentioned far above, Hiroshima. It my first time making a literature note, so I had a little trouble, but in the end making a note on the book helped me gain a much deeper understanding of the text, which made it worth it.
The next step of the project was to create three or more permanent notes based on the reading we did. Here are mine:
I found making these permanent notes, surprisingly, very enjoyable. It was the first time an awhile a school assignment really made me think critically and create something of my own.
Although the building knowledge section of any project, especially this one is important, I will not include much it in my blog post. The book Hiroshima was an awesome read, and we actually read another book “fallout” which depicts the story of families in a bunker after a nuclear strike. We also read or watched many secondary texts to gain a more complex understanding, including an article about America’s reporting of the bomb dropping, a documentary series about the Cold War, and the movie “Turning Point”.
After what felt like everything about nukes had been learned and recorded in my zettelkasten, I started work on my final product, starting with the development of a narrowed-down inquiry question.
I started off knowing I wanted to look into the technological aspects of nuclear bombs, but ran into problems when I tried to connect it to the driving question. After some time and lots of thinking, I came up with this: How Does the Fear of Nuclear War Influence Scientific and Technological Development?.
After creating a more clear goal for the information in my final product, I started outlining how I can share the information I learned. I wanted something engaging (at least something I would find engaging) and also thought provoking. I decided telling two stories, one what actually happened, and one an alternate reality where nukes were never invented, would be compelling and fit my goals for the product.
For the next two weeks I worked on my product, ultimately leading to my answer to the driving question: this presentation
Thanks for reading my blog post, and hopefully I will see you again in the next one.
The latest PLP project, we explored voting, governmental systems, social contract theory, and the behavioural patterns of humanity to answer the driving question: How do we convince young people that they should vote? So follow me today on a journey through the ups and downs of those project.
We started off our learning by reading the book “Lord Of The Flies” by William Golding. It is a classic novel that explores themes of inner evil, innate human urges, and how successful and unsuccessful societies form.
Here is my reflection and chapter summaries: https://carrots-warn-h8i.craft.me/bFvKU9p9NfwzlZ
I honestly found the book very good: I liked how the author made no unintentional choices and every action is meant to reflect a counterpart in modern societal patterns. Every word is intentional and the book forms a powerful allegory for social contract theory and brings up an interesting debate about innate evil and good in every person.
I do, however, think that this step of the project was not helpful in moving towards answering the driving question: when we later explored the reason why young people don’t vote, the three main ones were
1: Not knowing how to vote
2: Thinking it doesn’t make a difference wether they vote or not
3: Not having the time to vote
So after knowing these three main reason, I ask you, how does a deep understanding of lord of the flies help us learn to influence young people. Common topics the book tackles are mentioned earlier, and none of them coincide with influencing young people to vote. Also, to some extent, the points above are all valid to an extent. Voting does take time, and some people need that time for other things. Also, when you cast your vote it is just one of millions that all have very little effect on their own. Fundamentally if you didn’t vote the election’s outcome would very likely be the exact same. So really the main thing we should focus on in influencing the young is teaching them how the system works this segways nicely into the next part of the project. This is why I think most of this project wasn’t actually helpful in the answering of the driving question.
This segment was started off with a comedy video that explains the Canadian government in a funny and engaging way:
Canada Explained
My main takeaway from this video was actually not about the Canadian government, but rather about how engaging the presentation was: I was laughing almost the whole time, which actually helped me retain the information much better. This concept will also be important later when me and my group create our own presentation.
After learning everything there is to know about Canadian government structure, we showed our evidence of learning with a Kahoot quiz.
Now that we knew the information needed to educate young people, it was time to learn how to teach them it. In my opinion, this section is the most critical to a good presentation: no matter how much useful information is in your final presentation, if nobody is listening it doesn’t matter. So we learned about how the most popular modern marketing trends and audience engagement strategies work, and we tried to incorporate these into our final presentation.
The style we used to incorporate our audience was a presentation with an interactive voting activity throughout. We split our group to research six individual issues that are very relevant right now and then found each political party’s stance on the topic and compiled all of this into one document.
After this, we were finally ready to create our presentation. We worked hard to make graphics, videos, and an overall engaging and informative presentation, and then it was time to present. Unfortunately, our presentation fell slightly short. We had a sick group member who couldn’t come, our timing was off and we didn’t rehearse enough beforehand. If I did this again, I would strive to add more entertainment value to the presentation: ours, even after our efforts, was quite boring. I think comedy would be a useful tool and I think probably the biggest change I would make.
