Cray cray Pecha Kucha

This blog is about the story of my favourite plp project this year. 

Craziness is something that is not something that is commonly kindly looked upon when people think of crazy most of the time they think about people who are deficient, for example schizophrenics but crazy is good if your definition of crazy shifts a little bit. This project is about the crazy ones, but the good crazy people like bill gates, Jeff Bezos and Dave Chihuly people who are renowned for being crazy in a good way.

This project started by chance, with the spin of a wheel. We were to pick a person out of apples’s 1997 crazy ones advertising campaign centered around the people who have changed the world. People like Richard Branson, Ghandi or Muhammad Ali. People who have had un undeniable impact on the world in the own unlike way. The purpose of this was to give us an idea of what a Pecha Kucha is with out giving us enough time to perfect it. A Pecha Kucha is a slide show presentation where each slide has around one image on it and the slides automatically change after twenty seconds so that it forces you to spend a certain amount of time time on each one or look bad.

We had to research the person for the person for the Pecha Kucha. My person was Richard Branson described as a: British Businessman by Wikipedia he is known for starting the virgin name conglomerate. So we researched the person and crafted our Pecha Kucha. I had a hard time with mine and would say that i didn’t do well because i don’t think that Richard Branson changed the world like a lot of the other people that were available to choose from. The point of this exercise though was to learn about what it was like to make a Pecha Kucha, what worked well and what we would need to do for the next one. 

The next step for this project was to go to Seattle and learn about oddballs that have had an impact around the world on a variety of different things. Some of the highlights from the trip were the space needle, the MoPoP, the tour that we did of the Boeing factory, the Bucca di Beppo restaurant. If you want to read more about the trip you can read my blog post about it or read one of my classmate’s blog about the trip. While we were on the trip we went to different locations some of them on guided tours some of them self guided and learn about the different people. We took notes and media about the different sites that we went to so that we could formulate and argument as to why the different people changed the world and why they were/should be considered crazy.

When we got back from the trip there were a variety of things to do, the first of which being get a good sleep over the weekend. Then we started making a storyspine or storyboard what these are are structures for a story of presentation to improve it and not have look like a rambling run on sentence. We also had to make the slideshow and find pictures for it. The final step was to fine tune. And make it look all slick for the presentation night.

Finaly we presented on the night and watched the other group present and enjoyed the hard work of the class.  

Thank you for reading.

T-pol 2023

“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.”

So after that declaration i would like to initiate my transitional presentation of learning. So i am going to introduce the story of my learning in the second semester of school. So in the second semester i had only one plp class and that was humanities. I am going to reflect on the things that i think that i did well this semester and things that i think that i did sub optimaly.

The first thing i would like to talk about is: motivation. I think my performance in my plp classes is overly based on how motivated i am. So if i am liking a project i do very well and am often happy with how it turns out. So i think that i need to be better about this next year. I need to find ways of being more happy when i am doing a project that i donn’t like or we are learning about a subject that i do not like. So i need to find some ways of improving this. Ways that i could possibly fix these are having an open mind set breaking up work with stuff that i find interesting. I could also find ways of adapting projects so that i find them more interesting. Out of these options i think that adapting the projects a little bit is the one that i think will be the most relevant. The reason that i say this is because: i think that this can be done and it would have a good effect.

The second thing that i would like to talk are goals that i set and which ones that i think that i achieved and the goals that i think i need to continue striving to achieve/. The first goal that i set this year was: keeping a more open mindset about the different projects that i am going to have to do in my different classes. I think that i have done a good job of keeping an open mind. What i think that i need to do better after learning from reflection are: putting more effort into projects that i do not like. The second goal that i set was: do better in scimatics. I know that math and science were separated this semester but the goal still applied to the science part of it. I think that i achieved this goal because i really enjoyed this class. I did well and i think that my grades reflected that. The final goal that i set was to do better in my maker class and i think that i achieved that. A thing that i would like to add is even though i make this seem all negative I still thing that i did a really good job and did better this year then i did last year

The final thing that i would like to talk about is: my favourite project that i did this year and why i loved it. So there were two contenders for this but i chose the second one because it was the one that i did this semester so it is the one that i though was the most relevant. So the first project that i thought about was exiting electricity in the first semester in science class and the second project that i thought about was dulce et decorum est in humanities. The reason i chose the second project is because it is the one of the two that i did in this semester. So this was the project that i just showcased in the spring exhibition. My teacher for this project was Erin Madsen. What we did in this project was: learn about World War One and showcased it in a project at the exhibition. The reason that i loved this project was because i got to learn about a subject that i am really interested in and because i got to showcase my work in a way that i found really fun.

