Welcome to my final blog post of grade 10 and all of PLP. This last blog post is my tPOL blog post or Transitional Presentation of Learning. This blog post will serve as a background to my presentation and will highlight some of the points that I will make in my presentation.
The first thing I want to cover is the seven habits of highly effective teens. This book didn’t resonate well with me for a few reasons. The first one being that the book was kind of a bad spin off of the original book Seven Habits for Highly Effective People, I later switched too reading this book after reading the first chapter of the Highly Effective Teens version. I felt like the book was also counterintuitive, the book talks a lot about how you need to be proactive and take action but because the book is so long and all of the workbooks on top of that it really felt like it was just a waste of time and not really a good way of practicing the Seven Habits. I also felt like the summery video was a way more helpful way of learning the Seven Habits and I feel like I learned more from that then the actual book. The information from the book was overall forgettable and just watching the video was an overall better way for me to learn.
Now I will talk a little bit about what works for me as a learner. The first thing that works really well for me is getting straight to the point I think that it is better then drawing something out over an extended period of time even if it means that you get less time to spend on individual aspects, I find that this makes things less forgettable. It also works for me when I am able to push myself to improve and do something even if I dont feel like it rather then just letting things happen and hoping that I improve. When I am able to improve myself it makes me a better learner.
Something that I thought was a good way to communicate my ideas was the podcasts. I find that podcasts are easier to get my ideas out and I dont have to worry about things like punctuation and spelling mistakes, which get me stuck and make it harder to write. It is also a lot faster and I dont get distracted very easily. I also find it easier to convey a message by using tone and by also using by using subtleties in speech.
in conclusion I think that there is both things that I have struggled with. and things that I have been able to do really well in school this year, and I believe that because of all my improvements, that I am able to advance to the next grade level.
Today I will be making a blog post reflection on Destination Imagination. This is a tournament where you have a challenge and you need to present a solution to the challenge in the form of a skit. As a team me and my pears Keenan, Nathan, Nya, Ryan and Julien we solved the scientific challenge for DI. The scientific challenge that we needed to solve was that there is a micro world where the characters have to enter it and find a mysterious object that they dont know what the use for it is. Then some time in the story they have to find out the use of the mysterious object. We also had to have 2 team choice elements which could be something like a costume or a skill. You also need to have 1 technical element like a machine. And 1 lighting effect. For my group we Ryan made a hoodie that I used as a costume in the presentation. We also for our other team choice element had Julien make our sound effects for the presentation. Then for our lighting effect we used black light to light up some of the things in the micro world.
Our solution to the challenge was that there is a flesh eating bacteria vibrio vulnificus that is common in coastal waters and kills a lot of people each year. The scientists then get shrunk into a sample that they got of the water with the bacteria and then find the anti body in the sample and use it too kill the bacteria that was in the sample with them. Its a little bit complicated but here is the video of our challenge so you can better understand it.
something that I learned while doing this is that it is a lot better to work together as a team rather than too try to do a large amount of work by yourself. I also learned the value of planning a lot before you actually start doing any work.
In conclusion DI was a pretty good experience. It taught me a lot about teamwork and it taught me a lot about problem solving.
Today I will be talking about our winter exhibition this year. If you haven’t stayed up to date with PLP we haven’t had a winter exhibition for 2 years. So for the teachers and some students this was a special event. this exhibition was about apology and the history of racism in Canada. we mainly focused on three events.
For this exhibition we only had 1 week to prepare which made all the class time a time crunch and we couldn’t waste any class time in order to get everything done. but before we talk about the actual exhibition lets talk about how we got to that stage. The first thing we did was studied the Komogata Maru, a ship out of India that was basically refused access to Canada because of a law that was passed to stop immigrants from coming to Canada. If you are interested in the details of what happened there you can check out my blog on it here.
The next event we learned about was the Chinese head tax which was a tax that you had to pay if you were Chinese in order to live in Canada. The way we learned this was we went on a field trip to china town to learn about all the hate crimes that accrued and how the Chinese lived through it. we also took a walk through Dr Sun Yat-Sen which is a garden in China town. here are the pictures that I took from this field trip.