Thanks for reading my blog post! If you want to read this from my groupmember’s perspective check out their blogs here:
In the latest PLP projects, we learned about finances and presented this at the 2023 spring exhibition to answer the driving question: “How Do I Support My Career Life Choices?”. So without further ado, here is the post.
We kicked off this project by talking about budgeting and our financial future (bank accounts, investing, etc…). I created a budgeting chart and logging onto MyBlueprint, a site that helps students with finding jobs, university, school, and finances.
MyBlueprint Tasks
After learning some more context information, we moved on to the stage part of this project: the Stock Market Simulator. Everybody downloaded an app that track real life stocks and simulate stock trading for free. we tracked our stock success using weekly reflections, and this was what we would present at the exhibition.
First we researched stock market terms so we could be better educated on the stock market. I honestly think this didn’t help at all because the top money makers used a very simple strategy to make all their money.
I made around 3000$ from the starting 12,000, and got 4th place in the class.
Then we presented this at the exhibition, but in my opinion the stock-related stuff was to hard to find and ask about to guests, so I really only ended up marketing my podcast and not my stocks. I really liked all the ideas of the exhibition, but I felt like the execution was a bit rushed. I learned a lot though, like how valuable investing and interest can be among other things.
Thanks for reading my post, and I’ll see you in the next one.
Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.
Welcome to my grade 10 tPOL. In this post I will cover all my biggest learnings and achievements throughout the year.
The first project of the year was called “gold digger”. This project was about Canada’s history of gold rushes that built up the Canada we know today.
The first field study of the year was the Loon Lake trip. This was the second time we’ve gone to loon lake, but it was very different this time, with a workshop about personal productivity and growth.
The second field study of the year was to disney world, and on this trip we worked on two projects: the Power of Imagination and the trend videos project.
The last project I will talk about is the PGP project “Atomic Habits”. I learned more about myself in this project and also about how I can be more productive.
In this post, I will talk about the latest PGP 10 project. The driving question for this project was: “how does balance in my life create opportunities?”. So, without further ado, here is the post.
This project can be cleanly split into 3 facets of learning: atomic habits by James Clear, the 7 habits of highly effective people by Sean Covey, and positive brain training.
Positive Brain Training
Positive brain training is the act of consistently using your brain in ways that increase positivity and efficiency. This can be accomplished through meditation, exercise, being kind or grateful, and many others. We set a positive brain training schedule that looked like this:
Positive Brain Training
I felt that this process helped short term, but I didn’t train my brain consistently for long enough for long term results. But, I have started to keep journaling and noting routines because of this activity
The 7 Habits
You may recognize this book from another blog post I did long ago, but if you don’t or need a refresher, the seven habits are habits that anyone can implement into their life to make their productivity and overall happiness better. They go as follows:
1. Be Proactive
2. Begin With The End In Mind
3. Put First Things First
4. Think Win-Win
5. Seek First To Understand, Then To Be Understood
6. Synergize
7. Sharpen The Saw
These habits I think help simplify and objectify the process of improvement into clear individual steps, which I found very helpful when I first read the book. When it was brought up again, I used this as an opportunity to reflect on the habits and goals I set previously.
Atomic Habits
Now for the center piece of this project: Atomic Habits by Sean Covey. This book’s messages about how small things can compound for massive impact later was quite eye opening for me personally, and I really enjoyed reading the first 5-6 chapters. However as the book went on, I found it quite repetitive, and the way the author wrote was sometimes convoluted. Even with these minor gripes though, I have implemented many of these habits into my life such as workouts and making negative habits unattractive, and had noticeable improvements since.
And this concludes my post! Thanks for reading, and I hope you learned something. I would recommend anyone to try these self improvement strategies on their own as well. Bye
Recently, most of the PLP 10 class went to Disney world in Florida for a ten day trip. And we didn’t go there just for the rides (though they were a very nice extra), we had two projects centred around this trip: The Power of Imagination & Creating Trend Videos. This post will cover the latter, the trend videos project. In this project, I created five trend videos to answer the essential question: “How do I make effective personal design choices?”. So, without further ado, here is the post.
