Hello and welcome back to my blog. This is now my second weekly learning portfolio post. This will be a quick little reflection post about the week.

I think that this has been a very productive week for me for The Greatest Canadian project. This week I got my interview recorded, recorded my podcast, and edited it. However one thing I think I should improve on is my interview preparation, as I had to re-record my interview several times to get my recording to actually get the audio, and need to record my side of the audio again. I should also find a way to use a better mic while doing things like online interviews.

Something interesting we did this week was watch the “Greatest Canadian” TV show episode for Tommy Douglas, and compare it to the episode for terry fox. I think that episode could be extra relevant to my podcast and relate to it as it was a discussion about the political accomplishments of Tommy Douglas. I think that I may be able to use my experience watching that to reform my podcast slightly to use some of the ways the show communicated its point so I can communicate mine better.

Thanks for reading my post this week.

Hello and welcome to my first weekly blog post. This is for the week of October 26rd to October 30th.

The first thing I would like to talk about was an assignment on Monday, to look up Canada’s international involvement throughout history. We were told to read a section of a textbook, and pick a part to make a keynote on. I did one on Canada in Yugoslavia. Looking into that assignment reminded me of a CBC documentary I had watched a while back about one of the incidents I talk about in my keynote. I found it interesting that I was able to connect my previous experience learning about these topics to our current assignments and the curriculum.

Here is my keynote and the documentary:

I would also like to give an update on my podcast project. For this I have arranged an interview, and made a final script, and am well on my way to completion.

I think this has been a quite productive week, and I have shown my commitment to my contract grade.

Thanks for joining me for this quick reflective post for the week. Hope to see you next week.

Hello, and welcome back to my blog. Today I’m going to be discussing my latest project in Humanities/Maker. This project was an introduction to podcasts for our class, and set out a plan for the podcast we will be making episodes for throughout the year. Without further ado, lets talk about what we did for the project.

The first milestone of the project, was to tell an oral story to a peer, and record it. We had to choose our topic from a list of potential candidates. I chose to do one on whether voting third party in an election is a waste of your vote. I think I told this story quite well, but my mic had some irritating background noise for some reason which definitely made it not sound as good as it could have.

The second milestone of the project, was to write a post about our identities, and to make a GIF of a double exposure photo of ourselves to go with it. Here is the link to that post. I think I did quite well on that post, but could have used more examples of readings and other media that I learned from earlier in the project.

The next milestone, was to write a plan for the podcast we wanted to create. This is where I settled on that I would create a podcast about natural resources in Canada and how current politics relate to them. Here is my podcast plan.

Our next job was to have a peer critique of our podcast plans, in an attempt to improve them. This went alright, but my partners and my podcasts were so radically different that it was hard to give feedback.

Our next milestone was another type of peer critique, but this time it was a charrette protocol type. For this we had to listen to each others pitch, then ask clarifying questions and give feedback, and then switch roles.

Our final milestone, was to create a trailer for our podcast. This had to include our own music, voice and a script that would get listeners interested in the podcast. We also had to include the cover art of our podcast with it. I think that I made a pretty good trailer, and gives all the information anyone would want to figure out what my podcast will be about.

Here is my trailer:

Thanks for visiting my blog. Hope to see you again.

Hello and welcome back to my blog. Today I will be talking about my recent blue sky project, and how we presented it at this year’s spring exhibition. This year it was quite different because of distance learning. For our projects we had to focus them on two things. The affects of covid 19 and the UN sustainability goals.

I won’t get into all the milestones of this project since they are all set up, but I will just describe my final solution and reflect on it.

My final idea was as follows.

“As we all know, the effects of COVID-19 on the economy have been devastating. Many small businesses have been forced to lay off employees and even shut down permanently. For my project I decided that I would think up strategies that could be used to restart businesses from the perspective of the federal government.

My first strategy to assist would be to temporarily eliminate the Goods and Services Tax for small businesses. Small businesses would be considered any business in which they have 0-2 locations. This would help them by encouraging people to shop or go to these businesses as there would be a 5% reduction in costs of Goods and Services nationally, while still not taking away from the revenue of the businesses.

