Category: PLP Reflections

It’s That Time of The Year Again – mPOLs 2022

“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.”

Hi there, welcome back. Today’s blog post is about a yearly tradition amongst PLP, mPOLs. Although we skipped last year due to Covid-19, I am ready to reflect on my growth as a learner so far this year and what I can do to improve myself as a student before the end of the school year. 

My Learning Plan

Something new from these last couple years is what’s called a Learning Plan. Near the beginning of the year, we filled out a statement of learning intent, plans to accomplish goals and choosing “Profiles” representing different levels of certain Core Competencies that we hope to have achieved by the end of the year. At this year’s mPOL, I will be discussing some of these competencies and wether I think I have improved so far in them or not, as well as discussing aspects of learning such as, revision, teamwork, responsibility, and production of high quality work in my Humanities class. 

One thing I’ve been working on this year so far is Communicating. More specifically, speaking in front of others in a confident and engaging way. Speaking in-front of people has always been a bit of a struggle for me, especially these last couple years, which is why I find it as something very important to be striving to improve on. By the end of this year, I want to have become much more comfortable and confident when communicating in-front of peers, classmates or anyone in general.

Presenting my “Playlist of My Life”

So far this school year, I believe I’ve shown improvement in this competency already. I felt much more comfortable when speaking in front of my peers about my “Playlist of My Life”. Not to mention, I knew my presentation by heart and hardly needed to look at my notes, as well as managing to keep my audience engaged. This was also the case when it came to presenting the idea behind my conceptual art piece at the winter exhibition. On the other hand, an area for improvement when it came to this competency was our class Socratic Seminars. Although I have improved much on my analysis skills which would give me more confidence when it comes to my ideas that I would share, it would still be quite challenging to me as it involves sharing personal opinions in-front of my classmates. Yet, the only way to improve in this area is to go out of my comfort zone as much as I can, which will be then again be pretty challenging, but something I’m definitely willing to do. 


The next thing that I’ve been working on this year is Collaborating. This means that I can not only confidently work with others, but can also take on a leadership role, and do a good job doing it. – ie. being open to new ideas and possibilities, as well as understanding that there is no “right” way to do things. Furthermore, one goal that I’d like to accomplish by the end of this school year is to further improve my leadership skills and to take on leadership roles more often. 

Picture from our Political Party Ad

Now for this competency as well, I have shown aspects in which I showed leadership – the politics project and winter exhibition. However, it’s not the level in which I want to be. What I’d like to do is to create an even deeper understanding of my strengths and flaws in order to build an authentic leadership style that fits best with me – in order to be the best leader I can be. This also means demonstrating qualities such as flexibility, open-mindedness and creativity. 


My Agenda

As I’ve been talking about competencies that I’ve shown and would like to continue improving in, I’d now like to talk about something I’d like to “celebrate” – and that is keeping very organized and making sure I stay motivated and disciplined. This could also be connected to the “Personal Awareness and Responsibility” competency. In the past year, I have figured out what I want my future to look like, which I think has made it slightly easier to keep up the motivation to stay organized and determined – especially since I want to go into the medical field, so this is a crucial trait to have in med school. I think this has always been a trait that I’ve been very good at, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t had times I’ve struggled with it. I’ve had weeks in which I’ve felt very disorganized, which lead me to feeling more stressed than I would’ve been.

When it came to completing my four final analyses for my “Playlist of My Life”, staying motivated and organized was essential. I had four days to complete them all, with things such as soccer and work to also keep in mind. Now this was something everyone in the class was assigned to do, but it was an accomplishment for me. I usually spend way too much time than necessary while working on assignments that involve writing, as I excessively re-read them many times to make them as good as I can possibly make them. I still think this is something important to do, but not to the same extent. That weekend, I was able to find the right balance, and with that I learned to be much more efficient with my time when it came to writing assignments . 


Part of my Zettlekasten

Now that I’ve already answered the driving question “How have I demonstrated growth as a learner so far this year?”, I’m going to answer the next one – “How can I sharpen my Learning Plan to ensure I will reach my learning targets by the end of this school year?”. In summary, I hope to reach the levels of “Communicating” and “Collaborating” in which I set in my Learning Plan at the beginning of the year, and stated in this presentation. I will however strive to take my organization and determination to the next level by bumping up 1-2 “profiles” – where I’ll be able to take responsibility for making ethical decisions and become even more self-aware of my own strengths and flaws (which also ties into improving my leadership skills). In addition to staying organized and efficient, I’d like to take more time into using my Zettlekasten, as it will be beneficial to future writing assignments. 

The “Language” is The Message

Hi there, welcome to another blog post. My class and I just completed one of the shortest projects we’ve ever done. Nonetheless, it was quite enjoyable and taught me a lot. The most important part of this project was where we learned about how to analyze music through the language that it used – tone, poetic devices and overall meaning of the song. For our final product, we did so with five songs of our choice that reflected an aspect of our lives. Hence, why our project’s driving question is “How can we use music to represent texts and ourselves?”. 

