Imagine that you are in a completely white room. White walls, white floor, and the lights are dim. You are wearing all white too and it is cold. And all around you, is chaos. Stressed teachers, students fighting over the last pieces of clear tape. Everyone hurrying to finish whatever task they had deemed important. This is where I found myself one December 19 2019. Ladies and gentleman, the PLP exhibition has struck again.

As you may have noticed, I am writing in quite a descriptive mood. That is because the main topic for this years exhibition was story telling! I loved it! The project itself is a little complex to describe but I will do my best to break it down for you. First of all, let’s start by saying that this Exhibition was Star Wars themed and that played a big role in making our groups and deciding our planets. Basically we were divided into planet groups based on the planets in the Star Wars universe. The planets were; Tatooine, Endor, Hoth, and Death Star (not really a planet but whatever). I was put into the Hoth group along with my fellow storytellers; Ciara, Julia, Kaden, Felix, Brenton, and Angelo.

I say fellow storytellers because that was our task. To write a story about one of the minor characters on our planet. We decided to chose the Tauntaun that died and ended up saving Luke’s life. We also named him Pudge. Then to make it more complex we put our collective story on a story chart, and assigned each part to a group member. Then, that group member would take their part and write a story. To top it all off we created an object that is symbolistic and connects to our story.

The part I got was right after the climax, where sadly, our charector dies. My story;

For this project we were focussing on our ability to create, and our literary skills. So I will be talking about my literary skills first than what it is I created. In our class we talked a lot about a cycle that all stories go through called the hero’s journey. The cycle goes something like this; Call to adventure, committing to the journey, some tests, allies and enemies, the supreme ordeal, reward and road back, and finally crossing and final life. I found that this was challenging to do because finding the climax of the story and matching things up isn’t always easy. Luckily we had a lot of practice thanks to the short stories that we had read.

After a lot of practice I think that I can analyze stories fairly well. I find that when I am writing I have one of 2 problems; the first is that I can’t think about anything to write and the second more common one is that I have too much to say and can’t narrow things down. I managed to get over this struggle by taking feedback from my group, and incorporating more that fit with the others stories. Since I am not that big of a fan of Star Wars, I relied a lot on my group members to make sure that my story made since.

Now, as much as I love story telling and books, I must say that the create part of this project was incredibly fun. As I explained briefly before, I made an object that helped represent my story. That object could be anything; physical or digital, as long as it connected to the story in some way. The object that I ended up making was a paper mâché heart. In the beginning I was planning on making the heart as realistic as possible but I soon realized how inconvenient that would be. My main charector is a fictional animal so the closest example that I could come use would be a cross between a horse and a lizard. So, in the end I decided to make a more symbolistic representation of a heart so that it would be easier for the audience to understand what they were seeing and I could put more time and detail into the heart itself. That was part of the reason why I made a paper mâché was so that you could see the past of the Tauntaun through a filter.

Throughout this project we were documenting our learning using an app called Explain Everything. This app allows me to make annotations on pictures and add videos. It is great for animating and explaining things which is why I used it. Check out my video below.

In the end after talking with the audience I decided that our group did a good job of making an interactive experience that elevated our stories. I had a lot of fun with this project and I am looking forward to the next. Check out some pictures from the exhibition below.

Hi guy! Today I will be talking about what I learned in science. We were learning about atomic bonding and how atoms work. We were given the task to make a animation that explains how atoms work using 2 different examples. One had to be a bond between 2 of the same covenant compound, while the other was a bond between a multitalented metal and a polyatomic compound.

In order to make this animation I used an app called Explain Everything. This was defiantly not my favorite animating tool because I found that it glitched a lot. However, it is really good for explanation videos and I ended up working out.

For this project we were mainly focusing on 4 competencies and I will be going through how I demonstrated each of them.

The first competency is the Big idea. Did I accurately show how atoms bonded and was it animated in a way that the audience could understand? I think that I defiantly did do this because if you watch the video you can learn about atomic bonding and hopefully understand it. I also demonstrated my understanding with the types of words that I was using to describe how binding works while keeping in mind who the audience might be.

The second competency that I demonstrated is communicating. Is it understandable? Like I mentioned before I think that I did a good job in keeping in mind who my audience is while still being able to teach them about the bonding process. You can however easily hear, or not so easily hear, the voiceover. The volume setting was all over the place which made it hard to actually understand what was going on. I think that I could defiantly improve this by checking the audio beforehand and listening to it without headphones on.

The next competency was  processing and analyzing. This was the one that I personally had the most trouble on. The main focus for this competency was about the actual exchange of atoms and how it was shown in the Bohr model. Making sure that all of the electrons were in the right place was a big struggle for me and I had my classmate, Felix helping me a lot. I also made sure to ask my teacher about the Bohr models and went back many many times to revise it. I also had a lot of trouble identifying whether or not, after the bond, if the 2 atoms would share  atoms or not and showing their charge. In the end I did manage to show the sharing and exchange of the atoms rather correctly but I accidentally left out the charge when the stuck together.

Finally the last competency was basically whether or not i am able to use my class time effectively. I definitely think that I am good at this because I don’t really get that distracted and am fairly good at staying on task.

Caution; SPOILER ALERT. I will be talking about some of the scenes from the movie; “The Empire Strikes Back” proceed with that in mind.