The second action I would take would be subsiding small businesses (the same businesses described with the GST section) by way of partially paying off rent of those struggling along with giving them property tax break so less revenue needs to be set aside and less panic is induced.

My third action would be to have government provided PPE if we can stockpile it, because that will allow workers to worry less about stuff such as that and allow businesses to hire without the worry of having too small a supply.

The combined effect of these would drastically help businesses, but would lead to a strain money wise, which we should be able to compensate if the government spent money conservatively post pandemic.”

I think my groups presentation of our ideas including this worked out quite well. It was difficult to come together to figure out a story since our projects were all so different, but we decided to section it into each UN goal to make it easier. We then created a detective story for the presentation. I think this represents the revise competency because we had to revise our story with all the ideas until it made sense.

I think the entire presentation and it’s ideas are a good representation of the take creative risks competency, because the entire presentation method of distanced learning was a creative and new way of displaying our work.

I think I represented the research and understand competency quite well with how I created by project. I researched many different methods of helping businesses and combines the best three,

Thank you for reading about all my Maker projects this year. This will be my last Maker post until Maker 10.

Hello and welcome back to my blog. Recently we have been studying the First World War in humanities. Today I will be talking about the different things we learned, the milestones of the project and the final assignment. At the end of the project everyone’s pages were compiled into a final book that is at the end of this post.

The first thing we had to create was something to represent the domino effect that caused WW1 to become such a major war. This is the diagram I made. It’s the flags of the main nations involved in the war put together how the nations are on a map, it describes how the different colours mean different things, and how the initial conflict was just between Austria-Hungary and Serbia.

The second milestone of the project was to figure out the soldier we would be focusing on and get their information. I actually found a couple Canadian soldiers that I was related to that did in fact fight in the First World War. The one I chose was Harold Marsh Wilkinson, who was living in Toronto at the time he went overseas. You can read more about him later in the post where my final copy pages are displayed for my solider and topic.

The next milestone was choosing a topic that relates to the war and research it to create pages for our book. The topic I chose was conscription in the First World War. I specifically focused on conscription within Canada during the war rather than abroad. It was interesting to learn about all the controversy with the conscription laws and how they turned out in the end.

The next milestone had to do with a book study. We were all put into groups for random books, and every week we had to read a certain section of the book and complete a certain activity. The majority of the activities were just doing stuff like writing questions to ask the group I was put in.

And once this was all done, we had to do the final assignment of it, to put our topic and soldier info into final pages for our book. My pages are page 66-69. I think the topic and soldier combined really represent my understanding of the “comprehend” competency, because the entire assignment was to collect information from whatever video or written sources we could, and interpret them in a way that would be best for our book.

One of the biggest things I’ve learned from this project is how people’s ideas and beliefs have changed. At the beginning of the war, nationalism was at an all time high with people, not it is quite a minor factor in modern times. Another interesting thing was how communism rose so much across Europe at the end of the war. Also the thoughts of war, and how those. I also learned about how alliances can lead to such widespread affects, which is probably still very relevant today as we are a member of NATO. I think comparing things like these are a good representation of my knowledge of the “take historical perspectives” competency since comparing the similarities and differences between then and now allows us to see the differences and similarities between the two and adjust our perspective away from what we see as negative today, and see what it would have been like to be there at that time.

Thanks for reading my blog and the accounts of my learning in humanities for the year.

Hello and welcome to my TPOL. Today I will be discussing my learning through examples of my strengths, weaknesses and achievements this school year, and how this proves that I am ready to move to the next grade level. Several months ago I presented my MPOL, which focused on how I was doing midway through the year.

The first project I am going to focus on here is my witness to history project, which was a recent project focused on the coronavirus pandemic. For this project we really had to put our journalism skills to the test. I focused my video for this project on the effects of the virus on my neighbourhood/community, Blueridge. Near the beginning of this project I encountered issues where I handed something in late, leading to it not getting revised in time and made me end up behind, but I overcame this and created a pretty good video, showing the situation across the community in my footage. The only issue was me using a copyrighted video clip of a government press briefing at one point. This is a good show of perseverance.