Thank you for coming to my T-pol. I think that this has been a really good period of learning reflection for me, and i appreciate you comments and criticisms.

A case for a nation

So this is the second spring exhibition that i have d with plp and i would say that it was my favourite and also the one that went the best. The reason that i think that this went well is because i really enjoyed this project and put my 100% into it and as a result i fell i was able to showcase my work very well.

So this blog post is about the exhibition and the project that the exhibition was on. For the first part of this blog post i want to talk about the project. So this project was called dulce et decorum est. So this project was on World War One. The first part of this project was focused on learning about World War One. We learn about the cause and consequence of the war, why the war was started. If you want to know why the war started encyclopedia britanica is a good source to learn about it. Once we knew why the war started we learned about what happened in Canada during the war. We learned about the social and political changes that happened during Canada during the war like women getting the right to vote, draft exemptions for status Indians(first peoples). Next we learned about the war effort so how many men went to fight in Europe (too many) the production on the home front.

We then had to choose what we are going to do for out projects. We brainstormed and picked our topic. My topic was discrimination in the military. For my project I focuses on bringing to light the service of black and indigenous peoples during the First World War. For my projects i made a keynote with b-role to, a paragraph for peoples to read and a model to kinda show how peoples would have been treated.

For the exhibition we decorated our room based on the theme of our projects (so World War One) we then presented them to the guest explaining why we made our exhibits. Each person made a presentation on a different part of the war. 

Thank you for reading.

The spring exhibition show casing dulce et decorum est.

So this is the second spring exhibition that i have d with plp and i would say that it was my favourite and also the one that went the best. The reason that i think that this went well is because i really enjoyed this project and put my 100% into it and as a result i felt i was able to showcase my work very well.

So this blog post is about the exhibition and the project that the exhibition was on. For the first part of this blog post i want to talk about the project. So this project was called dulce et decorum est. So this project was on World War One. The first part of this project was focused on learning about World War One. We learn about the cause and consequence of the war, why the war was started. If you want to know why the war started encyclopedia britanica is a good source to learn about it. Once we knew why the war started we learned about what happened in Canada during the war. We learned about the social and political changes that happened during Canada during the war like women getting the right to vote, draft exemptions for status Indians(first peoples). Next we learned about the war effort so how many men went to fight in Europe (too many) the production on the home front.

We then had to choose what we are going to do for out projects. We brainstormed and picked our topic. My topic was discrimination in the military. For my project I focuses on bringing to light the service of black and indigenous peoples during the First World War. For my projects i made a keynote with b-role to, a paragraph for peoples to read and a model to kinda show how peoples would have been treated.

For the exhibition we decorated our room based on the theme of our projects (so World War One) we then presented them to the guest explaining why we made our exhibits. Each person made a presentation on a different part of the war. 

Thank you for reading.

As shown by the photo above we all did our projects standing sideways on a wall.

The rise of the Franken- stuffy’s, a Humanities project.

The rise of the Franken- stuffy’s, a Humanities project.

So this was a project that i did in my humanities class, but it was kinda a 2 part project. In the first part of this project was focusing on reading the book leviathan and doing a bit of a book review. The second part of this project then sewing a real franken stuffy out of stuffy parts into a weird looking stuffy. Once we had done this we had to write a story with our franken stuffy. We then made this into a video. 

