Hi guys! Today is officially the last week of the blogging challenge. This year was a lot of fun!
My favourite challenge would have to be week 5. I really like music so this gave me a chance to rant and talk a lot. If you read my about page you should know that this is my second year doing the blogging challenge. Personally I liked this year better for a few reasons. The first is because I now actually know how to blog. Last year I was still figuring that out which made these challenges a lot more of a hassle. I am really glad that the challenges didn’t repeat so there was a new thing every week and the mystery really made it exciting. I was able to complete all of the challenges and had a lot of fun though I would be lying if I said I completed all of them in time. If anything I think that it would be interesting if there was a challenge that was a collaborative one that you did with a partner. Other than that to be honest I don’t really have any criticism.
I will definitely keep blogging, probably mostly for school but I will defiantly try to get out and find more things to write about. I would definitely encourage other people to try this challenge because it’s fun and a great way to connect with other people.
Term 1 is officially coming to a close and though that means that we are closer to the winter holiday, it also means that report cards are coming up. Report cards mean grades and grades, mean reflection. That’s what today is all about. I am here to reflect on all the awesome and not so awesome work that I have done so far. This is really focussed in one thing. Video making! We have made so many videos this year it’s crazy. However, since I have made so many videos, why don’t I make this easier by just talking about what I learned. You know, to save you some grief.
So what have I learned? I have first learned about how to take proper videos. Before even taking the videos I need to know what I want to film. What types of things do I need clips of? Never shoot vertically! This includes how I position the camera, what I am getting in the clip and things like the quality. Can I see what I’m filming? Does it look good? What about the audio quality? Things like that. Then there is of course editing. Do I need all of these clips? Hint; the answer is no. What kind of music is there in the background. I have to make sure that the viewer can see and hear what’s in the video too. And of course publishing it. While I was doing all of this, I was also making sure to practice the competencies; empowered learner, knowledge constructed, innovative designer, creative communicator, and computational thinker. So, let’s break things down.
Empowered learner;
The first step would have to be planning. A lot of these video we had to make in groups which means that communication is key. The best example of this that I can think of would have to be my revolution videos. This was a 6 week project that we did in order to learn about revolutions and why they happen. This was a group project so we had to make sure that we were communicating with each other and that we all stayed on top of our work in order to not drag everyone else down. I thought that I was really good at finishing my work and helping my team during the project. One thing that I really bad at was editing the videos. I finally managed to figure out that you can crop in iMovie and I thought that I used my iMovie skills way better in the Take Your Kid to Work day video. I will talk more on that later. I thought that my main skill in this project was animations. I found that Keynote and Explain Everything were really helpful and I created most of the animations in our videos. If I were to do this project again, I would want to make sure that my group films 3 or 4 day before the video is due. This way we have more time to edit and retake scenes that we don’t like.
Knowledge Constructer;
Since I mentioned it, why don’t I talk about editing? This was definitely not my best skill but it has gotten better. Well to be honest, I think it was okay in the beginning, then we started to learn about these cool features that we could use and it got worse. After I figured out how to actually use these cool features, it started to get a lot better again. A great example of this is both the ghost town video and the Take Your Kid To Work Day video. In my opinion the TYKTWD (Take Your Kid To Work Day) video is a lot better than the Ghost town video but there are sides. The Ghost Town video, we worked on as a group. I did most of the editing and added the music and such but at this point I had barley used iMovie. So I would like to say that for a beginner this was a fairly good job. And to top it off we had a few comedians in our group that helped to make our video funny which made it way more entertaining.
https://youtu.be/T_1J_gH9Q_Y
Innovative Designer;
The TYKTWD video was done completely individual. So from planning out the kinds of shots that I wanted to take to filming and then to editing, it was defiantly a piece I was proud of. While working on this video I discovered more about how to control the volume, the transitions, cropping video and photos and adding text. The last one, adding text, was the one that I was most proud of figuring out how to do. When I think about it now, it is actually really easy to do but it took me a while to figure out the timing. I also liked this video better because I was using the new animations skills that I had learned in Keynote. I thought that because the intro animation and ending animation used the same kind of transition, it helped keep the whole video together. The one thing that I didn’t like about the video was the fact that I was speaking so fast. I can’t really compare this to the Ghost Town video because it was a silent film but it’s still pretty easy to hear that I’m talking very fast. The main reason for this was because I had a time limit that I was trying to reach. If I didn’t have that I think that it could have sounded better but then the viewer might get bored. I definitely still need to work on my ability to stay focussed on a point and not getting sidetracked.