My Tone & Mood Response

After learning about 40 poetic devices through a couple quizzes, we practiced analyzing the tone of poetry and songs. We then applied it in an assignment for a favourite song of our choice. As far as analyzing music goes, I think I started off well – but improved much more in my next analysis. 

The next analysis’ intention was to get more of an insight into what our teacher was looking for in our final products. When thinking about this assignment, I had a song that came to my mind immediately – I’m Yours by Jason Mraz. After receiving a lot of positive feedback from my peers and teacher, I went on to revise it a little and include it as part of my “Playlist of My Life”. If you’d like to read it, click here. If not, you can also click the accordion bellow for a summary. 

Listening to “I’m Yours” always brings me back to the moment I was laying in the grass as the sun was shining, with my dog about a week before he passed away. It’s a pretty simple moment, however, it has a much further meaning. As he had been with me my entire life, losing him was even more devastating than it would be set out to be. In fact, I was even taught a valuable  lesson – not to take anything for granted. The line “our time is short” which is referring to the cliche “life is short”, reminds me of this lesson I had learned – life is too short, so don’t take anything you have for granted. I also mentioned that I believed this song was addressed to life itself, rather than a person or romantic interest. As you listen closely, this meaning becomes clearer and clearer – you can start to see that he’s explaining how he is dedicating himself to life, or his own life rather, and is changing his attitude when it comes to it. 

As I said, this analysis compared to my last one was a major improvement. Although the biggest difference was mentioning poetic devices, I was able to go much more in depth in my second one’s meaning and how it reflected an aspect of my life – which is what I think was a big strength when it came to that analysis. This piece of writing was also one of my favourites out of my 5 songs and was a very good start. Although, I still think incorporating poetic devices wasn’t the strongest quite yet. Especially since one of the one’s I mentioned was just repetition, which is in practically every song out there because it makes them much catchier and easier to memorize. 


My least favourite analysis was that of Rolling in The Deep. Although this time I did much better at including poetic devices, it was the song I connected with the least. The only meaning I have to it is the fact that it reminds me of when I was little, and is still one of my all-time favourite songs. What I really enjoyed about my other analyses was how deeply I was able to explain how they reflected an important aspect of my life, and this one was lacking that. When I listened to this song when I was younger, I never seemed to feel the sense of anger that I noticed in analyzing the lyrics – which is why I think I don’t have as clear of a connection to it. 

Adele has always been a favourite artist of mine, as I’ve been listening to her for as long as I can remember. However, this song in particular stands out because it reminds me of singing my heart out to it at 6 years old. The tone of “Rolling in The Deep” is wrath, displeasure and heartbreak. She represents said tone with many poetic devices. A hyperbole such as “the scars of your love leave me breathless”, explaining how the betrayal left her astonished, but she obviously wasn’t shocked enough to be physically breathless. Adele gives a very clear picture of the emotions she is feeling in result of this heartbreak, even dark thoughts – desiring to get revenge and for that persons to feel more hurt than she did. When I listened to this song when I was young, I felt a sense of confidence in her voice rather than anger. Which can still make sense, since after experiencing this, she became stronger and confident that she wouldn’t let someone do something like that to her again.

Finally, the last analysis that I will be discussing was arguably my best out of all 5, which was “Thriller” by Michael Jackson. I believe it was a very good analysis all around – MJ was a big part of my life in terms of music, as well as the important event in which I connected to it. I was also able to analyze the true meaning/intention of the song and more naturally integrate poetic devices which added further to the effect the song had on listeners. I even suggested that the whole thing in which the song is addressed to (evil lurking) could even be an entire metaphor in itself to an aspect of society or someone’s life – one example could be overworking and stress.

Grade six was one of the years where I went through an entire phase of where all the music I listened to consisted of Michael Jackson. In this same year, I experienced a pretty big turning point in my life in which I was able to discover something I knew I was good at – joining my school’s track team. Thriller is essentially a horror movie in the form of a song – yet, I found it to be much more enjoyable and exciting than one. Additionally, this song has a romantic undertone to it – MJ’s character is hoping that his romantic interest will be so terrified that she’ll have no choice but to seek safety in his arms. Although appearing more simple, Thriller includes a number of literary devices in his song. To name one, “horror” is personified quite often – “as horror looks you right in between your eyes” and “you try to scream, but terror takes the sound before you make it”. However, using personification, and other devices such as imagery and hyperboles adds to the dramatic tone is brought through in the song.

 

Although I don’t have an issue with it, one thing I was pretty proud of when it came to this project was my work ethic. I wasn’t able to be at school for a week – which equivalents to over a third of the project. Nonetheless, I stayed on top of all the activities that were done in class. Additionally, I planned to do all four analyses that I had left in four days (one for each day) and managed to accomplish that goal on time. I was pretty happy about it as I usually spend way too much time than is necessary, especially on things that include writing – and that wouldn’t have been possible since I had activities and work in the majority of those days. 

Presenting to a couple of my peers

I’ve always felt a little uncomfortable while speaking in front of people, but I think this project’s final presentation has shown improvement in that area. I was well spoken, knew the majority of my presentation by heart and managed to keep my audience engaged with a fun game of bingo while still not having it distract them from my presentation. Although, these final products were pretty personal which was a bit out of my comfort zone, but I enjoyed the challenge.

