We made a Podcast! I think they turned out super well. You should definitely check them out as they get released in the coming weeks. I will update this post to include mine once it’s released. My episode was about German Propaganda during World War Two. I learned a lot about cause and consequence through my episode. I truly considered the effects of the war on both groups of people. It was very interesting to see how effective and quick they’re propaganda was. It taught me that we need to watch out for propaganda and fake news in our own lives.
Above is my podcast episode, it is apart of a collective class podcast. If you would like to learn more about all kinds of interesting aspects of the war. Go check it out. You can learn about the rise of german tanks, the failure of appeasement, music in the war, or whatever else catches your eye. There will be 23 episodes each focusing on something different in the war. New episodes are released daily so check back in.
So this project was obviously about World War Two but what did we study? The answer is, so many different topics. This was to give us a baseline understanding of the war and prepare us for our podcasts. We also read books and discussed them in literary circles. My book was called the Cage by Ruth Minsky Sender, I would highly recommend it. The book gives a super interesting, but very sad look into the lives of children, particularly Jewish Children throughout the Holocaust. Throughout this book I became interested in how the Nazis divided the communities so fast. They split up neighbours, friends, even family just because of there ethnicity. It just took them a few days after invading Poland which is mind boggling to me. I then decided to research how it works and why it was so effective. This led to my podcast topic.
“How might we use stories to better understand the causes and consequences of WWII?” That was our driving question. Something I thought about through all of our assignments and even answered in our Podcast Episode. In my opinions stories are a key way to understand the causes and consequences of WWII. They help you connect with people and they’re a good way to spark a personal interest into researching this tragic event. However I think its extremely key to read stories of both sides in order to consider both sides and how people can be mislead so quickly. We can use this research to better determine the causes and consequences, and look out for these signs in our own lives.
Hope you had a fantastic time over the holidays and stayed safe. It has been strange getting an extra week off. But hopefully going back to school goes well and we all stay healthy. If you’re reading this post you probably heard about the PLP winter exhibition. Maybe you even went and checked out. Anyways it went quite well and I feel like I learned a lot.
So over the last two months we finally got to go back out on field studies. Even though they were not over night and we just remained in Vancouver it was nice to go back out of the classroom. We got to go to six super interesting places all around Vancouver. We learned quite a lot about three cultures. As well as the hardships and injustices they faced in Canadas past. As the people of China, India, and Japan arrived in Canada they were met with hostility. I was shocked to learn just how many terrible injustices these groups of people faced in the past. One injustice which truly stood out to me was the horrifying conditions Chinese Canadians were subjected to in the late 19th and early 20th century. It began with Chinese Canadians beingforced to pay a large tax in order to immigrate to Canada. Then they were forced to live in the worst areas of towns (typically swampy, industrial areas) and faced anti-asian racism. Many of them also were tricked into working on the Canadian Pacific Railway. They were promised good fortune and high wages but ended up being paid extremely low wages and were forced to do the most dangerous jobs.
This brings us to the exhibition. My group which included, Dries, Julien, and Erin was tasked with creating a memorial for the Chinese Canadians. We decided on creating a giant railroad spike. You can see a photo of the model below.
This spike would be placed in across from the Canadian Pacific Railway station in downtown Vancouver. It would be in a park surrounded my vegetation in order to increase public traffic around the spike. At the spike there would be plaques with information about the racism Chinese Canadians faced in the past. There would also be information about how that racism continues to this day. See location below.
If I was to pitch this idea to city council I would probably make some minor safety edits to the spike. As well as change the location because apparently that park will be the site of a hospital in the future. I would likely need to hire an engineer and a city planner to help find a suitable safe location for the spike. The location would also need to hold significance just as the train station did.
We chose a spike for our memorial as we wanted to create a powerful and simple visual piece which memorializes the hardships Chinese Canadians faced in the past. We wanted to show the ugly history of one of our nations greatest triumphs and most important pieces of infrastructures. Even though the railway connected our nations coasts, it drove apart our people.
It’s been awhile since my last blog post. So what happened was there was Christmas break, and then we did an extra long project, it was TEN milestones in a month! This project was about nationalism during the 19th century and how that affects our lives today. We used a different example every week, on the first week we learned about various examples of nationalism around the world. I focused on American Manifest Destiny. The second week was about nationalism in British North America and the Canadian Confederation. The third and final example was Indigenous oppression in Canada. This included the Indian Act and the Story the Red River Resistance. We also made six videos during these last four weeks!
We began with our driving question “How can an understanding of nationalism help us make sense of today?” My answer to this question was “An Understanding of Nationalism in North America during the 19th century can help us understand why People express their pride in their country through sports and explorations.” I chose to focus on nationalism through sports and travel because not only are those some of my greatest interests, those our the examples of nationalism my mom can relate to the best. You might be asking why do I care if my Mom can relate to the examples of nationalism? To answer that we have to go back to the beginning of the project.
