A field study to Alberta with your class can be tough especially when trying to do work, but they are tricks you can use to stay focus.

Hey again, welcome to a blog post about our field study to Alberta.  In this post, I’m also going to be talking about how I managed with impulsivity through out this field study and how what I’ve learned will help me in the future.  This all fits in with our course called PGP (Personal Growth Plan). Personal Growth Plan to me is mainly about developing stronger work habits.  I’m going to give examples of how I’ve stayed persistent and focused throughout the field study to complete my project.  This falls into the PGP area of work because it’s all about how I can continue to be persistent and focused throughout the school year and what I need to fix to get better.  Before I go straight to my examples, I’m going to talk more about the trip and the work we had to complete.

 

When we got to Alberta, it was very exciting.  I was pretty excited to visit a new Provence and hang out with friends.  Along with the excitement of going to Alberta was the realization that this is also still school and that we had to make sure we were focused and getting stuff done while having some fun.  At times, it was tough to balance work and fun, especially when you’re with friends and want to play games.  There are three examples that I want to talk about that I think fit will with PGP and how I managed to get stuff done without the distractions.

 

Example #1 | Ghost Town

For our ghost town project, we had to make a video revolving around the ghost town.  We had a short amount of time to film this and we wouldn’t be given any extra time.  The ghost town was big so we had some extra time to explore and find places to film.  At times it got tough to plan out what we were doing and where we were going next.  To fix this issue, I set up a timer to help us get sections of our film done on time so we could balance our time better for other scenes.  This led to better time management skills and we ended up producing a great video as a group.

Example #2 | Royal Tyrell Museum

The Royal Tyrell museum was a dinosaur museum located in Drumheller.  The Royal Tyrell museum was huge, filled with fossils, relics, and more.  The assignment we got here was random and unexpected.  We had a short amount of time to film and edit a video about one of the dinosaurs in the museum with a partner.  We both had to make separate videos, but we also had to help each other.  The time blocking skills I had gotten better at before really helped.  Although, a bigger problem was managing all the tasks we had to do like how we were going to fit filming each other’s videos, editing our videos, and finding interviews.  The solution was to step up, stay calm, plan everything out, and take action.  What I mean by that is one of us had to step up as a leader and guide what we needed to do get done first and what we should do at the end.  This can help keep things stress free and fun!  We both jogged some notes down and filmed the bits to our video.  We then took a small editing break and went to get an interview from the staff about our dinosaur.  In the end, it worked great because with the time we saved from working together well was used to finding a good staff member to interview.  We had to ask many different people since some of the staff weren’t comfortable.  Having a leader to take responsibility is great for any project.

Example #3 |Daily Notes

In Alberta, we had to complete a project called daily notes.  Daily notes was an assignment where the teacher gave us questions we had to answer.  These questions would usually revolve around what we were going to do and where we were going to go on that day. The tough part was that there were many different daily notes and we had to keep up with each one every day.  To easily get information, I found that it was good to take out my daily notes or jog down some notes on my phone whenever someone talked more about our daily notes subject.  I also did voice recording that I could go back to if I needed help.  Even writing down a few quick note/bullet points to come back to can make it way easier to complete projects.

For the rest of grade 9 and before the field study in grade, I have some goals that I want to try and break.  One of these goals, of course, is getting better at time blocking and procrastinating less.  I have been trying to get better at this and I feel like this is one of my worst habits.  I will continue to time block to get better but I will also get more in-depth with planning when I will do work, what work I’ll do, and stick to it.  Another habit is speaking up.  I want to be more of a leader and a responsible person when it comes to group projects.  Hopefully, if I can follow these goals I can improve my work habits, my leadership skills, and become a better PLP student.