Hey and welcome to a more unusual post. If you have already seen my blog before you may have seen a post titled mpol, mpol stands for mid- term presentation of learning. So in this blog post I will be talking about my tpol, which stands for transitional presentation of learning. Transitional meaning reflecting on my grade eight year and why I should move onto grade nine. 

Before we get started I will now take the pol declaration. 

“Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on 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 for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.”

The driving question for this blog and presentation is “ why do you feel like you are ready to advance to the next grade level?” So in this blog post I will be showing you.

Maker

One of the first things I learned in PLP this year was to use an iPad. Before PLP I didn’t really know anything about iPads or any type of technology in general, but over the year I have learned about so many new skills, tools and apps from all of our classes. One of the main projects where we learnt about this, was our constructing creative communication project. We drew and took photos on our iPads and learnt how to use lots of new techniques and editing skills. This really does show how you can improve on new things while learning, because if I wasn’t in PLP I wouldn’t believe that you could do some of the things that we used.

I think one of the most important things I learnt about this year was teamwork. Now after being in PLP and working with people so many different times and learning how to interact with other people and everyone’s different types of personalities, it is helping me gain such a much better understanding of what to expect and how to handle situations better. This I think will be one of the most helpful things for my future high school years, learning how to talk to people and work with others and communicate will help me a lot. One area where I had to use my teamwork skills a lot was DI (destination imagination). We had to be in groups for several months and work together to create things, and that is really hard in a big group ( because there is lots of arguing ). But in the end after getting to know each other we learned how to merge and collaborate ideas.

Humanities

One of the main and most important parts important parts of PLP is the real world experiences.  For example in our very first humanities project “medium is the message” we had to make an advertisement for real business or person. We had to learn how to communicate with them,  take feedback and just talk with businesses and adults in general. Lots of the time we also have to present and talk to people, like in exhibitions. I think this could really help us in our future high school years because being able to talk to people and present is such an helpful and important skill that everyone should hopefully be able to use. I really think things like that will help me in my grade 9 year. In elementary school there’s no way I’d think I’d be able to stand up in front of people and just talk about my work.

No matter how hard you try there will always be failure in school, and that’s not a bad thing. Failure is what helps us become better learners, better people. For example I would always think about the negatives in projects. Now, even if I still don’t like a project I think about how I can improve it and how I can get help to make it even better. Working with words was a poetry project and if you know me you know that I don’t like poetry. But over time after learning about poetry and its ways and terms I started to be more fond of it. I even ended up creating a bunch of poems and art pieces to go together in to a book that I created myself. At the start of the project I had been unmotivated and negative, and in the end I ended up growing so much more. I learnt from my mistakes which shows you even if you do dislike something there can be a good outcome in the situation.

Scimatics

Just a few days ago I participated in the PLP spring exhibition, my job was to show a draft that I had from my scimatics class. It was supposed to show where it started versus where it ended. My example was my comic cells scimatics project, obviously we did our launch and we learned about it, then we did our building knowledge where we did textbooks and work sheets,  then it was develope and critique which is where we started to make our drafts and storyboards and lay all of our ideas out. Obviously it didn’t look great it’s rough ideas and thoughts, but after critique from our teacher, classmates and ourselves we ended up creating final versions of our comics. It shows how you can get one place to another from excepting and using feedback.

I think that I have really improved as a learner and person this year, thank you for reading!