So the book leviathan is a steampunk book themed around the first world war with all of the great powers and the other country’s that were in that awful war. So in the book the two sides of the war are also in a little bit of a ideological divide with Austro-Hungary and Germany using metal war ships and Britain using genetically modified creatures to wage their war, so for example one of the main characters in the book Daren (a girl disguised as a boy so that she could join the military because girls were not allowed in the military at the time) and the air ship that she is on is a giant flying genetically modified whale. So we had to read this book and do a book report on this book and talk with some group mates every 6 chapters or so. I personally though this book was awful. I really like history and i did not really like the way that this book changed history. I know that Britain did not use flying whales during world war one and i do not like the way that this book changed history. It also has a real steam-punk vibe and i don’t really like that but if you do like steam-punk you can really do better. 

The second part of this project we had to start making a character for our story’s. So i went a very different direction from my first character draft to what i went with for my final project. I will include the work below but it makes no sense as to how all of the different documents are related because of how much my ideas changed. So my first draft was kinda a bad guy who wants to destroy the world because of a bad childhood, but then i realized that this has been done a thousand times and i wanted to do something else because i wanted to do some things kind of unlike. So what i changed the project into for my next draft was a close to normal American man who is a nuclear physicist in the 1950s in the cold war against the soviet union, but there is a twist and that is that this scientist is a alien disguised as a human working for the American government with good intentions and when aliens try to invade earth he has to go to the soviet union to work with their scientists to make a nuke and nuke the alien invaders. Here is the link to my video, click hereThank you for reading.

Thank you for reading

Mpol 2022

Thank you for reading 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.

So this is the second Mpol that i am going to do in the plp programme and it has been an interesting start to the year. With most of my plp classes in the first semester this will be more of a recap then what i can do better for the rest of the year, but i still have one plp class and i will still be reflecting and doing my best to improve my learning for my next year in the plp program. With that let’s hop straight into the mpol(mid year presentation of learning).

So the first class that i would like to touch on is Humanites. I would like to recap what i did but also reflect on what my strengths and weaknesses have been in this first semester chunk of the class. So the three projects that we have done in this class are: Revolutions the power of geography and the industrial Revolution and i have had my strangest and weaknesses in all of these projects but the one that i would like to focus on is the Revolutions because i think that this is the project that best represents what i have been able to achieve. I think this shows my growth as a learner because my teacher mister Harris had to leave the project mid way through because of reasons i will not disclose. Because of this me and my group mates had to make sure that we got stuff done and we had to make sure that we were adapting our plans because we could not ask the teachers about things. I think this made me and my group mates grow as learners because we had to be more independent.

The next class that i want to talk about is science. The projects that we have done in science class are: life as we know it, exiting electricity and handle with care and the project that i think most shows my growth is the exiting electricity because we got to learn about something that i am very interested in and because of this i was very motivated an made sure that i was doing my assignments to the very best of my ability and enjoying doing them and that is something i can’t say this true for every project. Because of this when i messed up my energy poster i went and fixed it. I missed some of the learning that we did in this class when i went to Mexico so when i got back i then put in all of the work to make sure that i got my operation board game done in time and i really enjoyed it. I think that this project really helped me grow as a learner because it has taught me that a project can be really fun and something that i enjoy doing on my own time.  IMG_2217

And finally the last class. To me the elephant in the room. Maker. The project that i think best shows my learning is: finding fun with videos. I think this is the project in maker that i most enjoyed the most because we got to run wild with our imagination and do something that we wanted. In this project we had an assignment and we then had to use our imagination to make something that meets the criteria and i know that this is the case for all of the plp projects but especially this one. For example the A.R. snow globe we used the A.R. maker app to use geometric shapes and some images to put an image in the snow globe and make it look like the snow is spinning. I think that this project shows my growth the best because it shows myself that a maker project can be fun and that maker as a class is not a giant waste of time. I also think that it shows my growth because i was mature enough to give this project a try.

My goals for the year are to: stop procrastinating, all though the procrastination is not so bad that i can’t get anything done, that doesn’t change the fact that it is not a good habit and that i should stop it. I also think that i should be more open minded but i say this a lot so i think a better way of phrasing things is i should give things a chance before i decide that i do not like them and develop a closed mindset about them. Some thing that I desperately need to improve is hading stuff in on time because this is a major flaw of mine  And finally i want to be better about cementing my final project idea in stone and not changing it on a dime when i fell that it is not as good as it could be and changing it so that it ends up worse in the long run.