The third and final point in Canadian history that we studied was the Japanese internment camps. This event happened during WWII after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. When this happened and America joined the war Canada would make every Japanese Canadian go to internment camps until the war was over, even though a lot of the Japanese Canadians had never been to Japan. We learned about this event by going to a museum and taking a walking tour of Hastings park where there was an internment camp. This event was the event me and my team based our project on for this exhibition, the task at hand was to make a memorial of the event and all the people that lived in it and died in it. The memorial we made was a house which was just a normal Canadian home, but with a clear glass floor and beneath there was the Japanese internment camps and there conditions. here was the 3d model that I made to show what the memorial would look like.
Driving Question: How might we use artifacts and film to show the significance of WWI?
This is me at the WWI Exhibition I had, and the Script of what I would say when you came up to my station. But how did we get up to this point? Lets start from Milestone 2 where we got our Artifact for the project and explained why our Artifact is Significant. My artifact that I chose was the Bullet Casing. Here is what I wrote for my Artifacts Significance:
After we explained the significance of our artifact it was time to make a video on the artifact and a soldier that we chose. for my soldier I chose Pte. Alfred Newburn, who was a Canadian Soldier from Victoria, during WWI. The Video I made Above is what I made About the Soldier and Artifacts Significance.
Curricular Competencies:
Establish Historical Significance: How do we make choices about what is worth remembering?
I think that I demonstrated this competency in Milestone 2 when I was writing about the significance of the bullet shell in WWI and why it is still significant today
Global Collaborator: How might I use technology to connect to the world?
I think that I demonstrated this competency when I was making my video. I think that I did a good job with using reliable sources to get my information and sharing it with the world.
Answer to the Driving Question: How might we use artifacts and film to show the significance of WWI?
I think that I used artifacts and film to show the significance of WWI in my video. I think that I did a good job with explaining the artifacts significance and bringing it back to today, as well as showing that it was significant to winning the war. I also think that I did a good job at putting that into a video.
Today I will be writing about my latest project in my Humanities and Maker classes. This is the final project of this quarter of the year. Lets go over the project. In this project we would make a new kind of video each week. This project was also my first ever project in PLP with 10 Milestones, each with the common goal of improving video skills, and learning about history and nationalism, The difference between the videos were the styles of them. Nationalism and history was the Humanities portion of the project, in this part we learned about history, mainly Canadian history, and the effect nationalism and history have on today. The Maker portion was all about expanding our video skills. Here was the driving question that we have been working on answering throughout the project: How can a understanding of Nationalism help us understand today?
we started out with an interview. Our task was to interview one of our parents to see what they know about Nationalism. My dad was a History minor in university so he knew a lot about this topic. Here is the video of me interviewing my dad about nationalism:
There were a few more video styles that we had worked on, there was a few common things throughout all of the videos. The first one being that all of the videos past the interview all had to do with continuity and change, nationalism, and historical events. I think I did a pretty good job with these things being incorporated into the videos I made, I think that I was pretty good at identifying the different historical events through the videos. A good example of this was in the Louis Riel documentary style video, where I think I did a good job with explaining all the different things that happened throughout his life. I think I did a good job with identifying nationalism in the video about British North America and the final video that we made which brought all the different videos that we made together, I think that an example of this was explaining the part that nationalism took within British North America.
The videos were all explainer type videos but with a few variations. One of which being a animatic video, which was our second video that we made. I didn’t completely finish the video, but that is ok because now I know how much time I will need to give myself the next time. On the other hand I think that I did a good job with getting information about the Crimean War for my video. I think that it was really effective to start by reading sources from museums and historians. Then look into the specific events with articles that focus on a certain aspect. Here is the video I made:
The next section of learning in this project was about British North America. In this section we had to make another video. This time the video was a tutorial style video, but not a regular tutorial video, in this tutorial video we had to teach 2 different things. For this, we had to take something that we were already able to teach, and use metaphors from it to explain how the British North America Act happened. For this I chose to teach how to backflip since I have thought multiple people in the past how to do it. I think that in this video I did a really good job at improving on editing. I think it was challenging to only have videos from the past for demonstrations of the backflip. Despite the challenge it helped with knowing how to take any clip and cut it down to show just what you want it to show. something that I really improved on was showing things that stayed the same and changed. I think I improved by telling a story and then pointing out what changed and what stayed the same. I also think I improved on camera work. It really helped me to have a layout of all the different angles I wanted and try all of them out with different scenes to see what worked best. Here is the video that I made:
