Welcome to the annual TPOL. A time of merry making because school is almost over and of reflective thought. 

This year has been a very busy year, for everyone. And we got a lot done those year. Just to put that in perspective, here’s the total number of assignments we did: 

 Humanities: 107

Scimatix: 71

Maker: 23

PGP: 17

Which gives us a grand total of 218 assignments, that we handed into showbie. And today I have chosen a select few of these assignments to show my awesome journey through the year and divided them into a few categories. 

1# Videos 

Last year’s focus for the year was still images. I.e. infographics, advertisement etc, this year’s focus was moving images, i.e videos.

Here you can see my first video ever made in grade 9: 

And here, not the most recent video we have made, but the one I am the most proud of, which part of our heritage minute:

To me, this two projects exemplify the difference between my knowledge/skills in video creating and editing from the beginning of the year to now. 

If you look at the first video, which was related to our identity unit,  you can tell everything is wrong. A) the video is in portrait mode, sorry for that Ms. Maxwell and Ms. Willemse. B) the audio is not clean and C) the video is filmed in one consecutive angle the whole time. 

That video is what we call a F.A.I.L or First Attempt in Learning. And even though whenever I watch that video I mentally face palm, it’s a good example of how far I’ve come.

(Here’s a short e book about all the different skills we learnt in video making this year and a post about it too)

2# Performing and leadership 

In last years TPOL I barely talked about a little experience I had called D.I. Mostly because last years D.I. was not a time I wished to relive. But this year’s experience was really quite different. 

In the videos category I mentioned the drastic difference between first drafts and last drafts. This year’s D.I. Performance was the same. 

Our regionals performance wasn’t terrible, but it definitely wasn’t great. We placed in Second out of three groups. So, not the best not the worst. 

Here you can see our scores for the first performance, our goal going into our provincial’s performance was to improve by 20 percent. 

Which we did in every single category, except one where we had already scored high. D.I. Provincials is really a highlight of this year for me. We placed in second again, but this time we were competing against much higher performing teams and many more of them. 

Here you can see our improvement chart for regionals and provincials.

I think these two experiences show a skill that I think I’ve improved upon this year. Follow through and honestly just the skill of doing it even if I was scared of it or intimidated. Last year if you asked me to find improvement between provincials and regionals I think I would be hard pressed to do that. Because, last year I avoided D.I. altogether in the time frame between the two competitions. 

My group for D.I. this year was Amelia, Aedan, Izzy and Luc. It was a pretty solid group. The issue was that there were 3 of us that were “strong leaders” so we sort of had to learn how to share power and not monopolize control of the group, something I had a lot of difficulty with last year and even at the beginning of this year. 

A few more project that I felt I succeeded at working in groups and performing were:

– Matter Talks

– The Victoria Tourism Video

– And an ongoing project, Blue Sky

3# Goal setting

This year we had a whole course dedicated to goal setting. (PGP, click here to see a post about it). Which means I got a lot of practice doing it. At the beginning of last year we had to make a little photo with a quote of what our goal was for the year, here is mine: 

And I have kept on working on that goal for this year. Math has always been a huge challenge for me. It was just like my brain went into full on panic mode each time I had to do it. The most recent unit in Scimatix was about linear graphing and algebra. 

I’ll be honest, for the first week and a bit of this unit I did not understand what was going on at all. Like at all, so I went home and watched a bunch of videos one how to do it. That actually worked. I used goal setting techniques to keep working on this goal with a series of protocols for what I would do if I didn’t understand what was happening

#4 Improvement

And finally the last skill I want to improve on. Creativity. I always turn in my work and I feel that it’s very often “solid”. That’s because I’m playing it safe, next year I want to allow myself to take creative risks and occasionally take a gamble at things. I think that by staying in the PLP I will be able to explore those possibilities in a way that I simply couldn’t in the regular school stream. 

I really did learn a lot about story creating and how to execute stories, how to film and edit and create, take feedback, think outside of the box etc. I want to thank you all for a wonderful year and I hope to see you again next year.