What are some things that i can do to implement changes for these bad habits? Well for the procrastination, i can make sure that i am settings goals for my self in stone and doing my homework/ assignments one time before i do other things that are more fun. For the mindset i think i have to mature as a person and you could say that this is the solution to all of these is being more mature, but i really think that being more mature would help with this because it would mean that if i was aware enough to know that i need to be more mature, then i would be aware that having a fixed mindset instead of a growth one would be very helpful as a person. As for handing stuff in on time i think that the solution to this issue is setting alarms and reminders would go a long way to helping me get this under control next semester. This last goal that i have sounds kinda weird but it makes sense with context but i want to make sure that i have confidence in my work and not think that i need to mix it up half way done the project because it is not good enough. If it is not good enough i need to be thinking about how i can improve it.

After one and a half years as a plp learner i think something that my work reflects about me, at least in my opinion is that i am not good at making things look aesthetically pleasing and this is a big weakness whether it is from making good media for my blog posts or making somethings look nice if art work is involved. I know that this is a weakness of mine and i try to counter this in my work by making sure that i have my work be of a high quality whether it is from making sure that i get a lot of facts in a poster talking about somethings or i replace art with a good layout. An other think that i have learned is i do not ask for help enough. I need help acknowledging that i might need help and cannot do every thing by myself.

One thing that i have not talked about very much are my strengths: and a according to me i have at least a couple in my opinion. So some strengths that i have found that i have from working in the plp are: giving directions if need be and i mean this in the best way possible, like if in a group project if something needs to get done but we are not sure how to do it i can assign things so that they get done by the group. An other strength that i have found in my work is the ability to do good research on something, like finding good hard pieces of evidence to back a claim that i might make for a project. I also think that i am good at creating creative ideas for projects i am just not the best at implementing them.

Thank you for observing my mid year presentation of learning, any constructive criticism would be nice, just remember to keep it kind helpful and specific.

A splashy new video

So this is my first project in maker for the year and it is called vibrant video and what this project was about was making videos and learning how to use some of the apps on our iPads and learning how to create skills around them. But i am getting a bit ahead of my self here. There were a few different steps to this project and i am going to list them, the journey we took and how we learned and improved on telling a story in out videos.

Part one what is this project about learning how to use the apps to film a good video. Next once we knew who to film a good video we then started on telling a good story through our videos. We we then did an activity for this and i will add all of the things that i think are important at the bottom of my blog post. So in this video that we did with two of our class mates we had to make a silent film video like it would have been in the 1920s. So instead of violence more of a slap stick comedy vibe. The plot in out video was a kid is going to debate club and on the first meet he is told that he is going to read a poem instead of debating something and he aces it.

The second big activity that we did in that we did was a video that was meant to show someone how to do something and the subject that my group me members decided to do was fitness and the theme of the video was 4 exercises to keep you in shape. So what we did for this video was we filmed the video outside and when we were done. Filming we then edited the video and we added music and graphs showing how to do these exercises (also a note this was not my idea i think that this was kinda weird but i mean it’s whatever.

In my opinion the things that we did in the start of the project was really a waste of time and i don’t think it helped us understand what we were doing at all but anyways here it is. In the start of the project we were doing some of the sappy what do you want to do with your life stuff and what goals do you have. We did a whole lot of of goal setting stuff like hall ladders among other but yeah that was the gist of this project.

 

Here are some of the video that we did in this project:

Final video

IMG_2229

Making videos fun right?

So this project is obviously about videos but what was it really about? What did we learn what did we work on and how did we improve our skills in making stop motion videos in this project making fun with videos.

What we did in this project was learn how to make a stop motion video and pick a famous video to make a stop motion replica of. The video that me and my partner chose was ipong 13 pro max so me and my partner made a stop motion replica of this video using lego. Once we had filmed our stop motion we then took the audio from the original video and added it to the lego one that we filmed. So it took me some time to edit this but once it was done i was happy with my work and i think that this turned out very well.

This is the linked here

Full steam ahea-poetry?

