Tagged: Worldview

Identity again??!

Hey everyone! In this blog post, I will be talking about Identity. Now why exactly am I talking about identity you may ask? Because I haven’t talked about it so much since our first project from grade 9, This Land Is Us. Well, in our newest project, we are preparing to create our own individual podcasts. So, we started from learning all about podcasts and the most important parts that make them so interesting. Little details like formatting, editing and music all play a huge role in the making of a podcast. And, our podcasts are going to be based hugely on some certain aspect of our identities.

Side note: I challenge you to count how many times I say “Identity” in this post. Because I bet there’s going to be many. 

 

Identity is a complex and confusing thing. But to simplify it for you, it’s really just everything that is either a part of your life or something that represents you. As I said, identity has been a big part of our class discussions and activities. So, let me show you my own description of identity, and one that a few of my classmates and I put together as well.

Now the first part of our group description is pretty self explanatory, but let me explain the second part for you.

“Your background plays a role in who you are today and who you are today plays a role in who you are tomorrow.”

What that really means is that your past, present and future actions affect who you are. Or more specifically, your identity. 

It can be something big that represents who you are such as the place you live or even something just as small as your favourite ice cream flavour. Just really every little thing that’s apart of your life or could represent you, is part of your identity. Your worldview, (something that I haven’t talked about since grade 8!) is also apart of your identity. 

 

 

 

After having many in-class discussions and activities to help us better simplify the meaning of identity, we took it to the next level by creating something called a bio-poem. Even with such little words, somethings in this bio-poem can mean many things.

For example, Covid-19 has hugely impacted my identity and the way I live, as has it with everyone else in the world. Where I live also impacts my identity a whole lot because it impacts who I’m friends with, my values, my beliefs and what my day to day schedule is like.

In this project, another assignment that applied a lot to our identities was the “Letter to myself”. These letters were to be written to ourselves at the end of this year. We wrote about goals that we’d hope to have accomplished, things that we would have liked to have made changes to and of course, incorporated points on our own identities as well.

While and after creating my podcast, I’m going to focus on having it push me to grow and improve as student, teammate, friend, daughter, sister and just a person overall. And so I’m hoping, when I do look back at that “Letter to Myself” in June, that I would have achieved those goals, not only from just my podcast, but from my experiences, actions and opportunities to come.

Another part from the milestone that is this blog post, was making a GIF. This GIF had a picture of ourselves and included symbols that represented our identities. Here’s mine!

 

It’s The End Of The World! More Worldview

 

Hello! Welcome to my blog! Wow, it has been about a month since I have even touched or looked at this blog! So, you may be pretty darn intrigued by this title. You may be asking why I  said « it’s the end of the world »? Well, have you ever heard of the song « It’s the end of the world as we know it» (by R.E.M.)? Here is the link to the music video if you haven’t seen it.  Well, our teacher, showed us the music video for the original song then, showed us a version of the song sang by Michael Stipe (the singer of R.E.M.), Stephen Colbert and an appearance of James Franco at the end. They rewrote the lyrics to be a sort of revision of that year for New Year’s Eve. Now, guess what, we were assigned to do the same! Except that the lyrics have to be rewritten as a reflection on our change of worldview from elementary to secondary school. Here was how I got there.

1. Need to know questions 

At first, the only information we had was about rewriting the lyrics and that we had to sing the song as well. Here was an opportunity to learn or discover more things about this project. Surprisingly, lots of the questions had to do with the singing part because, none of us were looking forward to it.

I think that this was a great idea to do in any other project as well, it really helps you understand the project more. 

2. Crusades Paragraph

Next step in our project, was to learn about the fall of Rome, the crusades, etc. After we read many documents and watched a film, we had to answer a question: how did the Crusades encourage a cultural exchange to shift worldview? In the answer, we need to choose one side of the conflict (Muslims vs. Eastern Europeans) and focus on how their worldview shifted. 