In conclusion, to answer the driving question “How can we use music to represent texts and ourselves?”, I think I did a pretty good job answering it. I chose songs that represented an important part of my life, and identified poetic devices as well as included my own outlook on each song’s meaning. I believe that this project already shows my improvement in critical thinking and analyzing skills since the last project. Our last project had to do with art, but this one did too – and it took me the different aspects from this project to realize how meaningful the stories behind some of my favourite songs are, and I’ll of course never look at music the same.

 

PS: Here are the links to the other analyses that I didn’t mention – “Rocket Man” and “Vogue”.

 

An Atomic Medium – The Manhattan Project²

To end off the new year, PLP conducted their first winter exhibition since 2019. Over the last couple months, we explored three areas of focus where in the end, we would eventually create our own conceptual art focused on the lasting impacts the world’s first atomic bomb and it’s creation had on the world. First, was conceptual art – where we first discussed in class and saw in person on a field study.  Secondly, was analyzing the term “historical significance” – through a blog post that we wrote as a project milestone. Lastly, the infamous Manhattan Project– where we learned lots about in class lectures.

“How did the development of the atomic bomb change the world?” – Driving question

After gathering up the key knowledge essential to this project, we then went on to start creating our final products. Our class was separated into 4 different groups; Society and Culture, Science and Tech, Politics and Warfare, and Morals, Ethics and Philosophy. This is how we would be separated on the night of the exhibition, where each group would display their art in their group’s assigned room. I was in the Science and Tech group with Jordyn, Alexee, Liam, Kaden, Matthew and Brenton. 

When it came to setting up our room for the exhibition, teamwork was extremely important. The two hours we had to set up passed by a lot faster than we perceived, and during the moments leading up to the exhibition, our room seemed to not be working out due to set up and audio/visual issues. But in the end, we pulled through and managed to make our room look much better than we originally expected. 

As I was in the “Science and Tech” group, my final product had to be connected to this category.  Given my interest in pursuing a career in the medical field, I decided to focus my concept on how the Manhattan project ultimately provided break throughs in this field. I made my concept on the discovery of radiation being able to not only cause, but treat cancer. This of which was discovered through the ramifications of those who were affected by the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I felt like this was a more unique approach, since it was making something positive out of something so negative. If you’d like to hear more, click the accordion bellow to see my artist statement. 

My primary motivation when it comes to my art piece is my personal point of view on the research behind the atomic bomb—that it is conflicting with two different “sides”. It’s about the fact that, the atomic bomb—something so dangerous and deadly, has also lead to technological advances that have ultimately helped save lives. By choosing to base my art piece on a positive outcome that came from the research behind the atomic bomb, I desire to have the viewer spark the same thoughts after coming to understand the meaning behind my art piece.

I decided to have my art represent radiation therapy in an interactive way, as well as with the materials I chose, because I feel as though it is the best way to represent both the concept that I am choosing to depict, as well as the reaction I intend to provoke the viewers with.

As you approach my art piece, I will ask you to remove part of this mannequin’s hair, as a representation of something that those suffering from this terrible disease tend to go through—losing their hair. Cancer has, without a doubt, impacted many people’s friends, loved ones, or even themselves. I want people through my art piece to feel this conflict between this good and bad – radiation therapy – the bad you lose your hair – the good it has proven to cure or diminish cancer.

 

Before the night of the exhibition, I was already unsure about how I was representing my idea, and how it would come off to other people. I realized that my art had the potential to bring up sensitive past or present experiences, and my suspicions were confirmed especially with two people who came and saw my art. One going through radiation therapy, and another who’s dad passed away after going through radiation therapy a few times. In the end, I was still happy with my idea, but if I were to do it again, I would most certainly change the way I represented it. However, representing something such as devastating as cancer can be quite challenging to not unsettle others who were closely affected by it. 

We also completed a new area of writing skills, specifically Text Analysis in conjunction with reading the novel “Hiroshima”.  We wrote three response journals, an in-class theme analysis and finally, a critical summary. I had never written a critical summary before, but I found it quite interesting to look at a novel in a different way and force myself to think about the underlining meaning in each page, word and sentence.  In the end although difficult, the final critical summary in my humble opinion turned out quite well. You can click here to see my critical summary blog post. 

The other blog post we did in this project was on historical significance. For this assignment, we chose an event and needed to show specific evidence to convince others that this chosen event is historically significant. In giving me an even deeper understanding to the term historical significance, I believe that this assignment helped contribute to making my final product’s concept more refined – specifically showing the audience how the atomic bomb affected the world of Science and Technology. 

I think that my conceptual art gave most people a different perspective on the discovery of atomic power. Which is what I felt was a big take away for me from this project – , that the splitting of the atom can and has been used for good. Those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the time had to suffer and nuclear bombs that could ultimately destroy the earth continue to be produced.  However, believe it or not, due to the historical significance of this technology the world has also changed for good – impacting medicine, energy, agriculture, space science, engineering and more. 

 

How Can We Do better?