So this a project that i just completed in my humanities class, and this project was about learning about the industrial revolution and how it changed the lives of people forever including inventions, changes to society how it has effected how we move around, live our lives and how much we pollute the environment.

So obviously to write a poem about the industrial Revolution we needed to understand what it is/was and how it has effected everything, what kickstarted it, where it started (in Britain, and yes i refuse to call it “great” Britain because i do not like the country). So the industrial Revolution was a large cultural, political, societal and economic kickstarted by an industrialized change of manufacturing of goods from hand to machine or factory. An other big part of the industrial Revolution was the fact that it became more widespread to have children in a workplace environment, and before there were children in a workplace but it was not as widespread and it was more common for children to be an apprentice then to be a factory worker. Some important inventions that came out of the industrial revolution were but not limited to: the steam engine, the incandescent light, the combustion engine, the spinning jenny and the telegraph.

So that was a brief summary of the industrial Revolution but we still had to learn about the poetry aspect of our project and we learned about slam poetry specifically. This part of the project i missed a bit of so here is a summary of what slam poetry is and what we did while i was at school. A slam poetry is poetry performed at a slam and this may sound redundant at first but let me elaborate, by definition slam poetry is a form of poetry that combines competition, audience involvement, performance and writing. When performing a slam poem the artist/ performer is often very passionate with the delivery, has ebbs and flows with emotional ups and downs of the poem and focuses on a certain topic.

So that is a summary and explanation of what this project was and here is my poem:

The steam engine is all good right?

Well that is what most would think.

But is that what we should think?

Don’t get me wrong the steam engine is great

I mean it gives us the electricity we need to make everything from phones to plates.

So good or bad, right or wrong this is what we must decide

But the steam engine has lead to genocide

The steam engine had lead to faster mail

So that makes some of the downsides pale

But to be serious there are things to discuss

Like the fossil fuels pollutions from the waste that it spews

The trees that are cut down, think about the yews 

The steam engine has lead to rail roads build and peoples hurt

It has lead to faster mail and better communication and locomotion

But is this worth the fossils fuels burnt?

So to finish off the steam engine is great 

But we must reconcile and re-pair some of the bad things that have been done

Now there are the things that must be done even if they are not fun

The steam engine is a great thing but we need to make sure that we keep the pollution under control 

And maker that we do what we need to do. What ever the case we need to make sure that it gets done.

Was the Haitian revolution a success or a flop?

the point of this project was to argue with an other group about whether a revolution was a success. My group was the Haitian revolution and the side that we had to argue is that it was successful, but i do also agree with this because after reading the sad state the enslaved people of Haiti were in and i fell bad for them, with that out of the way the next paragraph will be about the project.

So the first part of this project is all ready talked about in more detail, but the first thing that we did for this project was a simulation and in the this simulation is was a Middle Ages European style so kings, peasants, law officers/ army and finally store keepers/ owners. So the event that made this specialty was the fact that there was a food shortage so things got very hectic durning the last days of the simulation so there was murders over food and stuff and weapons were for sale and there was murder.

 So once we had a little bit of perspective about how bad life would be back then if you were not at the top of the pile when it comes to social status and how much it sucked we had to research about our revolution and the living conditions and what pre-lying condition caused the people to revolt. 

So the people in Haiti who revolted where the enslaved Africans who were kidnaped from their homes and forced to to harsh labour in the french Haitian colony. The mortalities rates in the Haitian colony were extremely high, as they were the highest out of any slave colony at the time, and it was a truly horrible place to be. The things that the enslaved people were forced do multiple different things but a big thing was manual labor including but not limited to: sugar, indigo, coffee, cacao and cotton. They were forced to toil in hot and horrible conditions and many died.

The slavers were a majority of the time white french people, mostly men, but sometimes women and occasionally they were enslaved by freed people of African and white decent.

So now onto what my group did for the final project. What we did for our court trial was create an affidavit and the other group did as well. We gathered evidence and did all of the mock legal proceedings and we then recorded our part of arguing our reasoning to the judge and the other group did the same. You can see the video by clicking the link to the right. IMG_2150 .You find my group members blog posts here. Brooke. Sydney. Dylan.