Hi everyone! In today’s mPOL, I will be talking about what has been happening throughout this past half-year. Since we have three PLP classes, there is a lot to talk about! I am in grade 8, so this is my first year in PLP, and my first mPOL, so I had a lot of improvement in the past four months.

In humanities this year, we did three projects. One about advertising, one about the classic novel the Outsiders, and one about poems. In the advertising project, Medium is the Message, we learned about advertising, working with our iPads to create our own advertisement, for an actual company in Deep Cove. We mostly used Canva to make our ads, because it is an amazing app to make posters in.

This was our first big project, so it was one of the first times I was using my iPad. One of the biggest things I grew on this year was my technology skills. My technology has improved by a considerable amount throughout the year, learning new tricks about the iPad, like how to take better photos, how to draw better with Sketches Pro, how to use Canva to make better posters/advertisements, and even how to use Keynote to make better final products!

In maker, we learned how to use the iPad a lot better. For example, at the start of the year, we had some classes focused on how to use Showbie and Basecamp, the two apps we use the most with our iPads. In late November and early December last year, we learned how to draw with our iPads in Sketches Pro, and take better photos with the professional camera in the iPad using very good tips and tricks that I didn’t know before. Taking these photos, we also learned how to edit them to make them look even cooler! Using apps such as Snapseed, we could add cool effects, or take things out of the photo using magic eraser!

Another project we did in maker this year was all about becoming a PLP learner. We made user manuals to let people know about who we were, made Memojis (yes that’s a thing) of ourselves, and presented all of this to the public through a walk-through presentation, where you could stop by someone’s final product and see what that person is all about!

At the start of the school year in scimatics, we did a project that involved watching our screen time, and used fractions to represent it. We used numbers for our calculations, and used some cool tricks that helped us out a lot, like how numbers can automatically find the mean/medium/mode of a row for you.

One of the main things that I have improved on throughout this past half-year is my blogging. Since I started PLP, my blogging has enormously improved. Even my first blog post to my most recent cyclocross post has a massive improvement! At the start of the year, we learned that we were going to make a blog, and with no clue how to make one, we learned how to make a good blog post, with links, photos, even how to cut paragraphs and make them short!

Here’s a link to my first blog post

Here’s a link to my latest cyclocross blog post!

You can really tell the difference, even from the title!

We also learned how to make our blog posts short and sweet with our latest project in maker. This project was all about getting better at blogging so that I can blog like a boss. This was a four-part series where we blogged about one topic that we really liked, and wrote short blogs about that topic, going in-depth about what it is and why we like it.

There are two massive things that I learned from this past half-year, controlling the iPad, and blogging. I think these two things helped me a lot throughout this half-year, and it will definitely help me out for the next half-year! Thank you for listening to my mPOL, and I hope you have a great day!