Hi everyone, this post is marking the end of our “Think you can do better?” project. If you haven’t read my previous posts, the driving question for this project was “How should we govern ourselves?”. In this project, we were split up into political parties and each decided on what we wanted to see happen in Canada’s government. In my opinion, the final outcome of this project was a fail. But, has also had successes and sparked out opportunities to learn. Like we learn in PLP, a fail isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s your First Attempt In Learning and a chance to grow. 

improveism.com Written By Al

At the beginning of this project, our class was introduced to the Zettelkasten system. Which was one of the really good outcomes of this project. It is essentially a note taking system that helps you store ideas in a “second brain”, which for us was in an app called Craft. But, the magic of this system is really in the linking. Where you’re able to link notes to each other (through Craft) by finding a way to somehow connect them together, even those notes are completely different. Which, you eventually create ideas from. I quite enjoyed being introduced to this system and will continue using it for school and personal use for the foreseeable future. 

ryerson.ca Written By Surbhi Bir

By the time the Canadian Federal Election had just finished, we had already learned about some political concepts and Canada’s government structure. So, we then wrote a blog post reflecting on the election’s results. We all got some feedback on our posts before our teacher officially marked them, and mine was to explain why my GIF supported my post. I could’ve done a much better job with the feedback I received, because my paragraph didn’t make much sense compared to the rest of the post. My post was also a bit all over the place, I should’ve made my main message much more clear throughout. To add, I had yet to get good enough at using my Zettelkasten, which I think could’ve also played a factor. 

However, I did take my thoughts on this post and made sure I improved those aspects when it came to my next one. The next step in our project was for our class to be formed into political parties, and have each party come up with plans on how they would like our country to be governed. For this next post, I wrote my party’s press release on the ideas my group and I had come up with (Jordyn, Liam, Meg and Alex O). I made sure to have a clear message throughout the post and made good connections (eg. Solar and wind sectors and to my previous post). I also enjoyed the fact that you could tell that I knew what I talking about. Because of all the research I had done, and used to back up my points included in my post (thanks to my Zettelkasten).

What I want to talk about next is the final step of our project, our party’s campaign video. When we first wrote up our screenplay, we had a specific vision as to what we wanted our video to look like. And it didn’t turn out exactly the way we wanted. At the start of our video where we had the people walking in, I think that you can tell what we were trying to accomplish. But, the overall quality of this part could’ve been improved (ie. audio, visual, place, angle).  Next, the clips of Jordyn and I talking was the most important part that could “make or break” our video, since it was the longest part. We didn’t take the time to memorize our lines as much and we didn’t get to film the way, and at the place we wanted because of weather and time constraints. 

On the other hand, I did really like the visuals that popped up when Jordyn and I pointed. Plus, the content was well said and the editing was pretty good for what we had. All in all, I think that if we had more time or were to do this again, we could’ve definitely made every aspect of our video slightly better. Now that I look at it, I also think that we should’ve explained our party’s name more in depth to avoid confusing our audience. Our party was the most unique out of all the other parties in our class, and I think we should’ve used that as more of an advantage and stuck to it when it came to our video. 


Finally, this project may have been a bit of a flop. But, it has also lead me to be the most interested in anything politics related that I have ever been, and I’m really glad it has. Although, I still have much more to learn and have probably just scratched the surface enough to form my own opinions. 

I’ve also come to the realization that it was a lot harder than it looks to be put in a politicians perspective and make final decisions on what exactly would be best for Canada. I now hold a little bit of sympathy for politicians I have criticized in the past, because they’re people too and also have failures. So, when it comes to answering the question “How should we govern ourselves?”, it may seem simple but it can actually be pretty complex. Because no matter what, there will always be people who don’t necessarily agree with your ideas. That’s because no plan will be 100% perfect, and will always have it’s flaws. For example, if you want to focus a lot on the environment, you need to figure out a way to fund it and other plans you may have. Reducing the deficit also should be put into account. 

 

 

Side note: 

Via BC Gov’s Instagram Page

This visual was something that was just published on the BC Government’s Instagram page. Reading it, I noticed that a large portion of the plans were plans that parties in our class had actually mentioned. This goes to show, that all our parties had legit ideas that governments are actually discussing and implementing. 

Gee Wiz, The 50’s Were Swell

The 1950s was a time of prosperity and growth in many different ways. At this time, people also strived to make everything perfect, it was so bad that it was
even an obsession. For example, there was the ideal nuclear family with the housewife, working father and kids. The housewife was expected to cook and clean all day and the father was expected to bring all the money home. Now if you’d like to hear more about society in the 50s, don’t hesitate to check out some of my previous weekly posts, such as the one on the movie Grease. 

Now in terms of our most recent project, it’s pretty clear that it’s about the 1950s. In fact, our driving question was “How has Canadian life developed after WWII?” This year, a local non-profit organization called the Deep Cove Heritage Society contacted our program to help them out with a few things such as conducting interviews for them. After we conducted those interviews (I did mine with Emily McGee and Julia Cree) we then assigned those interviewees to people in our class who could connect information from them to their podcast topics and to help answer our driving question. We were also assessed on two different competencies through the entirety of this project:

Discuss, Listen and Speak: Have I respectfully exchanged diverse ideas and viewpoints to build shared understanding and extend thinking using appropriate speaking and listening skills for the context and purpose?

