Our theme for this grade 10 year in PLP is identity and our first major project for maker has definitely shown that. We have just finished a unit that was all about sharing the stories of all sorts of different people. The goal of this unit was to get stories from peoples lives and create a huge data base to help spread the stories of these people. This is all based in the Story Corps mission. The final part of this unit was something that we had never done before. Instead of a just exhibition that we would present a project that we had done to people that showed up, we were going to interview people that were there.
The work we did that led up to the exhibition helped us prepare for what we would have to do. The first thing we did was research about Story Corps and different ways to interview people. This helped us lead up to our first interview which was with our grade 12 partner. This was the first of three interviews that we would be creating and editing. The topic of this interview could be anything we wanted it to be and we chose the the theme of childhood and high school.
The second interview that we created was with a family member of my choice. For this one I chose my mom and asked her “ what is something that you would like people to know about you?” Her answer to this was all about her traveling and visiting places all over the world. So that is what I asked her about and it sounded like she had a good time talking about it.
The final interview that we had to create was the one at the exhibition we were partnered together with another group and then made a n ordinary room in our school into a comfy relaxing area where we could sit down with people and talk about their stories with them. The theme that I chose to ask these people about was their childhood and some of the things that they learned from it.
This interview was the one that I had the most fun with as it was something completely different and it had a connection to me as I am a child now and I even learned a couple of things from the interviews. Out of the three people we interviewed we could pick one or mash them up together and form a story with all three. I included two out of the three people in my podcast to create a stronger effect for the stories they were telling. Some people did this and some people did not but after this it was time to pack everything up and edit it to make it sound good. We have been through a couple of revisions to make this as strong as possible and I am very happy with the final product. I think this unit gave me a much greater understanding o different people and all sorts of things that they had been through. It also helped me understand better ways to talk to people that I don’t know and different ways of editing audio. I really enjoyed this unit and I hope the trend continues through the rest of the year.
