A Revolutionary Experience.

French, Russian, Industrial, and American revolutions, what a topic. Learning about these revolutions over the past 2 months, has been quite an experience, not only for learning about them, but for improvement on video, editing, music, and filming skills. Creating call sheets, screenplays, storyboards and learning about the pre-production, production, post-production process. All while being assessed according to the curricular competencies, Evidence, Cause and Consequence, and Creating and Extending Shared Understanding. Its been incredible having the chance to gain all this knowledge and I would like to share what I learnt with you today. Lets jump in!

EVIDENCE

Showing evidence involves doing a lot of research, knowing your facts and having the right information to back you up. It means assessing the justification for historical accounts after investigating points of reliability of sources, and adequacy of evidence. I think I showed this in all of our revolution videos. I knew I was always on the right track when we were talking about that revolution in class and I knew my facts fairly well. But, for example, in the Russian Revolution, I knew the general story of how it went, but I wasn’t really focused on the details. I couldn’t seem to remember the important names, what they did, and if they were good or bad! This is one case where I think I could’ve communicated better to my group and to Ms. Maxwell to get a better understanding of the Russian Revolution. This has taught me to, in the future, ask for help when I need it and to not be ashamed of communicating to my group to ask questions.

In one case, where I think I showed evidence really well was in both videos of the French Revolution. Out of all the revolutions, I think I was strongest in the French Revolution, because I really understood the story. I even got a different perspective of it from a book we were simultaneously reading, Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly, which was heavily connected to the French Revolution. Our first revolution video, could’ve been better filming and editing wise, but I think our lyrics explained the events and the cause and consequences of the French Revolution.

I think it lays out all the events and I’m proud of me and my group for creating the rap. Even though it may not have been very detailed, or perfectly edited, I think it still deserves an Accomplished because almost all or even all of the expectations are met in this video.

CAUSE AND CONSEQUENCE

A video I felt quite confident in, under this category, was our American Revolution video. In my opinion, we showed cause and consequence very well, we demonstrated cause and consequence by acting it out and having a voiceover (Owen Cree) explain the events. I learnt a lot about time management for this type of video. We has many scenes to film and the only times our whole group was free, was during class. So we had a limited time to get things done, and even though we pulled through in the end, we could’ve budgeted time a little better. Sometimes it was just focusing and not goofing off, and sometimes it shooting the same scenes from different angles and that was taking up time. We grew accustomed to this type of video (act it out) and we used it in our final revolution video. We felt it was the best way for our group to express and show what we’ve learnt about cause and consequence.

CREATING AND EXTENDING SHARED UNDERSTANDING

I have had some highs and lows with this competency. I wrote in a showbie comment about how I think I deserve an Extending in my group work because I did initiate all group get togethers, I helped with a large portion of filming and I edited all the videos for every single revolution we learnt about. I mentioned before that we could’ve budgeted time a bit better, but as we continued in learning and creating videos about each revolution, we learnt from our previous mistakes and we improved on them.

Our first video, wasn’t great and we were horrible at managing time to film and we did not anticipate editing time at all. Comparing that to our last revolution video, we learnt to plan it out in things and assign equal roles, so that one person isn’t overloaded with work. This all wouldn’t have worked without us communicating as a group, and that also improved over the span of these videos.

After learning amazing skills in all areas, we applied all these new skills to our last & final video. I think our final video shows these aspects of cause and consequence, group work, communicating and showing evidence and I’m proud of how far we have come to be able to understand these terms and represent them in our final video. We had 2 weeks to create our final video, and I think ours turned out very well. We had budgeted time correctly and Emily took a little bit of the editing job, to help me.