Continuity and Change: How are lives and conditions alike over time and how have they changed?

The third milestone we did in this project that I’d like to use as an example of my learning was our Keynote Presentation. In this milestone, we were to present to the class on a topic relating to our podcast topics. 

In the matters of the Discuss, Listen and Speak competency, I think I did well in some areas but not so much in others. I think that I showed good presentation skills and understood the content, so you could tell that I knew what I was talking about. However, I had a problem with constantly saying “things like that” at the end of my sentences and was a bit quiet. But, I did end up taking that feedback and applying it to the next time we did a presentation in front of the class for one of our stepping stones and improved a lot. 

Now for the Continuity and Change competency, I think that I excelled quite well in it and used very strong points for both continuity and change. For my presentation, I talked about how media has affected teenagers since the 50s. I used examples such as movies and film, like the movie “Rebel Without A Cause” is the first movie targeted at teens. I also talked about music and the impact Rock ‘n’ Roll had on them. For things that have remained the same, I talked about how media today still pushes unrealistic beauty standards. I also mentioned that television and music are still very much around today, but have just grown more.

For the fifth milestone we did (being our actual podcast episode), I was pretty happy with how it turned out. We took our interviews, knowledge and extra research on the 1950s relating to our topics to put together the final assignment in this project. 

For the Discuss, Listen and Speak competency, I think I showed it very well in this milestone. However, I also think that I had some areas to improve on. On one hand, I had a good understanding of the topic, you could tell I had done my research and the listeners were able to understand me because I was speaking at a good pace. I also made sure to add lots of context and make connections throughout my episode. But on the other hand, I kept worrying about audio issues because I could never seem to get my voice to sound the way I wanted no matter what I tried. This is one thing I would like to master if I were to make another episode. 

 As for the Continuity and Change competency, I think I nailed it pretty well. I approached this competency in a slightly more unique way than I usually do for my episodes, and decided to do even more interviews and focus on the continuity and changes in teenagers since the 50s in two different sides of Canada: British Columbia and Quebec. I also had a lot of good examples of change represented throughout my episode and mentioned things that had remained the same in my conclusion. An example of changes that I mentioned were the catholic school boards they had in the 50s, but are not around today. To talk about continuities in my conclusion, I said that teenagers today still spend time out with friends, still fall in love, still “rebel” and find themselves and what they want their place to be in the world.

Click bellow to see my progress throughout the making of my episode!

 

In my episode, I came to the conclusion that comparing a teenagers experience in Canada is not as simple as it seems, because there would be differences in different parts of this country, which was shown throughout the episode. In this project, it was also an interesting experience to hear about different parts of Canada in the 1950s. My original plan was to interview people who grew up in the 50s in several different provinces but I realized that it would make my episode way too long.

Finally, to answer the driving question for this project (How has Canadian life developed after WWII?), I would say it has developed drastically. The economy, quality of life and the overall face of Canada all faced major changes after WWII. I realized that I didn’t know as much as I thought I did about the 50s until this project and how much this decade impacted the Canada we know today in so many different ways. Immigration, technology innovations, voting rights, workers rights and many more all improved in those years. However, the 1950s weren’t as perfect as they appeared on the outside, there were still issues such as discrimination, which we still know today.

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?

From William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1996)

The tragic love story that is Romeo and Juliet was what my class and I had been studying for the last month, for our newest project. In the process we read the play, made 2 podcast episodes, watched different adaptions of the story and to tie it together, in the end, we created a live audio story of our own adaptation of the play. The driving question that we were answering for our adaption was: How can we present a live audio story that makes an audience appreciate the relevance of Shakespeare?

So, now that I’ve given you a pretty solid base as to what this project really was all about, let’s go into the process of these parts of the project. 

First off, we read the play. My first impression was that it was very blah; hard to understand, confusing and pretty odd. When we first read Shakespeare back in grade 8, I expected it to live up to the hype, because, people always say how genius and amazing Shakespeare is as well as is writing. But, I thought otherwise. As did the people that I collaborated with in the first podcast episode of this project — Matthew and Noah. In this episode, we talked about what a classic is and what makes Romeo and Juliet such a classic. 

I found creating a co-hosted episode was a lot more entertaining for audience members because you got to see us joking around and having fun which was pretty different compared to my previous episodes. Not to mention, it was also just a lot more fun to record. As far as the episode overall, I think it was great for my group and I’s time making an episode like this, but I still could have added a lot more clips in between for giving context during the conversation. 


Next, I collaborated with the same people to do a second co-hosted podcast. This episode was a follow up to the last one, but instead, we talked about adaptations. Those adaptations were more focused on the movie adaptations we watched on the play, but we brought on our own points and topics as well. 

For this episode, believe it or not, my group took everything that was good about our last episode, and made it even better. Our chemistry/making it seem like we were actually good friends, giving the audience a good sense of all our personalities and the planning for the topics and questions we were going to discuss in the episode, was hugely improved. And for this episode, I made sure to add a lot more clips of myself talking in between clips do give more context to the viewer. I also want to add that I really liked the the first minute of my episode or so turned out. 