Computational Thinker and Creative Communicator;
The final video I will mention for today is the Alberta video. I was focussing on artists for this video and had to interview a lot of strangers. This means socializing. Yes, I socialized. This video really made me problem solve and search for effective solutions to problems that I faced. One of these problems was talking to strangers. In order to overcome this I decided to get my friend, Grace(link), to help me interview. This ended up going really well and I got 4 interviews from different perspectives. I found that making this video helped me in understanding the kinds of things that I need to get on video in order to communicate my point clearly. This was shown when I was conducting the interviews. Some of the people I interviewed talked about one thing for so long, which was great, while others I was able to ask 4 questions in under a minute. This made me realize I was probably asking the wrong questions. Through many trials and errors I was able to understand what kinds of prompts I could use in order get a person to say what it is I wanted to express. That was really a key thing that I learned.
Whew, that was a lot of talking! Hope you enjoyed!
Hi guys, today we are talking about emojis! I made a few math games so feel free to try them out! Write the answer in the comments if you figure it out!
easy:
🌴 + 🙉 = 6
🙉 + 🌴 + 🌴 = 7
🙉 + 🙉 = 10
🌴 = ?
Medium:
🍭 + 🍭 + 🍬 + 🍫 = 28
🍭 + 🍬 = 15
🍬 + 🍫= 18
🍫 = 8
🍭 = ?
Hard:
🚢 + ✈️ + 🚅 + 🗼= 34
✈️ + 🗼= 3
🚅 + ✈️ = 7
✈️ + 🚢 = 26
🚅 + 🚢 = 31
🗼= ?
Next I decided to get a little artsy and create a emoji:
Finally, try to guess the song from looking at the emojis.
It is currently November! And you know what that means? Christmas is coming! Hi guys, today I will be talking about the holidays. Now, my family isn’t actually that big in celebrations but we still have a lot of fun. My family really only celebrates the main holiday’s: Christmas, Birthdays, and Halloween (if you count that). Like I said, we aren’t too big on celebrations. Last year, we almost forgot about Christmas.
Like most people, we celebrate by getting a tree, decorating it, and opening presents. Each year, around 2 weeks before, we write up a list of things that we want/need. Then, that list is hung up near the dining room so that everyone can look at them for reference. Then each of us buys one or 2 things for each family member. Most of the time, we don’t actually stick to the list but it’s there if we can’t think of anything. Last year, we had the list up, but everyone was really busy so it wasn’t really our major focus. I didn’t buy my gifts until almost the day before. After present swapping, we usually go skiing or just do our own thing for the day. However, on Christmas Eve is when we always have our big Christmas dinner. This is because we have a tradition with a family friend of ours to go to church (though I’m not religious) and then to their house for dinner. This is always something we had done and after dinner us kids would go and watch a movie, though it’s not usually a festive one. We would hang out for a while until our parents stopped socializing, which usually takes a while.
Finally, here is a poem that I wrote about Christmas:
Do you want to know how I did that? Hi guys! Today I will be talking about a really exiting event; Take Your Kid To Work Day!!! (Or Job Shadowing for short). This was basically where instead of going to school, I followed my dad around to find out more about his job and the place that he works at. Then if that wasn’t exiting enough, I also was there to make a video to help show what I learned.
What does my father do?
So what is it that my dad actually does? My dad is a operation supervisor for a transit bus company. His job is to talk to the public, receive and respond to complaints and, in some cases, compliments. He then decides whether or not the complaint should be investigated. Sometimes a complaint is about a personal opinion and isn’t something that needs to be pursued. However, there are also complaints that are about situations that should have and could have been dealt with. In this case, depending on the situation, he can take a variety of actions ranging from just warning the driver, to getting the police involved, to firing someone. My dad has worked at this company for over 10 years. Until recently he was a driver and then the person in charge of defending the drivers from getting fired, after that he was promoted to the job that he has now.