For my second example, I will be talking about my Louis Riel/ethical dimensions project. This project had quite a few roadblocks along the way too, but it also turned out quite solid. The start of this project went quite smoothly, as me and my partner for it were able to pick out our topic quite easily for it. We focused on the Second Boer War. Our task was to create three images that represented the war, the issue was that my partner ended up getting sick for an entire week, causing me to lead the project on my own.

The next example I will talk about is my Confederation Commercial project. For this project we were put into groups for each project in the Confederation Conferences, and were tasked to create a short commercial about our demands to join the new nation. Our demands were somewhat silly, but we were able to create a pretty good video with the green screen. I think this really represents how our video skills have improved over the year, as we have learned skills like that.

The next example I would like to bring up is destination imagination for this year. This year for Destination Imagination, my team took up the engineering challenge of building a bridge out of cards and duct tape to support a weight going across it. We started off with many ideas each, but rather than fight we were able to test the majority of them to figure out which ones were actually the best for us. As we moved toward the tournament we continued to have issues, but we persevered. At the first tournament encountered a few issues with our bridge, but it generally was a very good build strategy. We planned to fix the issues until the coronavirus lockdown happened. Because of that, we ended up having a tournament online, where I rebuilt the bridge very effectively, but for the presentation my table was not big enough for the bridge and it ended up breaking so I wasn’t able to test it. This all shows how willing I am to try for success and revise until I can get there.

My last example that shows my commitment to learning is this TPOL itself, since because of this lockdown my grades cannot go down, but I have continued to do the work for many projects. This hasn’t been perfect since a few are missing, but it is still far beyond the minimum.

And now I will talk about my MPOL, and how I have moved towards the targets set in that. In my MPOL one of the things that I highlighted was teamwork and how that had been difficult during my revolutions project. I have since done far better in relation to this, and I will use two of the prior examples to justify that. In destination imagination, my group for this year worked very well together, and we were able to come to agreements far better than the prior year. This could also be said for my confederation commercial project, where my group worked together extremely well and didn’t have any arguments over what we would do.

Now I will talk about how I ended my MPOL. I ended speaking about my time management as it relates to use of my iPad and distractions. I have been able to move towards this in a couple different ways, although they have been somewhat interrupted by quarantine. The first way being that when I need to get something done, I will simply delete the apps that may act as distractions when I must be focused. My second strategy that I have applied is to choose a specific part of the evening to get whatever done that I can over a certain period.

Welcome back to my blog. As everyone knows, there have been major changes to our society and ways of life due to Covid-19. As a result of this, we were given the task of documenting and making a video essay about the affects on a community that is important to us. This is the project that I will be discussing today.

The first milestone of this project was to create a short video and is also linked to another project in Humanities. The video was supposed to be about what was happening in BC before the gold rush. I focused by video on the fur trade and used a horror theme for the way it was made. The video is supposed to follow the way that a beaver is hunted and made into a hat. It starts by having the hunter and trader agree to a deal, and then the hunter catch the beaver and trade it. Then in the next scene we see the hat being made.

Our second milestone was where we had to figure out what we were going to make our video about. For this we had to make a story spine. This is where I had to choose what community I would focus on. The neighbourhood I live in, Blueridge. I also focused on how this pandemic affected me personally.

Our next milestone was less related to the project, but also still a cool skill. For milestone three we had to make our own song on GarageBand using different instruments. This was a pretty fun milestone since we got to experiment with all different things to see which was best. The tool that we used was something called autoplay, where you select the notes that you wish to play, and the computer will put something together for you. You can change the sophistication of the song too. What you do is then put multiple of the instruments together to create your finished song.

Our fourth milestone was turning our story spine into a storyboard and showing what our film would actually look like exactly. This took a bit and a revision, but I was able to create a pretty good one that got the point across and was able to move on to my video.

For my video, I just had to put what was in my storyboard together. This took quite a bit of time, to get the different shots.

