Hello, and welcome back to another blog post! In our latest project, we looked at the way that media affects our lives and worldviews, daily. For the sake of simplicity, I have decided to divide this blog post into two parts. The first part will be about the project itself, and the second part will be about the spring exhibition. 

Our first keystone on this project was the media survey, and was an assignment that we filled out with the help of a family member. The survey was designed to make us think about how we interpreted media, and how it affects us without even realizing it. I think that this was a really good way to start off the project, as it was a good thinking exercise. I thought that it was an insightful transition into our next keystone. 

The second keystone was called the persuasion chart, and was a chart that we had to fill out in which we took multiple different types of advertisements and decided what their target audience was, what appeals were used in the creation of the ads, and whether they used pathos, ethos, or logos to interest the viewer.  

The final keystone was probably the biggest project of the year, as it involved not just the project itself, but also the Oregon Coast Field Study, and the spring exhibition. For your sake, I’m going to start off with the project, and then talk about the other two related events. To read my reflection on the field study, click here.

Our third keystone was centred around advertising, and our final task was to create advertisements for businesses on the Oregon Coast. We started off by doing some research on our businesses, and finding their websites. Then we started brainstorming questions that we wanted to ask our businesses.  

When we got the the museum, however, the museum staff decided not to interview us because they would rather have gone on their lunch break than take five minutes out of their day to interview us. This meant that we had to do extra research to make up for this, which made it more difficult for us to create our ads. However, we persevered, and I have to say, I was pretty proud of our finished products!

We all were rushing to finish our ads before the exhibition, but we were all able to do it in time! When we were planning for the exhibition, we had to establish roles that we would take. I was given the role of DRI, which stands for “directly responsible individual” and is the person who is responsible for most of the organization, and if something goes wrong. It was incredibly stressful for me, but I pulled through, and we ended up with a pretty good presentation at the exhibition! 

The exhibition itself was kind of crazy, as it was a struggle to find the right tables and all of the resources that were around the school that we had to use. In the end, we managed to get everything together, and set up for exhibition in time! This is us at the exhibition! I thought that I should also add that we got chipotle burritos as dinner before the exhibition, which put everyone in a good mood to present our projects to the community! Thank you for reading!

Here is a slideshow of my ad drafts!

 

Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am an expert of my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and offering feedback I can use to improve as a learner. 

Over the past year, I’ve grown a lot as a PLP learner, but also as a person. This is a program that lets us take responsibility of our own learning, and really lets us thrive. I’ve learned a lot about myself and others, as well as gained a bunch of new skills that I can apply not just to school, but to the rest of my life. In this presentation, I will show what exactly I’ve been learning in PLP, and that I’m ready for grade nine. Okay, let’s get into it. 

When I first started out the year, I didn’t have a lot of expectations for myself. We started off the year by making learning plans, which made us think about what we planned to achieve in PLP over the year. When I made the plan, I hadn’t really thought about how much work I wanted to put in to my projects.

This is the proficiency scale, and it’s how we’re graded in PLP. In humanities, I had originally put “effective” as the proficiency I expected myself to achieve. I was advised to change this to sophisticated, which has suited me much better. Since then, I’ve achieved this proficiency in all of my PLP classes. This has taught me that I should always try my hardest, and that even if I don’t get extending, I will still have done my best, and I can say that I’m proud of my work.

I wanted to start with the projects that I’ve FAILed at this past year, because in PLP, we believe that to FAILing, or first attempt in learning, is how we grow as learners. This is especially relevant in our project Blue-Eyed Brutes in Horned Helmets, in which we learned about the Vikings, and why they did what they did. We also learned about how they were so successful in their raids. The first keystone was a Viking character card, in which we made we created a fictional Viking, and had to make it as accurate as we could. I think that I could’ve put a lot more effort into this keystone, because I wasn’t very proud of my final product. 

I don’t believe that the reason that my final product was rather bland had less to do with effort and more to do with me not knowing which direction to take the project to make it better. This realization was one of the first big FAIL moments for me this year. Not because the final product was something terrible, but because I realized that I could have made it so much better. This is what I would describe as my biggest FAIL this year.

The project that I found the most interesting this year would have been Mind Over Matter, which was a science project in which we examined the structure of atoms and theories like the kinetic molecular theory. The first keystone was kind of a test of our knowledge of determining density, volume, and mass, so there isn’t much to reflect on. The second and third keystones are a different matter. 

The second keystone was based around diffusion, which is a scientific process that we demonstrated by using gummy bears to create our own experiment to show how different variables affect the rate of diffusion. I loved this project, and I think it’s been my favourite so far, because of the amount of freedom we were given in our experiments. We were really given the opportunity to take this project in whatever direction we wanted. Here’s the keynote that I made to show the results of my experiment. 