Something that really stayed with me is something that my dad mentioned; “a workplace filled with laughter, is a good workplace”. Basically when everyone gets along with everyone else, the workplace becomes a lot better of an environment to work in. While I was there, I went with my dad and 2 other people to do frontline support. This is when supervisors and managers go out to meet with the drivers to make sure that they are doing ok. While we were there, we were also giving out awards. The awards that we gave out were for 5 years in the company, and 10 years in the company. However, there are also many other types of awards such as; perfect attendance, years at the company, safety award, safest driver, and the peak award. While the other awards are self explanatory, the peak awards are for drivers who go above and beyond to do something. I think that these awards are a good idea because they help to keep moral up and it makes the job more interesting. On top of that, it helps to show the community the kind of support that happens in public and within the company.
Speaking about community support, on our way to the company I saw a lot of messages posted on the bus. The messages were displayed where the bus number usually is and it tells us whether or not the bus is still in service. These messages said things like “go team go”, amber alerts and “lest we forget” for Remembrance Day. I thought that this was an interesting idea because it’s somethings small but it shows support and respect and that’s something that I really liked. I also found out that the bus company will lend some busses out during special events. For example, they will be lending busses for Victoria Day. This also really shows the public the kinds of things that the bus company supports an I think that it helps give them a strong image.
Now, if I’m going to talk about the bus company I gotta mention the strike. For those of you who don’t know, the strike is currently for bus drivers asking for hi higher wages, and more breaks. So basically, better working conditions. Up until recently their method of protest was to not wear their uniforms and to not work overtime. However that might not be the case for long. Soon they will have a formal negotiation and if things go badly, there may be an all out refusal to work. This means a lot of things for a lot of people. For the public, this means that they will have to find a different mode of transportation. It will inconveniences a lot of people and will probably lead to a lot more traffic. For people like my dad, this means overtime. A lot of overtime. The busses need to be turned on every few hours for maintenance and if there isn’t people to do that, there will have to be someone who steps in. That would be people like my dad. For people like me, that means that I will be spending less time with my dad. For the drivers, they will get paid even thought they aren’t working, but it will be a much lower amount than what they would get if they actually were working. This means that might not have enough for living expenses. So lots of unhappy people. When something like this happens, it really makes you think about how much you actually rely on it being there. Most people don’t actually think about it but it’s nice to stop for a moment and realize how much you use something.
Finally, I took all of the things that I learned above, and condensed it as much as possible. Then I made it into my video using iMovie and Keynote. For the animations; the introduction and the ending, I used Keynote. Then I took all of the clips and put it into iMovie, editing it a whole bunch. In the end I came up with my final product that I am proud of! I hope that you guys learned something new and enjoyed reading!
Welcome back! Today I will be talking about a 6 week long project that I have been working on. In school, we were studying revolutions and in groups, we made 4 videos of our choice. We were doing this project in order to answer the driving question: How do ideas drive change? In the end, I decided that this was due to a persons personal experience. The first 3 videos were about the French, American, and Russian revolutions. We chose what kind of video we wanted to make with our group. I got to work with an amazing group consisting of Asha, Ally, Liam, and I. We got a week to make these videos. The 4th and final video was completely free choice. We got to chose the revolution and the kind of video that we wanted to make. In the end we decided to do the Meiji revolution with a John Green (crash course) style video that included animations.
The 4th video:
So why were learning about revolutions through video making? Well first of all, it’s really fun! Although there were times where, just like in most group projects, there were disagreements, we were able to make the most of it and have fun along the way. From this project I really took away the fact that in all of the revolutions that we were researching, the rich were always belittling the poor. It makes me think about how money can corrupt people with greed. This got me thinking about how these peoples actions can be put to blame for a lot of the events. The main person held responsible is always the one in charge, usually the king. However, you can also debate the fact that, that’s just what they were taught. In the end though, revolutions don’t happen unless there is someone who decides to do something.