Our very first Milestone for this project was a parent video interview. We had to ask our parents questions about nationalism. Then at the end of the project we had to create a reaction video of them watching our final video. You can check out both of those videos right in this post.
One of the biggest challenges I faced in this project was the high pace of work. I play lots of sports, mostly Basketball and Skiing right now. It was a challenge to balance those with homework. It required me to manage my time. I also had to chose what was an attainable amount of work in a few days. This would often involve me cutting information as I only had time to research a few topics. The time management techniques I learned during this project will help me greatly in the future.
Editing in iMovie
My favourite video’s to make were the second video, an animatic about Manifest Destiny and the final video, the parent reaction. I enjoyed the animatic because I found the content fascinating. I have always found exploration, and industrialization super cool. In the final video I feel like I did a great job in the editing. I used some techniques which I didn’t use throughout the rest of this project. This included multiple angles inter-spliced, and a custom made intro in keynote. Go watch both of those videos, they are linked in this post.
The video I found the most challenging was the fourth video, an explainer video about oppression in Canada. I used the example of the Red River Resistance focusing on Louis Riel. I also found the editing this video in an engaging way was difficult. We never ended up finishing this video as our teacher cancelled this assignment after our rough draft. I used some of the lessons I learned from this video to improve my final nationalism video though. I would like to show the video but sadly the footage corrupted, however I still have my voiceover.
Videos are not just filming and editing though, they include a whole lot planning. We use a movie planner. We use the Know Your Story tab to began. This involves all the research and sources we will need to create our video, we also create a story mountain or story spine. Those our essentially rough plans of our video. Then we move onto a screenplay or script. Which one we use depends on the kind of video. We mostly use the Screenplay as it lets us plan the visuals as well as audio. After that we create a storyboard. Finally we move onto editing and shooting. Creating this movie planner taught me a lot of things, first off videos take a lot longer to create then you would think. For a 4 minute long video I usually spend 2-3 hours on the research, then I will spend 30 minutes on a story mountain. After that It takes me 2-3 hours to write my screenplay. Then a storyboard will take me 1 hours 30 minutes. I find this me most useless step as I generally have visualized my story during the screenplay. After all that the filming and recording will take another 1-2 hours. Then I generally spend 2 hours editing. But I’m not done yet, I still have to upload to Youtube, write a description and cite sources. That can take anywhere from 15-45 minutes. That adds up to 9 hours 15 minutes to 12 hours 45 minutes for a four minutes video! The amount of time a video takes to create shifts depending on the video, the more cuts and clips required the longer time it takes to create.
We were assessed on four competencies throughout this project. There was one Maker competency, two Social Studies and two English competencies. You might be thinking but that adds up to five, you said there was four competencies. We had one competency which spanned two subjects.
Empowered learner was our maker competency. The how might I statement which came along with it was “How might I use technology to construct knowledge.” This competency was present in all of our video milestones. My best example of this competency in my opinion was the final two videos. I feel like I used my editing to enhance the message and improve understanding of Nationalism in both of them. The multiple angles, well timed cuts and captions helped improve understanding.
The competency which spanned both English and Socials was Using Resources/ Use Evidence from various sources. The description of this competency was ‘Have I found diverse sources and evaluated them for their relevance, accuracy, and reliability? The place were this competency was most evident was my Know Your Story Tab of my movie planner. You can also find evidence of this competency in my youtube description. In three of our videos (animatic, tutorial, final video) we had to use cite everything in MLA 8 format. Most of my sources were articles. Why… well I learn the most from reading an article or book vs. watching a movie or video. I favourite websites were Canadian Encyclopedia, History.com and Britannica. I found they all had a wide selection of articles on historical nationalism. My biggest takeaways from this competency were how to cite sources even photos in MLA 8 and what sources I can use for future projects.
MLA 8 citation
Our English competency was Designing Texts. The description was “Have I used writing and design processes to plan, develop, create, and refine engaging and meaningful texts considering purpose, audience, and message? Pretty much how can I design texts (this includes video) to create a meaningful text. My greatest examples of this were once again the last two videos. I think those were my most meaningful and engaging videos. I did this through increasing the time I spent on the planning stages, particularly Know Your Story and the screenplay.
Identify Continuity and Change was our Social Studies competency. “How are lives and conditions alike over time and how have they changed?” For this example I will point to cumulative video. Throughout that video I provided examples of nationalism and life in the past and the same in modern days. My favourite example was the example of Manifest Destiny in the past and how that resulted in the frontier era compared to Manifest Destiny now and how that leads to exploration and travel. I think my example of sports was the most meaningful to my mom though.
I hope you have learned something about nationalism. I would strongly suggest checking out all the videos and film planners linked I worked very hard on them. Now you know that sports and exploration are both parts of nationalism! There probably won’t be any posts for the next couple of months, I will be taking different courses (Science and Gym) in which I don’t use the blog. Have a good day 🙂