The person I decided to interview for the video was my mother, since she is quite active in the community, and I don’t have that many connections I could interview. The music I decided to use in my video is actually the same song that I made for milestone three, just altered slightly.

Here is my video:

I think it turned out fairly well, although the main thing that could have been better was how shaky the camera was when filming some of the stuff. Another thing that could have been better would be the interview quality, but I don’t currently have a microphone that would have worked for that purpose.

Overall I think that this was an interesting project that made sense to do during such an odd time. Thanks for reading.

Hello and welcome back to my blog. Today I will be discussing one of my latest Scimatics projects. This was the time is money project. For this project, we were told to think up a business idea that we would turn into a linear equation and put on a graph. For mine I decided that I would 3D design and print a little device to make sure that my Apple Pencil cap doesn’t fall off, since that is actually a big issue.

Here is the video that I made for the project that demonstrates my learning.

Now I will talk about the competencies being judged in this project.

The first competency I will discuss is the understanding and solving one. I think I have demonstrated this competency quite well, which can be shown by the detail I put into my video discussing the costs and profits of my business, and the justifications for each item and cost. I so however think that it would have been more accurate if I used the actual time worked instead of the amount of time to print my product.

The second competency for this project is communicating and representing, which I think I have shown with the graphs and data that I discussed and showed within my video. I do however think that I could have improved with this, had I included even more examples and data.

The third competency for this project was connecting and reflecting. This can be represented by how in my second to last slide in my video, I discussed whether this business is a good career and compared it to a minimum wage job. I probably could have improved this by adding more carriers to compare, but minimum wage seemed like a good comparison.

Overall this was a pretty fun project since we got to research and create whatever we wanted and had near total freedom of choice.

last month, we learned that the Destination Imagination Provincial Tournament was to be canceled because of Covid-19. Many of us didn’t think that Destination Imagination would go on after this, but the teachers had a plan. They arranged for there to be an online Destination Imagination tournament over Zoom for our classes. This let my group to get back to work revising our solution to our challenge. As mentioned in my last post about the regional tournament, there were many things that didn’t go too well with our presentation.

Anyways, let’s go back to the basics of our challenge. We had a few different elements to it that we had to solve. Those being a story, bridge, technical method to move a weight, team choice elements and then a team challenge. The one that I focused on most was the bridge.

When we heard about the online tournament happening, the first thing that was assigned to me was the bridge. I immediately looked at what didn’t work for the bridge last tournament, and began to think of solutions. As mentioned in my post about the Regional Tournament, the biggest issue with the bridge was the speed of connecting the parts. I was able to fix this by making the parts more precisely, along with using other pieces to hold connectors at the proper angles. Another problem that was encountered with our original bridge, was that the platforms at the top weighed too much. To solve this I build platform pieces to use two card triangles, instead of the usual three. This gave the bridge virtually the same strength as last time, just with far less weight. This also improved the angle of the platform, allowing for wheels to grip better on either side and make it harder for our technical method to fall off.

When it came to the technical method, I was able to get pretty much all of it working like at regionals. I still had all the parts except for the cart to carry the weights, which I wasn’t able to create a new version of in time for our presentation.

The other elements are all more related to our presentation, which I will talk about now. We had to present over a zoom call. This was difficult, but allowed us to change our backgrounds easily to help the presentation. The presentation went pretty well. We were able to finish our entire story unlike last time, and we were able to have Felix polish up and sing the song this time. The part of the presentation that didn’t go well was the bridge though. The bridge was pretty good and solved most of the problems from last time, but my table wasn’t actually big enough to put the bridge on, and I ended up having to put it on a carpeted floor where it couldn’t stand up.

After our main presentation, we had one thing left to do. This thing was the instant challenge. Our instant challenge was a presentation one where we had to make a skit. Our group came up with a funny and unique skit, but our presentation ended fairly short.

Thanks for reading my post. Overall this year’s DI was quite unusual, and the online tournament caught me by surprise, but I’m happy my group was able to pull through and revise our solution fairly well. Please check out my previous post for more info about DI.