The 1st video:
https://youtu.be/5eH-0WCYYds
The first video that we did was kind of like a tester video. We were trying to figure out what we needed to know and express in our video. This means that we were trying to figure out the information that we needed and convey it in a way that all types of audiences could enjoy. Then once we started to figure out what information we needed, we then needed to know what the visuals would be. That was our main goal in our second video. We didn’t get the audio to match with what was on the screen so it looked really weird and didn’t make a lot of since.
The 2nd video:
By the time we started to understand the process of making the actual videos we were able to get a fairly good understanding of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. We understood that there were people who were really good at editing, others who were comfortable on screen, and so on. Once we understood this we were able to play to each other’s strengths in order to create our video. This made the 3rd video that we created, my favourite video to create. I was in charge of helping with animations, and I worked on the call sheet and helped with the storyboard. Because these were all things that I liked to do it was a really fun experience. We were able to add comedy and over all I think that the video itself was pretty good. Not to say that it didn’t require improvement, but it defiantly on of our better works.
The 3rd video:
https://youtu.be/_fIAvm0tbs0
While we were working on these videos, we were also reading a book called “revolution” by Jennifer Donally. It’s a story about a teenage girl named Andi who is having a lot of internal conflicts due to the fact that her brother passed away, and she blames herself. To make matters worse, she is failing school and has a senior thesis that she needs to work on. Her father, a famous scientist, is fed up with Andi’s grades and takes her to Paris in order for her to finish her Thesis. She ends up finding a diary belonging to a girl during the French Revolution. From reading the book she is able to resolve some of her internal conflicts and meets a lot of interesting people along the way. I would recommend this book to people who like history, fantasy, drama or all of the above. I personally have very mixed feelings on the book. There were some really interesting points and perspectives in the book and I thought that the way that the author wrote the book made it relatable yet kept the reader intrigued and engaged. However, there were also some parts in the book that served as red flags for me. There were a lot of unanswered questions that I had upon finishing the book, which is something that I don’t enjoy. While we were reading this book, we were also tasked with book chat assignments. These were small tasks that helped us stay on top of reading and helped deepen our understanding of the book.
In the end from this project I learned that I am really good at using animations and in some cases taking an active role in leading. I can work on the quality of our videos, and I think that I could have stepped up more for the editing. Finally I think that ideas drive change because of a persons circumstance. This can be shown in the revolutions that we were researching. People decided to change because there was something that they didn’t like. They can me up with an idea to make that change happen, and then they took action. Now, the idea itself will be different with each problem and the extremity of the action also depends on perspective. However, you can see that this pattern is shown throughout many examples in history, things in your personal life, things other people (like inspirational speakers) say, and especially in revolutions.
Week 4 is all about freedom. The freedom of choice. So what do I do with that freedom? Write about buttons of course! Let’s not question it. So let’s get into it!
What Are Buttons?
I’m sure that you are all wondering the same question. “What are these mysterious objects that you call buttons?” Well, I’m here to clear that mystery up for you. Button are usually round object used to hold clothing together. The formal definition is that it’s a small faster that is used to hold 2 pieces of clothing together. Need a picture?
There you go! Seen them before? That’s cause they most commonly seen in fashion. Now, I’m not a fashion nerd myself, but I really like doing crafts, and buttons can be used in crafts.
History Of Buttons
So, where did this idea start? Well let’s go back to the
Do I like Buttons?
Yes, in fact I think that they are very useful although writing this post made me realize the lack of button that I actually have in my wardrobe. In terms of fashion, I’m not that great at keeping up with trends. I’m one of those people that chose comfort over appearance and usually cloths with buttons on them are fairly fashionable. Not to say that clothing without buttons aren’t.
Yes, I’m weird. So, what did you learn? Is there anything else I didn’t mention? Cool facts that you know? Comment and let me know what you think!
Hi guys! I am so excited for this week because it focuses on music. I may not have mentioned it but I love music. If you read my about page you will find that I love singing too. On top of that, I am in band and play the clarinet. So what will I be talking about? The clarinet of course!