For this episode, believe it or not, my group took everything that was good about our last episode, and made it even better. Our chemistry/making it seem like we were actually good friends, giving the audience a good sense of all our personalities and the planning for the topics and questions we were going to discuss in the episode, was hugely improved. And for this episode, I made sure to add a lot more clips of myself talking in between clips do give more context to the viewer. I also want to add that I really liked the the first minute of my episode or so turned out.


After completing our two episodes, we went straight to the planning of our play, which actually turned out quite well. In the play, I was put as “director”, so I basically made sure everyone was  in line and said their lines or made the sound effect at the right time. I think it was a good role for me, since acting is really not my strong-suit and I typically like telling people what to do. But, maybe one day, if we were to do something like this again as a project, I might try going out of my comfort zone to try and do something different. 


Overall, I actually ended up quite liking this project. At the beginning, I was not a fan of Shakespeare whatsoever. But now, I’m not saying I’m a fan, but I understand why it’s considered . By the time the project was done and I had done some reflection on the project as a whole, I realized that after a while, it was very satisfying to read his poetry, typically out loud, which I think I realized from the making of the radio show and when learning about his poetry style. Not to mention, Shakespeare did create 1,700 words and things such as the knock-knock joke, which is also pretty incredible. 

I recommend that you watch our final performance down bellow, and let me know what you think!

Bye!

The Youth in World War II

The Second World War was the biggest and most dangerous war than any other war in history, with over 75 million deaths (four times more compared to WWI) and involving over 30 countries. 

This is what we’ve been learning about this last month for our newest project. This project’s driving question was “How might we use stories to understand the causes and consequences of WWII?”. In this project, we created our second episode to our podcasts, where we told stories through our interviewees, obviously talking about the causes and consequences in WWII, plus still connecting it to our own podcast topics. If you’d like to know how I got to there, keep reading!

Responding to Text: Have I constructed an original connection between myself, the text, and the world?

The first competency that we were being assessed on in this project was “Responding to Text”. The milestone that I found best represented this competency would be Milestone 3. In this milestone, we read or listened to three different texts in the span of 3 weeks. After completing sheets, at the end of the week, we discussed with our table groups the connections we had made through this text and extra research we had did on something we were interested in learning more about. 

As an example, in week 3, where we listened to a video about a man named Harry Shaw who towards the end of the war, went to Dachau (the original concentration camp), to liberate the Jews that were left from that camp. The connection I had made to myself was that the person I had interviewed for my podcast happens to work in the education department there. I had also done extra research on “Cat eyes” that was was an effective technique used by the US military to transport heavy artillery at night without being seen by German planes above, which was my “connection to the world” I had made on that same worksheet. 

I think that I did pretty well with both the connections in the sheets we completed and the discussions I had with my group. I did have some great points and connections to add to the discussion, but I did have some trouble summarizing the texts we had read and listened to form a theme statement, which I would have liked to improve on. 

Using Evidence and Resources: Have I found diverse sources and evaluated them for their relevance, accuracy, and reliability?

The second competency we were being assessed on was “Using Evidence and Resources”, which I think would be best represented by milestone 2, our research. This milestone is pretty self-explanatory, so I don’t think I have to go into much detail explaining it, but it’s pretty much a section from our podcast planner that we essentially do research on our topic connected to WWII and what we think we want to include in our episodes. I was actually pretty proud of how my research turned out, it was very eye appealing, organized and had all the things that were required to be in this assignment such as 5 different sources and MLA citations. 

Analyze Cause and Consequence: Who or what influenced events to occur and what were the consequences of those events?

The next competency that I will be talking about is “Analyzing Cause and Consequence”. Out of all the milestones, I think that this competency would be best represented by milestone 5, which would be our actual episode, because this idea of “cause and consequence” was really one of the key pillars of this project. Throughout the episode, I give out several examples strictly answering this competency (although, I wish I did talk more about causes). One of my main ideas that I discussed in my conclusion part of the episode was the fact that people living at this time that were also able to make it past all sorts of traumas or other sorts of effects after the war, made them very mentally strong. Especially if they were at younger ages, because as youth, it was harder for some to process, plus then having to live on the next 70-80 years or so with all sorts of flashbacks or traumas coming back to them. It’s just crazy to me, and learning about Magdalene’s story helped give me an even better insight to that. Also, if you’d like to hear more examples of cause and consequence, make sure to listen to my episode ;). 

Global Collaborator: How might I use technology to connect to the world?

The final competency that we were being assessed on in this project was “Global Collaborator”, which for this project, I chose to talk about me finding my interviewee and getting the recordings. It was a bit of a hassle for everyone to get their interviews, since we had about a week to get them, because that was what was supposed to help us form our episodes. I had contacted the Anne Frank house and most of the people working at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site (which was the first and original concentration camp). I them found and made an interview with Maximillian Lutgens, who works in the education department at the memorial. We had two 30 min interviews, the first one, I had asked the questions I originally prepared, but later decided that I wanted to go through a different path and learn more about his grandparents that were around during the war, where is when I found Magdalene’s story. 