Star Wars is a sensation. With the up and coming movie, I only deemed it necessary to talk about this franchise. More specifically about one I believe to be the most popular. I am of course talking about “The Empire Strikes Back.” With some of the most iconic scenes and an introduction to one of the most famous characters, this movie is by far an epidemic of ideas. It is like an anchor to the Star Wars universe being that it is a great introduction to those starting out and a great reminder to the super fans. So of course why don’t we dive into this universe by starting strong.

This movie introduces to us the iconic father, son conflict. In the Star Wars universe it is a norm to know about Darth Vader and his contribution to the dark side, being the main “bad guy” in a lot of the movies. However, it is first introduced to us, in “The Empire Strikes Back”, that Darth Vader is actually Luke Skywalker’s father. This brings along the memorable scene when Darth Vader invites Luke to the dark side and tells him about his heritage. Despite what most people say, it is a common misconception that the line said is “Luke, I am your father” when all he actually says is “No, I am your father.” Needless to say, one shouldn’t let that anticipation take away from the scene.
Though the scene itself has quite a bit of action, the dialogue that is said helps elevate the importance of what’s going on, keeping viewers on the edge of their seats. Despite learning of this new connection with Darth Vader, Luke still decides to risk his life falling off the ship than going to the dark side. This internal conflict is clearly shown and represented later on when we see Luke muttering “Why didn’t you tell me?” Over and over once away from the man newly recognized as his father. Luke is saying this to Ben, who became like a father figure to him and was a mentor in learning about the force, the rebels, and the universe in general.

haven’t seen it? Check out the trailer below!

Original trailer;

Hi guys! Today I will be talking all about a live event video that I made! What’s a live event video you ask? Well, it’s basically a video about an event that you went to and you make it seem more like the viewer is there with you. You can see an example of a live event when you go to sports games. They have a big screen in the middle where that shows a video of what’s going on. I basically did that except that it was prerecorded. While working on this video I was trying to use 3 main competencies. These competencies were there to help, guide my learning and made it easier for me to reflect on my work. These competencies are; Empowered learner, Creative Communicator, and Navigating Ideas. So why don’t we use these competencies to take us through what I did?

Empowered learner

I used iMovie to create my live event video and I found that using iMovie which is a tool that we’ve used all term, all year, and still being able to find different ways to use it, was really fun. I found different ways to put videos together to maximize the amount of time I had and still make an amazing video. I learned how to use the split screen which is a new tool that I found while reading one of the books that we were suggested called “ everyone can create.” The reason why I decided to make a live event video on this Japanese school was because I have been attending this school since I was around three years old. After I graduated I decides to come back and volunteer to help the younger kids learn. I do not regret that decision at all. I think that it is a really fun experience and I want to share it because in this school, there is a huge age variety. Most people who attend this school speak both English and Japanese like me, so it’s really interesting to see how all these bilingual people gather in this one place and share a learning experience. I decide that I want to express our experience which is why I decided to make my live video on it.

Creative Communicator 

In my video you will notice that I haven’t actually spoken all that much. In fact the only time that I actually spoke was when I was translating what my teacher said in the interview. This is a weird thing for a Live Event video but I decided that I wanted what was on the screen to speak more than what I might have said. I did use live titles which is basically text on the screen so that people wouldn’t be too confuse or lost but I decided that it would be more powerful for my video if it didn’t have me speaking in the background. I would just like to say that translating everything, though it wasn’t as hard as I imagined, getting the timing right and making sure that people could still hear what was being said was a big challenge for me in this video. Making a video that uses more than one language is a challenging in and of itself which I found was made this experience a lot more exciting. Due to the fact that my life event was a school and a place of learning I needed to be on top of communicating with teachers and parents and more teachers and the students, because I needed their permission to film them.  Not only that but if you could see in the video, there was a guest speaker which was part of the reason why I decided to make a video of the Japanese school. I had to be talking with her as well to make sure it was OK to film and share their work.

Navigate Ideas

This competency was all about taking creative risks and I think that I definitely did that with this project. They were the three main risk that I took with choosing to film at the school. The first one was definitely the language barrier, being able to translate everything was a challenge. Putting it all in a video and making sure that it was understandable and the grammar was correct was even more of a challenge. I managed to get through thanks to my Japanese speaking mother and English speaking father, and google translate. The second risk that I took was with the filming. The day of filming had to be pushed back because sadly there was a storm and the school had to close due to the fact that a giant tree had fallen down near the entrance of the school. So at that point I had to ask myself whether or not I wanted to continue pursuing this event or if I want to change the event itself. I talked with my teacher and decided that I wanted to continue trying to film the Japanese school as my event. I got an extension for my video so that I could finish it with all the editing and have enough time to finish. The third risk I took was probably with editing the video. I’m taking more risks than what I originally thought that I would. I explored using the iMovie tool a lot more which came with the reward of the split screening and the live titles, which turned out better than what I expected. Live titles were really useful in dividing up the English and Japanese portion of the video so that both came through and both could be understood. I also put a lot of work into transitioning with the song making sure that the audio kept playing while the visuals changed and kind of showed the environment in which these kids were learning. I also used Keynote for my animations which is basically the title slide and the ending slide. Keynote is a tool that I’ve used before and I continuously find is good for making animations and I especially love using them for the title and ending slides.

I discovered a lot with doing this project and developed a lot of skills that will defiantly use in the future.