The Clarinet
The clarinet is a wind instrument and is a younger instrument compared to the other. It is said to have been first invented by a Nuremberg instrument maker, Johann Christopher Denner. This was at the start of the eighteenth century. Now some of you may be reading this and is thinking “what are you talking about? Have you not seen the movies? There are clarinets that are made of bones! They’ve been around for so long, and your telling me that it’s young! What?” We’ll, sorry to disappoint but the instrument that you are thinking of is probably a Chalumeau which is more like a recorder and is used to play in lower registers.
By the way, for those of you who don’t know, the Clarinet is not actually a low register instrument. True, it can go low however, it can also hit the higher notes. The Clarinet is one of the highest instruments compared to its size. This is a little hard to explain so I apologize if it’s confusing, but I will do my best. Basically, there are many instruments that can play notes higher than the Clarinet (like the Flute) but the Clarinet can go very high for the size of the instrument. This means that the way that the air flows through the instrument changes allowing the instrument to have 3 different registers. The lower register, the high register, and the extreme register. The low and high register are exactly what they sound like; the low and higher version of the scale. The extreme register though, is even higher than the high register. I have been playing Clarinet for 5 years and I still can quite get into the extreme register. The extreme register it the really high notes, note as high as a Flute can go. You can make it sound pretty, but it can also just sound like a lot of screeching and squeaking that is not pleasant.
I can keep talking about this forever however, I’m sure I will bore you so I will move on. Alright so, who’s tired of all that writing? I sure am. In order to take a break I decided that I would make a playlist of songs. Basically, I have picked out 5 songs each from a different genre. Check them out below:
Genre: Country Artist: Eric Church Song: Some of it
Genre: Comedy Rock Artist: Axis of Awesome Song: Phones *explicit content at the end
Genre: Emo Artist: Benny Song: Little Game
Genre: Hip Hop Artists: Machine Gun Kelly, X ambassadors, Bebe Rexha
Song: Home
Genre: Chill Artist: Alec Benjamin Song: If We Had Each Other
I hope you enjoyed those songs! Comment which you liked best and tell me what song you like best. Finally, please take this survey that I created all about music! Come back next week for the results!
(Add survey)
I hope you guys learned something and has as much fun as I did while I was writing this post. If your also a music fan like me, please comment down below and I will be more than happy to talk to you! See you next week.
Today is officially the first blog post that I will write for math! Even though I say “math” I think that this is actually a pretty interesting topic that we looked at. We were learning about something called correlations. This is basically when 2 graphed data, look like the could be related to each other but they don’t directly cause each other. Now that might be a little confusing right now, but don’t worry by the end of this post it should make since.
So what was the actual assignment that is supposedly “interesting”? Well, we were given the task to survey a group of people in order to collect data that would be used to show 2 correlations. One with causation and one without. We did this task in partners. My amazing partner for this project was Ally (link). Before I can get too into this first we had to do the not so interesting stuff. The first thing that we did was create a mind map of what we know and what we needed to know. Now if you have read any of my previous posts you may know that making mind maps are more of my style. At the end of this project I added to this mind map to show a before and after of what I learned.
Like I said, I like mind maps. The next thing that we had to do was figure out what our topic would be. What were we going to make our project about? Then we had an idea. Ally decide that she was going to conduct a survey about the quality of your breakfast and how hungry you are in school. I was really into something called the Mandela effect, so I decided to conduct a survey on your knowledge of the Mandela effect, and the effects it has on you. The Mandela effect is basically when a large number of people believe the wrong fact. For example, do you know the Queen song “We Are The Champions?” What was the ending lyric? Was it of the worllllddd! Or just we are the Champions? Turns out it’s just we are the Champions! What? Now if you knew that congrats but did you know that Darth Vader doesn’t actually say the iconic line, “Luke, I am your father?” He says “No I am your father.” Not too big of a difference but it’s still something. You can see why I was so interested in this topic. At any rate, we decided that we would each conduct our own surveys and interpret our own data, then at the very end we came together to create one final graph. Basically we took parts of each our data and put them together to show a correlation of 2 seemingly unrelated things. Our results were surprising. So what is the result you ask? Well, turn out…. you have to read to the end to find out. I’m sorry.