To finish this post off, I really had fun learning about World War II, because I didn’t know vert much about it before. This project actually got me pretty interested to learn more about the war, so I’d like to continue to do other research and watch movies. I was pretty proud of the way my episode had turned out, I just wished I had talked more about Magdalene’s life before the war and the causes of the war, because I only had about one paragraph on it. I was also pretty proud of the way I was able to connect my podcast topic to this project’s topic by turning this inspiring story into a message (where I got a lot better at from the Text Discussions). At the end of the episode, I had said that hearing such inspiring stories about these teenagers who got through living in such a brutal time, proves that you’ll be able to get through any struggle you may be going through, so never doubt your own strength. 

Anyways, make sure to listen to my episode bellow and I will see you in my next post. See ya!

My First Episode on “How to Survive High School”

Hi y’all welcome back to my blog. On todays post, I will be reflecting on my most recent project called “The Greatest Canadian” that my PLP class had been working on for the past month or so. This project was inspired by a show that ran on CBC back in 2004, where there was a series of 10 episodes, all with different hosts presenting a certain person and trying to convince the viewers that their Canadian was the greatest. So what each one of us in my class did was that we did something pretty similar except we created podcasts instead of videos and had a more diverse variety of people to be our greatest Canadians instead of just all white men. 

                          Driving question: “Who is the Greatest Canadian?”  

When we first started off this project, I had absolutely no idea who I wanted to interview, because that was also something mandatory to have in our podcasts, what I wanted to do for my podcast and who I was going to pick to be my greatest Canadian. 

Establish Historical Significance: How do we make choices about what is worth remembering?

So, the stepping stone that really helped me narrow down and decide who I was going to chose to my Greatest Canadian was the Historical Significance worksheet. This also happened to be one of the competencies for our project: Establishing Historical Significance. 

What happened in this assignment was that we noted the greatness of our choice for our Greatest Canadian on importance, profundity, quantity, durability and relevance. Of course at the time, I still had absolutely no idea who to do, but I had a few ideas. I eventually narrowed them down and decided to chose Alessia Cara because she matched my own podcast topic the best and she’s just amazing, so why not chose her. Overall, this assignment made it much easier for me to chose my person and get a better understanding of how great she really is. 

Empowered Learner: How might I use technology to construct knowledge? 

For one of our other competencies, Empowered Learner, I felt that both my podcast planner and podcast episode represented it best. My podcast planner because although it wasn’t exactly the “fanciest” planner, it was very well organized, very eye appealing and still used some of the features that we are offered in Numbers. Which made me quite proud of it because for me personally, I don’t typically like to make assignments like these look better,  nor did I think that I’m exactly artistic enough to, but this time I did. 

When it came to my podcast, I was quite proud of it in the end because of how I formatted it and expressed her story and my opinion on why I thought she was the greatest Canadian. The flow of it, with a combination of what I was saying, my tone and the music was well put together as well. I also liked who I ended up interviewing, Ms Langevin (the choir teacher at my school). I made this connection being the fact that she also has a platform to teenagers to spread all kinds of messages as Alessia does, and of course that both their careers have to do with music.

Comprehending Text: Have I applied a variety of strategies to comprehend texts and express an understanding of how texts use features?

Now for the final competency of this project, the best examples of this would be the videos that we watched of the greatest Canadians from CBC and the text readings we did in class. We only watched two of those “Greatest Canadian” videos but they certainly helped me get a better idea of what I wanted my podcast to be like and what I wanted the viewers to take from it. 

The text readings we did in class were also a good example because it gave me a great opportunity to comprehend a random text, relate the subject to my project and discuss with my peers and hear other points of view about the text. For example, one of the texts we read was about being “Not-American” and Canadian identity, which happens to be the main subject of our own project. With my peers, and the rest of my class, it was interesting to hear them talking about wether they agree or disagree to being “Not-American” well representing Canadian identity. 

After completing our final podcasts, we then formed a basecamp post, which included show notes, our episode, a transcript of our podcast and our sources from research. We then emailed the link to the basecamp post to our interviewee. 

I personally really enjoyed the lectures we did over the course of this project, they were very informational and just overall interesting to learn about. They were also all pretty different subjects, so if there wasn’t something that you were particularly interested in, you could find something else you liked more in another lecture. Also, since each lecture covered a whole subject, there was more that I was able to extend on and do my own research. Which is exalts what I did in my weekly posts, particularly for week 2 & 3. 

Here is my podcast if you’d like to listen to it:

To sum up, this project was very much enjoyable. I not only had fun learning about Canadian identity and other subjects we explored, but actually went and did my own research at home, and had fun doing that, which had never really happened before. I also learned more about creating a podcast and went out of my comfort zone while creating it. But, if I were to do anything differently, I wish that I had explored GarageBand a lot more because the music I created for my podcast was good but could’ve been much better.  

Anyways, that’s all for now. 

Bye!

Who Knew How Sick Podcasts Could Be?