The next big video that we made was a video about the freedom fighter and founder of Manitoba Louis Riel. For this video we had to make a documentary of his life. I think that this part of the project was the most up and down part. Sometimes it was really hard, and others it was very easy. A good example of this is the research part. It was pretty easy to find reliable sources of information, one of the more challenging parts was understanding some of the information, some of the information was easy to understand and some of it was a little confusing. Something that was hard to do was putting all your information into a screenplay. It was hard to come up with all of the information that you needed to tell the story of his life. But after doing the screenplay it was easy to talk about his life. I think that I improved my vocal parts of the film, it was really helpful to actually follow the screenplay and not just look at it a few times and then simplify it when your in front of the camera. I think another way I showed improvement was with storytelling. I really think I showed a lot of information in a short period of time. The video wasn’t finished because of the change of mind of how we were just going to hand in our rough draft. Here is the video:
Now it is time to move onto the last video that we made. This video was a video that would tell all the stories of the other videos. We had a few options for how we would do the video. The first choice we had to make was wether we were doing this project as an individual or a partnership. I decided to go with the partner option because it motivates me more to finish my parts when I have someone relying on me. The partner that I was with was my friend Dries. The second choice was what kind of video we were going to make, as a team we decided to make an explainer video. I think that this video was overall a pretty easy video. It was really useful to have prior knowledge of everything that you had to incorporate. And the execution of the video was not too bad. I think that it really showed all the video skills that I had learned over this quarter. I think that I improved on few different things. The first one being the way that I wrote a script. Before I would just write cues of what to say, this made it hard to speak in an engaging way and it made it hard to say everything that I wanted in one take. then when I started to write out exactly what to say and enlarge the key words, it made the process take less time. I think another thing that I showed improvement on was the editing. I think that I showed this by making the cuts as clean as possible with as little set movement and body movement. I think that I also did a good job with filming on different days and making them look as similar as possible. Here is the video:
Now I will talk about the final part of the project. For this part we were tasked with showing our last video to the person that we interviewed in the beginning, which was my dad. Overall the video was pretty easy. No need to make any script or anything. It was just setting up a camera and showing them the video that you already made and tell them to show reaction to it. I think the hardest part about the video was doing the editing. It was hard to show all there reactions in the editing, especially because there reactions don’t make any sense without context so I had to keep in some extra parts before his reaction. Here is the video:
Now lets answer the driving question which is: How can a understanding of Nationalism Help us understand today? Here is my answer to this: I believe that a understanding of nationalism can help us build an understanding of today because the past tends to repeat itself and when we see the way it effected us in the past then we can identify Nationalism and understand what effects it has on today.
today I will be talking about my latest Maker project called “Witness to History” for this project our driving question was can How we, as photojournalists tell stories of our community during this period of physical distancing? i will answer this at the end of the blog post. in this project we were tasked with making a photo essay on how covid-19 has effected a community of our choosing.
the first thing that we did for this project was learn about photo journalism. in this stage we watched videos of photo journalism to inspire us for what we wanted to do. the next stage was to practice photo taking. so for this our job was to take a few different photos of ourselves and everyday objects. here are the photos that i took for this part of the project.
the next thing that we did was do an interview with someone in our community and i chose to interview someone in my community named bari z. she is a grade 12 student who had an impact from there graduation. I thought that it was a good idea to interview them since i think that they were probably someone that had the most amount of impact from this virus in my community. here is the interview
the next step was to identify 5 different themes about the things that they said these are the themes that i identified are: people have become more sanitary, people are more cautious, people are more generous, people are more uncertain, she is more seperated from her family.
the next part of the project was to make a story board of what we are going to take pictures of. for this part we had to draw what we were going to take pictures of here is what i drew for my pictures
the next thing that we did was actually take the pictures and edit them and then put them into a book in book creator. then we presented it too a classmate for peer critique and the teacher for some feedback. here is the final draft of my book
now to answer the driving question which is can How we, as photojournalists tell stories of our community during this period of physical distancing?: I feel that me as a photojournalist told the story of my community through this project quite well. I feel that I did a good job with representing the feeling of my community through my photos. I feel like the people looking at the photos can tell themselves the stories just from looking at the image.
thank you for reading my post hope y’all have a good rest of your day!