We started this project by creating personal productivity systems. The first step in making my system was to learn about the tools I already had: like things, calendar, etc… next, I cleaned and organized my physical and mental spaces and started creating time blocks in my calendar and checklists in my things. Then, I started on the next facet of this project, which was creating trend videos
Trend: a general direction in which something is developing or changing.
A the next step in this project was creating Disney themed trend videos: creating ideas for what our five videos could be, and writing it down for the next step. I came up with five ideas: a dance compilation, a street interview about people’s favourite rides, a fake interview and hotel room tour, a prank video, and a day in the life at Disney video. Once these ideas where written down in my craft document, I started planning out how I would create them.
I created a storyboard and planning table for each idea, as well as example material and extra details. Then, we went on the trip to Florida,
Or we would have gone to Florida, if our flight hadn’t been cancelled the night before. Thankfully, our teachers somehow managed to reschedule the trip for soon after, and the trip was back underway.
I filmed all my videos, but once I got home and started editing, I realized I didn’t film enough for one, and it wasn’t turning out how I wanted, so I pivoted and created something else instead. You can watch the final five videos on my YouTube channel:
Recently, most of the PLP 10 class went to Disney world in Florida for a ten day trip. And we didn’t go there just for the rides (though they were a very nice extra), we had two projects centred around this trip: The Power of Imagination & Creating Trend Videos. This post will cover the former: the Power Of Imagination. The driving question is “how do Disney theme parks shape and influence the cultural, economic, physiological, and social experiences of visitors”
At the start of this project we learned how to summarize and understand text better, and we worked on an assignment about a TED talk called the happiness advantage.
This didn’t have a lot to do with the project, but practiced skills that would come in handy for many future projects, including this one.
The next assignment, however, has everything to d with the project. We read an article from Smithsonian Magazine and crafted a summary the same way as shown above. Here is mine:
The next step in this project had us divide into groups to tackle each section of the driving question: cultural, economic, physiological, and social. I was put into the social interactions group. Each group had their own subsections for individual group members to research. My job was to create five PKMs (Personal Knowledge Managers) about the positive social interactions Disney cultivates for its visitors. Here are my five entries:
Then, it was times to start fleshing out our final product: our group’s video to answer the question “How does visiting Disney World enhance well-being, reduce stress, and provide a sense of escape and enjoyment for some visitors?” We created a flow chart to help clarify our ideas, and then started working on our screenplay, call sheets, and storyboard.
Thanks for reading my post! This is one of two blog posts I’ve written about my class’s Disney world trip. If you want to read the other one, click here. Anyways, that concludes this post, bye.
Welcome to my Transitional Presentation of Learning.
Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.
this presentation will show why I feel I am ready to advance to the next grade level.
I did six scimatics projects this year: game of exponent laws, correlation vs. Causation, chemistry Stories, metaphor machines, meiosis Models, and time is Money
There were six humanities projects this year: Case for a Nation, Working with Words, Revolutions on Trial, People and the Environment, and A War to End All Wars: Graphically Told
Hello, and welcome to another post. The driving question for this project was “how can we predict our finances for the future?”. To answer this question, I created a narrated video. So, without further ado, here is the post.
The final product for this project was this narrated video:
Final video
To make this video, I combined all the milestones from this project into this video. Milestone 1 was just choosing my topic. I choose to make my business about wood puzzles.
For the second milestone, I created a spreadsheet that shows all my prices, time, and mateirials required for my business to operate.
For milestone three, I created an equation to represent my earnings.
Equation
for the final milestone (excluding the video) I created a graph that show my earnings over a span of time.
Graph
And then I combined them all together and added some spice and made the final video.
Now, for the curricular competencies.
Understanding and solving apply multiple strategies to solve problems in both abstract and contextualized situations
All time, materials, and equipment are accounted for in the cost of making your product or performing your service.
My video includes all equipment costs and they are all factored into my math.
Communicating and representing: represent mathematical ideas in concrete, pictorial, and symbolic form
Linear equations are used to determine profit per transaction, hourly wages, and predicted NET earnings (minus deductions) over a year. Graphs are created, labeled, and explained.
I showed this competency by explaining graphs and equation throughout my video. My video contains labeled graphs, equations, and other statistics.
Connecting and reflecting: connect mathematical concepts to each other and to other areas and personal interests.
Video compares your new business to other careers and considers the value of your time, if your business can cover your costs of living/operating, and its sustainability/impact on the environment.
while my video does do this, I think it could’ve been done better by me directly comparing actual jobs rather than an average salary.
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