mPOLs 2020!

Yeehaw y’all and welcome back to another blog post. Today I am talking about my mid-year presentation of learning. What is that you may ask? Well, if you’ve ever heard of a parent-teacher meeting, it’s basically like that except that its led by the student (the student presents what they’ve learned, what they want to improve on, etc to their parents and teachers).

Before I start my presentation, I must make the POL declaration:

“Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am an 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 weaknesses. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner”

In Humanities, the project that I thought the best examples of the opportunities I had to progress as a learner was The Story Strikes Back. Last year, one of my biggest subjects and goals that I talked about was my writing, and this project definitely helped me out with that a lot, you can see how well my writing has improved even since the beginning of the year. I got to learn a lot about not just writing in general but in an author’s context: learning about the hero’s journey and how the most popular stories told are formatted in this way, describing things like places, objects and people to make the reader feel as though they are actually in the story and to have the creativity and use the mindset of an author while writing your story and coming up with the plot. My goal to continue improving my writing would be starting to use fancier words because I think that it would make reading it much more enjoyable for myself and others.  And to help me with that, I want to read a lot more. Another goal that I’d like to try to achieve would be using words like “also” and “definitely” way less.

The competency that I want to start working on is:

Expressing and supporting opinions: Express an opinion and support it with credible evidence

I’d like to work on my writing skills in terms of giving more evidence. I mean, I am good at stating the obvious when writing something that needs me to give evidence, but I’d like to start being smarter about it and doing more extra research on the topic.

In Scimatics, the project called Chemistry Stories was a project that I found gave me a great opportunity to progress as a learner because one, I used an app of which I thought I did not like before (explain everything) and I learned about chemistry which I had always been super excited to learn about and that I had never learned about it before then. During this project, we had so much time on our hands to be doing our animations, that I would animate a slide of what I wanted to say but then would be unsatisfied with it a start all over. So, as two new goals that I’d like to take from this is that because I think animating is a cool and helpful skill to have, I’d like to get a lot better with it and more familiar with animating apps (just like explain everything). My other goal is to not always try and obsess over perfecting something because it will never be super-duper perfect and although I should try to make it best as I can but instead of just erasing and starting all over again, to work with what I have.

The competency that I’d like to work more on is:

Communicating and representing: Use mathematical vocabulary and language to contribute to mathematical discussions.

I always use mathematical vocabulary when it’s necessary, but I’d like to start using it much more often to help me explain or better understand mathematical problems or activities.

Now for maker, I’d like to talk about my live event. I thought that this project didn’t just give me a great learning experience, but it also really gave me an amazing opportunity to work on my movie making and editing skills and showed how much I’d gotten better over the course of this year. As a goal, I’d like to keep improving on my movie-making skills to hopefully become a master at it (or pretty close) one day because I think that it’s a pretty important/cool skill to have.

The competency that I’d like to work on is:

Creative Communicator – I communicated clearly and expressed myself creatively for a variety of purposes using the platforms, tools, styles, formats, and digital media appropriate to my goals.

I’d like to work on this competency because even though I want to become better at making movies, I’d still like to express myself creatively while doing that.

My final subject that I’m going to discuss is PGP, we haven’t really started on any major things this year yet, but, I decided to talk about Take Your Kid To Work Day. Now, in my opinion, my take your kid to work day, was madness. After getting such amazing shots of driving there, when I was there and interviews, I dropped my iPad and lost all of the things that I took from that day because my iPad wasn’t backed up. So, I had to go back there on a day that worked for me and re-film everything I took. The video still turned out okay, but definitely not as good as it could’ve been if I still had all of those videos. From this experience, I have learned to be extra careful with my iPad and to try to back it up every single day. Also, this project really showed that even though everything that could’ve gone wrong, went wrong, I still didn’t give up and gave the project my all using my movie editing skills.

The competency that I’d like to work on is:

Managing Impulsivity: Thinking before acting; remaining calm, thoughtful and deliberative.

At stressful times, such as DI, it is very hard for me to stay calm. So, this year, to help me with that, one, I have one friend that I have given the responsibility to remind me to stay calm in stressful times and to start meditating and doing other relaxing activities such as those. 

To conclude, even though I have had some challenges and problems, I think that this year has been pretty successful overall. This year, I have learned lots of new skills like movie editing, making and filming and, probably most importantly, to be extra careful with your iPad. The driving question for this year’s mPOLs is “What is your learning goal that you want to reach by the end of this school year, and how will you meet it?”. My answer to that is that with my writing (using fancier words and less words that I use super often) is by reading more and practicing my writing by making up essays or writing opinion posts on my blog. Also, continuing to get better at making movies: editing, animating, filming, etc. And to accomplish that, I will be making and editing videos of some trips that I go on and even maybe of some important events that I go to. 

Now, before I end my presentation, I have a question for you guys:

Other than reading and practicing my writing, what other techniques do you think could help me improve my writing?