today i will be talking about my latest combined class project. the project was a combination of Scimatics and my Humanities class. the scimatics portion of the project was learning about cells and diseases (i thought that it tied in really well with what is happening today in our world) and the humanities portion learning about different explorers from the 15th century. the first part of the scimatics portion was learning about what cells and diseases do to our body. the first portion of the humanities project was learning about how canada was found. the second part of the scimatics portion was choosing a disease from the 15th century, I chose to use the disease tuberculosis. i chose this disease because I thought that it was a pretty cool disease with the way that it attacks the lungs and what some of the symtoms are. for the second part of the humanities portion of the project we had to chose our explorer, for mine I chose francis drake. i chose him because i thought that it was cool how he was the first ever elplorer to circumnavigate the globe. (maybe also how his name was the easiest to remember because of the uncharted game that is based around him) the third part of the scimatics portion was to research our disease. i learned a lot about how tuberculosis (also known as TB) travels through the body and how it attacks the lungs and that it can spread through dust particals that are floating in the air. the next part that we did for humanities was making a story spine for what our comic was going to be about. the next part of scimatics was taking a unit quiz on cells and diseases using khan academy. now that we were done all the learning it was time to start making the comic book. for making the comic book we used an app called comic life. one thing that i really like about it, is how simple and easy to use it is. it is really easy to add pages and to add drawings and text bubbles and decorating the page. the only thing that i dont really like about it is how the drawings that i made in sketches pro were distorted and looked different going into the app. enough talk about the steps of the project. so here is my actual comic
now i will reflect on the core competencies of the project.
Scimatics:
Communicating: communicate ideas, findings, and solutions to problems, using scientific language, representations, and digital technologies:
I feel that I showed this when I was picking a disease that spreads fast due to it being airborne in a small space enough to infect an entire ship of sailors so they had to stop sailing and in the time zone of when the comic takes place.
Humanities:
Establish Historical Significance: how do we make choices about what is worth remembering?:
I feel that I showed this when making my book through showing the different events that were real life events in my comic and seperating them from the events that I cut out and changed
Connect: how do I understand my own and others personal connection to texts I read, listen, and view?:
When we had to read the comics I found that it was really hard to connect to them since in the comics it was a fictional world I found it much easier to connect with the story of sir Francis drake since he is a real person.
Today I will be reflecting on a DI tournament that my class did since DI was cancelled due to covid-19. For the tournament we had 3 days to meet with our team online using Zoom. To check out my first post on the DI regional tournament which explains DI and what my team did originally, click the link. In this post I will talk about the changes that my team made in class before spring break, and the bigger changes we had to make when school didn’t go back after spring break.
Before spring break, our group decided to make quite a few changes such as changing our claws’ colour from white to black to make them more realistic. We also simplified the claw arm that knocks over the trees since that wasn’t one of the focuses for points. We added more leaves to the trees so that they look more realistic. After we made these changes it was spring break so we had to put our progress on hold. Then DI provincials was canceled due to covid-19.
The cancellation of the tournament didn’t stop us from presenting to our class though. We made our presentations online through Zoom, and did our Instant Challenges that way as well. Now I will talk about the changes and challenges about presenting the tournament online. One of the main challenges with presenting online was the fact that we weren’t in sync due to it being online. Another challenge was that we all had to remake things like claws and other props that we had left at school. We weren’t allowed to go out and buy things to keep to the guidelines to stay home so we had to use things that we found at our house to make props such as fur. We had to make our narrator Nate look like a host in a nature documentary so that he would seem to be in the environment and the story with us instead of being just a narrator. In addition, we added lyrics to the ukulele song. We still had to show the trees fall over in our performance but we didn’t have our claw arm so we decided to do this by making a video of a tree falling over and using it as our virtual background. We decided to make our story longer, we added an extra day and extra night to add a little bit more time. It was really hard to make the tree fall over when one of the monkeys tries to climb it, so during the extra day we added to our performance, we decided to show how some of the trees fall over due to the monkeys eating the leaves and killing the trees. We were then able to change our virtual back ground in accordance to what is happening to the environment. Our virtual backgrounds that we used are in the gallery below.
main background
when it is night time
after the night that tree fell over
dead forest at the end
And here is the video that we used to make the tree fall.
In the online tournament, I think that we did a pretty good job even with some of the obstacles in our way. I think that we definitely improved from the last time that we performed (here’s the link to that post which includes the video of our Regional’s performance DI regional tournament).
Now I will reflect on the curricular competency.
Research and Understanding:
I showed this competency when trying to come up with a solution to our problems with being online such as being out of sync and not having our props for the environment.
Thank you for reading my blog. You can click on the names of my teammates to see their take on our virtual DI tournament: Raymond, Julien, Ryder, Nate.
today I will be telling you about a competition that I participated in a few weeks ago called DI. Di is a tournament were you compete in your age level and against other people who are doing the same challenge as you. Me and my group of 5 were competing in the scientific challenge. In this challenge we had to make a story that involved a outsider species and a habitat, my group and I decided that we wanted to put a proboscis monkey in the BC forest. Below I will put pictures of both.