I quite enjoyed writing this paragraph, I chose to write about the Eastern Europeans, there was so many more options and things to write about than the Muslims. 

3. The Book of the Lion Role Sheets

Next, we read a book called “The Book Of The Lion” which was about the Crusades. We had three weeks to finish the book and each week, we completed a different role sheet. The roles were the connector, the investigator and the illustrator. This Milestone was super fun, I really enjoyed expressing my creativity and going deep into them. 

4. Triple Venn diagram

Moving on, we now started to look into the actual project, we were assigned to create a triple Venn diagram showing the shifts of worldview from me, my peers and experts that we read about in a few articles. I think that my change of worldview was much different than my peers’ worldview change for example, the language that I am learning in. 

5. MindNode

This assignment was still a way of brainstorming on things that shifted our worldview but, this one is using a different app (MindNode) and has to have 3 examples for each aspect of worldview. It took quite a lot of time to think of good examples but, I knew that when I start writing the lyrics, it will obviously make it a lot easier. 

6. Photo essay, Song lyrics & Final video

Now onto the last step, the creation of the final product. At first, I was assigned to write the lyrics of the song, then we record me singing the song, next, our teacher made a plot twist, my table group (Ryan, Thomas and Rhiann) and I now had to combine all our song lyrics to make one song and record that as well. Next, each member of my group made a photo album of pictures of us in grade 7 & 8 to combine those into a photo essay. I think that the hardest part of the song(s) was the singing, my group and I had trouble staying on beat and making the audio sound the same. 

In conclusion, this project was quite enjoyable, even though, it was a little bit of a struggle at times, I still loved expressing my creativity in that way.  The thing that I probably struggled with most was the MindNode, finding examples for the economy aspect. One thing that I found very fun was the Role sheets and not to mention writing the lyrics. 

 

I apologize for my individual song sounding weird, I was sick and my voice sounded even weirder without auto tune…

My worldview!

 

 

Hi and welcome back to another blog post or welcome if you are new. In PLP Humanities, my class and I just finished a project on worldview. But, what is worldview? Why is it important? Worldview says it in the name, your view of the world. For our first task, we looked at some worldview vocabulary to enhance our understanding of this subject. Here are the notes that I took: 

The second task for this project was to brainstorm on our worldview, this did not mean our worldview overall, we had to brainstorm on 8 different subjects: travel, sports, gender, education, technology, cultural traditions, family and friends. To do that, we used an app called MindNode. Here is the assignment that I completed: 

For our third task, we had to choose 3 of the subjects that we brainstormed on to explain our worldview, I chose to do sports, friends and family. Then, we wrote a script. In my script, I wanted it to tell a story, I also wanted the story to be realistic and a true story. Here is my script:

For our fourth task, we discovered this app called Explain Everything. Our teacher, Ms. Willemse showed us all these cool things that we could do on the app but, most of the students in our class (including me) did not have the capability to do the majority of those cool things (because, we did not have the “advanced” version yet)  in-fact, we only had the option to draw and could only have one slide. So, I did my best, even though, every time I even tried to change the color, it froze my screen and said “preparing” for at least half an hour and it kept moving around my drawings and putting them to different places. 

Here is my first draft, it’s horrifying, you will probably cringe, you can’t say I didn’t warn you.  

Here are some clips of my drafts 2, 3 and 4 (for draft 2, I still had trouble with the audio but, it was fixed after). Click on this link:

 

For draft #5, that’s where it improved quite a lot. You can see that I have used more of the app’s tools like animation especially. Also, I apoligize in advance for the cheesiness.

 

I loved and hated this project. What I really loved was to learn about worldview (my own and others) and to learn how to use a new tool for  future projects/assignments. What I hated was the app (Explain Everything), it always glitched, moved my drawings to different places and especially at the begining where it said “preparing” for at least half an hour. It was pretty frustrating at times, but I didn’t give up!

That’s all for now.

-Lexie😁