Alright let’s break thing down. I first had to decide who I would be surveying. At first I had wanted to survey all the teachers at the school but I found out quickly that they are incredibly hard to track down. So I decided not to pursue that idea. Instead I decided that I would conduct a population survey of my class. Based on this knowledge I created my survey making sure that I am not being biased. I chose to first ask about who knew about the Mandela effect, the proceeded to present examples of the effect to see what the reaction would be. I won’t lie, I can’t deny that my survey is completely free from all biased. However, keeping that in mind I went ahead and conducted my survey. To my surprise the majority of my class knows what the Mandela effect is. Even beyond that, I was more surprised when, despite the common knowledge of what the Mandela effect was, almost everyone was effected by the examples that I presented. Despite my results not being what I expected them to be, I continued on to interpreting and organizing my data. To do this I used an app called Numbers. I created 3 graphs from the information that I collected. The first showed how many people knew what the Mandela effect was. The second, about how people were effected by them. I used these 2 graphs as reference to create the 3rd graph which compared the 2.
Finally, the time had come. Ally and I got back together and looked at each other’s results. Then after much discussion, we decided which pieces of data we would take from each of ours. In order to conduct her survey properly, Ally had gotten people to take a standardized test. We made the choice to take the results of the quiz and combine it with peoples knowledge of what the Mandela effect was. Turns out that the belief in the Mandela effect is related to your performance in school. Now, when I say it like this, it doesn’t sound believable does it? However data shows…
That these things are related. This is a great example of what correlation is. From hearing about it, it doesn’t sound true does it? However by comparing data people are able to make these claims. That doesn’t mean that correlation always happens when comparing data. Sometimes there is in fact a connection. For example, the research that Ally did, shows that the better quality your breakfast is, the less hungry you are in school. Logically thinking this makes since because of protein and nutrition intake.
Finally we presented this using a keynote and a kahoot. After all this I learned what correlations are, how they works and how they can be applied to real life. Companies can use this for advertising. Candidates can use this in elections. This data can be used in so many ways to make people believe something. I realize now how convincing these correlations can be and they have made me begin to take a second look at what I am being told. All in all I believe that this was a cool thing to look into and I hope that you learned something too.
Hi guys! Today we will be talking about a really cool and some what tiresome project that I did for school. You can see the final product above. Our goal was, with our group, to recreate a short horror film called RUN! This was a hard thing to do because there were many steps that we had to take and the filming process took awhile. I was in a group with Kaden, Angelo and I. This was a pretty good group except for the fact that Angelo had to leave for a few days meaning that we had to film his parts first.
Of course before we could get to the fun part of actually filming we first had to watch the original video, make screenplays, storyboards, and call sheets. Honestly, I can’t count the number of times that we watched the original video to make sure that our remake was on point. The first thing that we did was take a personality test. This was done in order to find out our strengths and weaknesses so that we could work effectively ctivly in a group. I thought that this was really cool and a really fun thing to do. Then we made a screenplay which is basically of script of what you see and hear in the video. Luckily there was no dialogue in the film so we didn’t have to worry about that during the remake. Like any good teacher would do, our teacher then had us make a storyboard which is basically a drawing of what the screenplay is or an animated version. This include time signatures so that we know how long each shot is. And of course we have to make sure that everyone is good to film, has costumes and knows what’s going on which is when the call sheet comes in. I find that the screenplay is one of those things that is nessecary and convenient, but at the same time annoying and teadious to do.
Next was the actual filming process. This took awhile because we had to find a good location. This had to be a spot with a path, trees, and a log on the right side. Luckily we didn’t take too long finding the spot that we used. It took us a lot longer to film then we had originally thought due to the fact that it was raining. On top of that we hadn’t realized how popular the path that we used was. Every few minutes we would have to wait while a jogger passed by. However other than that, we were able to get the shots that we wanted thanks to the storyboard.
Then came the editing. The first time we got a roughly completed video, we ended up using the audio from the original video. However, since we were supposed to recreate the film, we also had to recreate the audio. In the end we also ended up retaking our shots after a peer critique session. It had been pointed out that we were missing a few shots and the timing was off in some clips. The only problem was that we didn’t have the same costume as before. In the end we had to retake most of our clips so that it looked like it was all shot at the same time and didn’t look weird. So in the end, we have, our final product!