In this challenge we also had to have a technical element, my group decided that we were going to make a hydrolic arm that would knock over the trees to show how the habitat changed while the monkeys were in the habitat.
in the challenge we also had to have 2 team choice elements which are 2 things that our team gets to make. The only thing is that these 2 elements can’t be required by the challenge. So my team decided to play the ukulele and Raymond (check out his blog) made 2 songs that we played as the challenge went on too set the mood of the story.
another element that we had to have was a habitat morph. this is some way that the habitat changed when the monkeys were in the BC forest. our habitat morph was we made the trees fall down because the monkeys killed the trees by removing the leaves and cutting up the roots. so they became brittle and easily fall over. then we had to have a spices morph. we decided that the monkeys would grow claws too fend off some of the forests predictors and to rip up the leaves easier. the other morph that we had was that the monkeys grew more fur, this was because the monkeys were used to a warmer environment and since BC is very cold they had to grow more fur to keep warm.
If you would like to read the rules of the challenge by the people who made them then go to the DI website that i have linked. now I will start to talk about what happened at the tournament, at the tournament we first had to do our challenge I think that it went quite well. Other than the trees falling over too soon it was quite good since we could pull it off really well and since it was only the regional tournament we know exactly what to do if that happens at the provincials. here are my team mates blogs Raymond, Julien, Ryder and Nate. if you want to watch my teams video of us competing the that will be below.
I think that we did a OK job at regional but I think that we can do better in provincials. the things that me and my team are going to change are the following. I think that we should make the claws in our performance black not white, it would help since it makes more sense to have it that way. I also think that we should show the monkeys ripping up the roots of the trees and not just say that it happened. in addition I think that we should make the claw arm more simplified so that since the claw arm wasn’t one of the main focus points. I think that we should also make the trees have more leaves so that they look more tree like. I think that if we make these changes that we can have a way better presentation.
now I will reflect on the curricular competency
Research and Understanding:
I feel that I showed this competency when I was trying to figure out how the monkeys could morph. I put myself in the monkeys shoes and tried to think of what I would want to change to make me fit into the environment. I also thought to myself what would I do to the environment so that we could see the change of the habitat. I also had to put myself in the shoes of the apraisers and the audience to see how we could get the most points possible.
Today I will be reflecting on the most recent project that I have had in my humanities class. In this project we started out by sharing how our worldview has changed from elementary school to high school then we made a mind map about our worldview changing from elementary school too high school. The different categories of change are: geography, time, beliefs, society, values, economy and knowledge. The next thing that we did was we wrote some lyrics using a template from the song its the end of the world as we know it click the link to watch the original video. These are the lyrics and the mind map that I made
The next thing that we did was learn about the renaissance. We started by learning about the different “history makers” of the renaissance time period such as artists like Leonardo and Donatello, and scientists like Francis Bacon and Galileo and how they impacted the renaissance.
The next thing that we did was sing our songs. My song was not my best work since I had a few voice cracks and I am not good at singing in general but I did try my best. Below is the song that I made.
Then I had to write a song with a group of 3, the other 2 people are Ryder and Randy (check out there blogs by clicking on there names) we made this song by combining our lyrics together to make 1 song and then we sung our parts of the song below are the lyrics the purple words are ryders lyrics the yellow words are Randy’s lyrics and the blue words are my lyrics
This is the song that I made with my group here are the 2 others blogs, Randy and Ryder.
The next thing that we had to do was write a paragraph or 2 about an image that represents the scientific method here is the page that I wrote.
Now I will reflect on the coricular competency’s
Create: What literacy skills am I using to write, speak, and represent in the texts I create?
I used a few different skills for this competency as looking back at the videos and photos from the past when I am talking about the past such as in the song I had to look back at pictures to remember what happened that changed my worldview. I also looked up different words that make my writing more interesting to read and when writing my song I looked up words that would rhyme so that my song would flow better.
Cause and Consequences: Who or what influenced events to occur and what were the consequences of those events.
To answer this I am going to add my Mind Node mind map that answers the question “who or what has challenged your world view in the transition from elementary school to high school.”
I have come out of elementary school and gone into high school feeling more accomplished as a learner. I feel more confident with taking on the new challenges that PLP has to offer.