Ahem! Testing…Testing… Can everyone hear me? Good. I am pleased to announce that the first project of my grade 10 year has now been completed. What is this project you may ask? Well, in this project, we created podcasts. And yes, if you’re a typical teenager like me, you think that the only thing you’d like to listen to is music or tv. But, let me tell you, podcasts are a lot cooler than you’d think and way underrated.

We started off this project by focusing on two things: identity and the steps we’d take to get to our final product. Let’s start with identity. We had some in-class talks, talking about how we defined identity. The way I described it was mostly using the words that are apart of worldview (geography, beliefs, knowledge, values, society, etc). If you’d like to see more about our activities and class-discussions, click here to see my second milestone on identity. But, if you decided to stay here, here’s also a smaller look at the activities we did. 

Now let’s go on to the following milestones to get us closer to our final podcast. Our third milestone was our podcast plan. It wasn’t very eye appealing as I could’ve made it, but it got my ideas across. And, although I had a strong idea on what my podcast was going to be about, I had no idea what I would make my music like or what how my podcast was going to be put together. 

As I was brainstorming different ideas I could do for my podcast, I thought about what I think would appeal to a more wide range of people and in my case, teenagers. But, I finally narrowed down to the idea of creating a podcast that could give the advice to teenagers that they are missing from their everyday lives to make them even better. Because it’s always great to learn all this information early instead of in your 20s and 30s. 

The idea came to me when I was having dinner with my parents one night. Every once and awhile, I have these long deep conversations with them about different aspects of life. So, I thought, why not put all of that wisdom into a podcast? So that’s what I did. 

Next, we created a draft for our podcast trailer. A trailer being a 1-2 minute clip of us introducing our podcasts. Now, let me tell you, my trailer draft was mega rough, because I hadn’t created my music yet and had an okay idea of how it was going to be formed. And thanks to milestone 5, it helped make that a lot easier. In this milestone, we received critique from one of our peers (thank you Grace). This came very useful to me because it gave me a much better idea on how to form my trailer as I said it would. 

Next, came our final podcast trailer and final milestone. I also added somethings such as a small clip of a short interview I recorded with my dad. I asked him about 5 questions and picked which answer I found most “attention grabbing”.

And in the making of this podcast trailer, I successfully improved my GarageBand skills. Instead of knowing nothing at all, I now know pretty much all of the basics and how to work most of it. Which is a huge win for me considering the fact that  I was convinced I would never learn how to work that app.  

To conclude, I would say that this project overall was pretty successful. I didn’t start off quite as amazing as I wanted to but then later on and when it came to my final product, I can say that I am quite proud of how it turned out. It turned out way better than I thought it would and the steps in this project taught me how to become a real podcaster and get out of my comfort zone by eventually going out to bring and interview people to feature on the show.

Bye!

Identity again??!

Hey everyone! In this blog post, I will be talking about Identity. Now why exactly am I talking about identity you may ask? Because I haven’t talked about it so much since our first project from grade 9, This Land Is Us. Well, in our newest project, we are preparing to create our own individual podcasts. So, we started from learning all about podcasts and the most important parts that make them so interesting. Little details like formatting, editing and music all play a huge role in the making of a podcast. And, our podcasts are going to be based hugely on some certain aspect of our identities.

Side note: I challenge you to count how many times I say “Identity” in this post. Because I bet there’s going to be many. 

 

Identity is a complex and confusing thing. But to simplify it for you, it’s really just everything that is either a part of your life or something that represents you. As I said, identity has been a big part of our class discussions and activities. So, let me show you my own description of identity, and one that a few of my classmates and I put together as well.

Now the first part of our group description is pretty self explanatory, but let me explain the second part for you.

Your background plays a role in who you are today and who you are today plays a role in who you are tomorrow.”

What that really means is that your past, present and future actions affect who you are. Or more specifically, your identity. 

It can be something big that represents who you are such as the place you live or even something just as small as your favourite ice cream flavour. Just really every little thing that’s apart of your life or could represent you, is part of your identity. Your worldview, (something that I haven’t talked about since grade 8!) is also apart of your identity. 

 

 

 

After having many in-class discussions and activities to help us better simplify the meaning of identity, we took it to the next level by creating something called a bio-poem. Even with such little words, somethings in this bio-poem can mean many things.

For example, Covid-19 has hugely impacted my identity and the way I live, as has it with everyone else in the world. Where I live also impacts my identity a whole lot because it impacts who I’m friends with, my values, my beliefs and what my day to day schedule is like.

In this project, another assignment that applied a lot to our identities was the “Letter to myself”. These letters were to be written to ourselves at the end of this year. We wrote about goals that we’d hope to have accomplished, things that we would have liked to have made changes to and of course, incorporated points on our own identities as well.

While and after creating my podcast, I’m going to focus on having it push me to grow and improve as student, teammate, friend, daughter, sister and just a person overall. And so I’m hoping, when I do look back at that “Letter to Myself” in June, that I would have achieved those goals, not only from just my podcast, but from my experiences, actions and opportunities to come.

Another part from the milestone that is this blog post, was making a GIF. This GIF had a picture of ourselves and included symbols that represented our identities. Here’s mine!