The third keystone was definitely my favourite, as we got to use the coding software Scratch to create fun video games. They still had to somehow relate to the structure of an atom or the subatomic particles we had been learning about. My game definitely had the most revisions of any project I’d done this year, as I am not exactly the best coder out there. However, after numerous revisions and a lot of improvising, I finally came out with a product that I was proud of. 

This is the project that I wanted to talk about then most because of how much I learned throughout it. When I say “learned,” I don’t just mean about science. I also mean what I’ve learned about PLP, revising drafts, coding, and surprisingly, public speaking. I’ve struggled a lot with many of these things before, so this project was really important in my growth this year.   I feel like this project has really given me some useful tools and experiences that I can applications in the real world, as well as for the rest of PLP. 

I’d like my last project that I present to you today to really bring the presentation to an end that makes sense, and to end on a positive note. So I’ve decided to talk about the Oregon trip. 

In our latest project, and the one that we worked on for the exhibition, we looked at media, and how it affects our daily lives. The first two keystones aren’t as relevant, and I didn’t learn a lot from either of them. However, the final keystone was quite the endeavour. 

The project that was attached to the Oregon Coast Field Study was called “The Medium Is The Message,” and was centred around the idea that media affects our daily lives in almost infinite ways, without us even realizing it. 

Our assignment was to create ads for businesses that were located in Oregon, and my group was given the Columbia River Maritime Museum, which is a museum that was located on the Columbia River, and was dedicated to it’s history. It’s famous because it focuses on the shipwrecks that line the river, as well as the sand bar that runs under the river, and makes it difficult for ships to cross. 

 

All of the other groups got to interview their businesses and
ask them questions like what their target audience were, what they were most proud of about their business, as well as other questions that only the business could answer. Sadly, the woman who we had planned to interview decided that she would rather go on lunch break than to take five minutes out of her day to benefit our education. What a kind person. 

To sum it up, we didn’t really know a lot about our business, so we had to improvise A
LOT. Still, when the exhibition came, we did a decent job of showing off our work. We went through a lot of revisions on our advertisements, but because this was the last humanities project of the year, we had learned a lot about working around problems, so it all worked out in the end. 

This year has been a crazy one for me, and I think that I’ve gained the experience to to be able to advance to grade nine. I’ve been through a lot of revisions, a lot of projects, and been under a lot of stress. Still, I’ve managed to come out on top of all of my work, and I think that I’m ready for grade nine. Thank you so much for listening to my presentation (I know it’s been a lot), and I hope you’ve learned about my growth as a learner this year!

Hello, and welcome back to another blog post! In our latest project, we have been focusing on advertising and targeting goods or services at certain groups of people. Our driving question for this project was “How do we make our medium, a message,” and was focused around what media is, how we use it to send out a message to the public, and how it affects our daily lives.

Because of the type of project we were doing, we decided to use this project as an opportunity to go on a field study! On this trip, we went to the Oregon Coast, and went as far as New Port, Oregon! We got to do all sorts of crazy things, but they still had to be related to the project. 

We were all assigned businesses that we had to design an ad for. My group had the Columbia River Maritime Museum, which was a museum located by the Columbia river that has a numerous amount of exhibits and interactive displays, which make it unique. 

We also stopped at a number of amazing restaurants, many of which were only in the US. My favourites would have been the buffets we went to, because we could eat as much as we wanted! The best meal that we had by far would have been Kam Meng, an amazing Chinese restaurant. 

For our final stop, we went to Wolf Haven, an organization who takes in and rehabilitates wolves that wouldn’t have been able to survive on their own. We learned a lot about wolves and their habits, but also a great deal about the land and why they chose to build Wolf Haven in that exact spot.

I learned a lot about our business before we went on the trip, to make sure that I was prepared to interview the people who ran the museum. Sadly, they were too busy to answer our questions, so we had to improvise heavily with our ads. 

The trip wasn’t completely about ads! We got to do a number of cool things while on the trip, including zip lining, laser tag, and go-carting! It was an amazing experience, and I got to go with my friends.

Surviving with people from school for a whole week can be challenging, but it was worth it for some of the moments and the experiences we had. I mean, those kind of things are cool, but they’re just so much better to share with friends!

The trip itself had some up and downs. The bus broke down while we were close to our campsite, and we had to wait in the bus for over an hour. But because of that, we got to ride in a limo! We also stayed in yurts for most of the trip, which was cramped, but fun!

 

 

This is the book that I created that documented the trip! Enjoy!