So, basically there’s a world-wide pandemic, if you haven’t heard of it, you’re clearly living under a rock, or something even bigger than a rock. If you haven’t heard about the oh so famous corona virus (or COVID-19), you’re crazy, let’s just leave it at that. 

We recently just finished a project in our maker class called Witness To History. In this project, we made videos that would explain how a certain community has been affected by this period of social distancing and self isolation. This project’s driving question was “How can we, as storytellers, tell stories of our community during this period of physical distancing?”.  The community that I chose was actually the majority of the Deep Cove community for that matter since I chose fitness as my subject. But first, before I get more into that, let’s go through the milestones we did to get to my final product. 

For our first milestone, as practice, we made videos in iMovie using those trailer examples that they give us. The movies were supposed to be about what it was like before the gold rushes came along (so it was also a stepping stone for our GOLD! project) when the amount of fur being sold was going down and was being replaced by gold, the new “trend”. Here was my video:

Be an Empowered Learner: How might I use technology to learn more?

I think that I did pretty well with this competency because I didn’t just show what we were supposed to have in our videos, but I included some comedy which I think always makes things more interesting and fun to learn. 

 

Next we made our story telling diagram, which would help us narrow down our ideas and form our videos in a story form. Here was mine:

 

Be an Active Digital Citizen: How might I use technology to connect to the world?

I think that I could’ve definitely done better in this competency because I could’ve made my storytelling diagram a lot more detailed and I could’ve added more stuff to the denouement because I only had about one sentence in there. 

 

In our next milestone, we made our own music that we would play in our video, I ended up changing mine in the end but here it is:

 

Be an Empowered Learner: How might I use technology to learn more?

I think I did pretty well with this competency because I became more familiar with GarageBand and how to make my own music. Even though I did changing it for my final video, it still sounded pretty good for one of my first songs that I’ve made myself. 

 

In our fourth milestone, we started to become more visual and think of what we really wanted to see and have in our final products. Here was my storyboard:

Be an Empowered Learner: How might I use technology to learn more?

Be an Active Digital Citizen: How might I use technology to connect to the world?

I think that I did pretty well in these competencies, My video didn’t really end up looking the same but I think that it was still a good blueprint for what I wanted my video to look like and what shots I wanted to go out and get for my video.

 

Next was our actual final video! Here’s how mine turned out:

Be an Empowered Learner: How might I use technology to learn more?

Be an Active Digital Citizen: How might I use technology to connect to the world?

I think that I should’ve done more interviews because this was about our community and not me. There were a couple that I could’ve tried to incorporate if I had more time such as one of my neighbors who is in his 70’s and does water skiing for a hobby or one of my teammates from my soccer team. But overall, I think that I still did well with my competencies because my video wasn’t too long but just enough to get my point through and educate the viewers on how Deep Cove was handling COVID-19. I also enjoyed that I added a personal touch to my video where it was me talking in the frame for my conclusion because I always like to do that in the videos I make. 

To conclude, this project was great for me to change my perspective to a more positive mindset on this whole situation because all I used to think before was not being able to see my friends or play soccer on my school team since our season was just starting.