The Beaver Economy (The More Things Change)

What you’re seeing above is the YouTube video to the end goal of this project, a video explaining the infographic Judah (my partner) & I made. I advise you watch the video know to get a rough understanding of what this project is about. We made this infographic throughout working on the project: “The More Things Change”. This was one of the smaller projects being only 3 weeks, so let me walk you through it.

Although this was a partner project, we did not work with them in the beginning. We started off with the 1st milestone looking at the history of Deep Cove (originally named Deep Waters). We did this to understand a major part of this project being the idea of “continuity & change”. A lot of this information on how Deep Cove has changed or stayed the same was through a Keynote slideshow. We looked at things like: the name of the landmark, what kind of infrastructure, the population, and the resources that were available to them. To complete milestone 1 we had to go outside, and write a paragraph on continuity & change with Deep Cove that connects to us today, which you can read here:

Milestone 1 led to a nice transition into Milestone 2, where we looked again at continuity & change with 1 of the 3 main groups of people during the 1600s which you saw in our infographic video (the French, the British, & the First Nations). The group we focused on was the French when they colonized the First Nations land & established New France. We used milestone 2 to get better at figuring out “is this change?, is this a continuity?” through this chart:

 

Now we started to get into the other 2 groups and learn about their stories and what makes them what they are. We got into large groups and tried to get as many facts on the 3 groups with the information we had, we did this over the course of multiple days. We eventually started to think “how do we know this actually happened, from a website? How do we know this website is legit?”.

This is where the 2nd major part of this project came in: “What is evidence & how do we use it?”. This was also something we practiced throughout multiple days. This was done through a protocol, so we could understand evidence from multiple aspects, how to use it in a sentence, synonyms & antonyms, as well as photos to show evidence.

Another way we understood and practiced evidence was reading through the “Treasurer of Spain” on commonlit.org which is a letter written by Christopher Columbus to the Treasurer of Spain showing him how well his explorations went in order to get funding for future explorations, we figured this out through answering questions and looking at the text to find evidence.

All this learning and collecting facts built up to Milestone 3. This was the first partner milestone in which we needed to get the 3 facts for our infographic , and 3 graphics approved to go with those facts. We got facts and graphics, but before we got them approved our class did a gallery walk and could give critique on sticky notes. After we got our peer critique we made further revisions. It took many tries but we eventually got to what you see on the infographic.

Some of the main things we had to remember when making revisions (& when making the rest of the infographic) were these things: keeping writing concise, keeping to the theme or aesthetic, and making sure facts were historically accurate. These were some of our graphics that didn’t make the cut:

Like I said earlier for preparation of Milestone 4: the completed infographic, we had to more graphics, and other statements, like: our thesis (the big main text), the continuity & change statement, & our sources for our work. Judah & I completed this after again, more revisions and peer critique, giving you the this infographic (slight insignificant changes are present):


Now here is the exciting part: making the YouTube video and putting a QR code on it! We used Keynote, Magic Move transition to create our video, you can lead to do it yourself here:

Judah & I created a script which we recorded in Voice Memos, a video description, and a QR code which we generated with QR Code Monkey

However the 3rd major part of this project is not just to make the infographic & put it online, but to put it around the school, here’s our evidence that the infographic is in the school:

There it is, the end to this project, however we are still missing one last things, the answer to the driving question. The driving question being “What did European Settlement Mean For All The People Involved?” You’ve actually already read the answer, our infographic thesis.

This project was really fun to do, & I’m pretty proud of how the infographic turned out, this is definitely a project for future Grade 8s to look forward to.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *