Category: PLP

Once again it’s time for mPOLs📝

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Hello! And welcome back to another blog post. Today’s post is my Midyear Presentation Of Learning! We haven’t done an mPOL for quite some time but I’m excited to jump right in. This year’s focus for the mPOLs are these two driving questions: How have I demonstrated growth as a learner so far this year? As well as, How can I sharpen my Learning Plan to ensure I will reach my learning targets by the end of this school year? So tag along to find out my answers!

Something new PLP has started is individual Learning Plans. In the beginning of the year we all filled out a statement of learning intent, step by step plans to accomplish our goals and choosing “Profiles” representing different levels of the Core Competencies that we chose and aimed to have improved in by the end of the year. In this year’s mPOL, I’m going to be talking through some of these Competencies and how my progress has been.

The goal I set at the beginning of this year was to improve on my Communication skills. Meaning, speaking in front of others in a interesting and positive way as well as being informative and clear. Presenting and speaking in front of people has always been a very difficult and overwhelming task. I understand how important it is to have good communication skills to help you in the future, and I definitely want to feel more comfortable presenting as time goes on. That’s why I believe this is a good suitable goal for me to be able to successfully achieve. 

In preparation for my mPOL, I decided I wanted to take a different approach to it then I have in the previous years. I began to review my past mPOLs and what I noticed was I mainly focused on the specific projects we did throughout of the year. While that is clear and helpful, this year I feel as though there are much better ways to self reflect on my progress with Core Competencies and my chosen goals. I did not want to solely choose projects to reflect on. I wanted to be more wide range with reflecting on the year so far. So I decided I would focus on my Learning Plan, the goals/competencies I feel I could improve on, and examples to show my improvements.

Looking back at this school year so far, and I believe I’ve shown some promising improvements in the Communication Competency. While presenting to my peers about my “Playlist of My Life”, I felt way more in control and calm as well as confident in what I was speaking about. I focused on practicing presenting and making sure I’m fully aware of the Core Competencies I needed to achieve so I could submit a project I was very satisfied and proud of. Although I still have much more to improve and revise on, for our first semester I feel fairly proud of the progress I’ve made. I look forward to see how my skills will evolved by the end of this year.

The next thing I’ve been really working on this year is the Collaboration Competency. To break that down, I wanted to get better at successfully and effectively working with my peers. I’ve never had a problem with getting along with my group, what I struggled with was expressing and sharing my ideas, and giving helpful and specific criticism to ideas I had opinions on. I had a tendency to not share my thoughts because I felt they could be “wrong” and “bad” or not creative enough. I have come to the realization that there is no such thing as bad ideas. When we did our Political Party project, I had a difficulty finding my voice and the strength to speak up. I was concerned about the reactions I could get if I spoke up about my thoughts, but once again to my surprise I was welcomed by a helpful and supportive environment. I only wish I would have stepped out of my comfort zones earlier. But I’ve learn to not be afraid to express my thoughts because although it might be scary at first, the feedback and helpful criticism you receive it’s extremely useful and supportive and will only help you improve!!

Now that I’ve gone over and explained my answer for the first driving question: How have I demonstrated growth as a learner so far this year? Let’s 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? Overall I’ve made strong progress on my goals, I understand there is much more room for improvement and I’m eager to keep on improving. I aim to reach the levels of “Communication” and “Collaboration” I set in my Learning Plan by the end of the year. I will continue to make good progress on my goals, I will keep my organization skills up and work hard to try and meet the next level of the “profiles” in my Learning Plan. I’m going to work on my time management and organization skills so I can use my time most efficiently. I aim to become the best version of myself, with lots of practice and determination I’ll make it. 

Thank you so so much for taking the time to learn about my progress so far this year. I hope to see you around!

📝Alberta Field Study Reflection📝

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So this year we went on a trip to Alberta. If you have read my other blog post you would know about our big project there. But this post is mostly talking about our focus and behaviour there. Now in Alberta there were a couple of little projects we did. And throughout the trip we needed to stay focused and accomplish all our videos. And I forgot to say that all the little projects we did in Alberta were short videos. And if I’m being honest it was hard for me to stay focused while doing it. There were somethings that I could have done to help me stay on topic. So I’m going to talk about my two favourite videos which were also the more difficult ones. 

I’m going to start with talking about how I stayed on topic and focused during this trip. I’m gonna honest, it wasn’t easy to stay focused and at times I feel like I lost my focus and could have stayed on track better. But it is hard to stay focused when you’re always around your friends and on a overnight trip. So I’m just going to be talking about those two projects and how I did my best to stay focused and finished on time.

The focus for all of our videos is making and editing videos. Whether it be remaking a video or creating one of our own, we are learning about how to film, edit, and plan for making a video. The first video we made in Alberta was the a Ghost Town Video. One of our first educational stops in the trip was at the Three Lake Valley Chateau. At the Three Valley lake Chateau there is a ghost town made up of old buildings brought from old towns or build there in the Chateau. All of these buildings were made over 100 years ago and in the town it includes a barbershop, a saloon, a sheriffs office, and a hotel. This one was so much fun but because it was fun made it a bit hard to stay focused. If you would like to watch the video itself I’ll have in below. Now this one was one of my favourites because we got to go to an actual ghost town. This place we went to was really creepy it has old mannequins everywhere. And all the buildings were imported from other old rundown towns. Anyway back to the project. I do think I could have gotten things done quicker and easier if my whole group and I worked more on our time usage. Something big things that would have been helpful are making a check list of what we needed to get done and when it should be done, or we could have had a big talk as a group and talk about who’s doing what and when it needs so be finished. So that’s what I’m going to focus on for next project for sure.

https://youtu.be/Gnd-nh87yqE

Second video I’m going to talk about is the Royal Tyrell Museum. This was a dinosaur museum and what we needed to do was create a individual video that was about 1 minute long in a time length of 40 minutes. Now that sounds easy but with all the filming and editing and recording audio it’s makes it pretty hard. And since it was a big museum we used a lot of that time finding an exhibit to do our video on plus the time to get there. Now since we had no idea what sort of video we had to create until our teachers told us when we got there that didn’t give us much time to plan. And as you know planning is VERY important when creating a original video from scratch in 40 minutes. I think I did okay with my dinosaur video but I did get a little stressed at the end because I still needed to edit but I was running out of time. Next time I would definitely even out my time because I found that I was only focusing on one scene when I should have been focusing on the other more important things.

Last thing to talk about, my final Alberta video. Now this was the most important and informative one of them all. This video was about how we answered the driving question. I’m not going to go into detail with it but I will link my other blog post that explains all about it. I think I did good with managing my time well. I included everything I wanted to include and I think I did pretty good with explaining the driving question. But I would’ve liked to get more interviews. I had two in my video but I wish I had gotten more. This was one thing I would try harder at next time. One other thing would have liked to fix would be my intro. I just think I could have made it more informative. But I do believe I did good overall. I will put in my Alberta video you you guys can watch it for yourself and see if you agree with me.

https://youtu.be/2pGurWnizMs

In conclusion I think the biggest thing I will work on for next project would definitely be my use of time. This was a bit of a problem for me and I wish I took it more seriously in Alberta. I think my focus on this trip was pretty good. There were a few things I would like to get better at, but overall I managed to stay calm and remember that even though we weren’t in school, we still needed to do schoolwork. I think it was a pretty successful trip for me because I managed to finish the projects in time and in my opinion they were pretty good and definitely proud of how they turned out.

– Emily ✌️

🏔 Alberta 2019 🏔

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New year, new project. You know what that means! It’s blog post time. After quite an interesting week of bus rides and interviews. I finally got my answer to the driving question. How does place impact who we are? Well to be exact the question is How does place impact wildlife? Now for you to understand why isn’t changed to wildlife we need to go a couple days before we left for our 9 day long school trip to the Rockies. About three days before we left, everyone in my class was put into people groups. Well when I say people groups, I literally mean people groups. For example there were groups like Business owners,Tourists, Albertans, Artists, First Nations, Students and Wildlife. Wildlife was my people group. Each group had the driving question changed just a bit, just to fit their people group. So basically the reason we were put into these groups was to get a deeper explanation of our modified driving question. Like I said mine was How does place impact wildlife? It did take a whole week of taking notes and interviewing workers and asking questions for me to get the answer I was looking for. We did also have to do a little bit of pre trip research. This just helped us get a better understanding of the place we were going.

Now what we actually had to do for the project was create a video answering the driving question. We went to so many places, but the two that really took my attention was the Northern Lights Wildlife Centre and Leo’s Buffalo Ranch. These two place were so amazing and interesting (Not saying the other places weren’t, they were all quite amazing) they also helped me out with my video. Like I had said before we are making a video and we had to include some interviews as well. One other thing we did during the trip was daily notes. This just helped us keep on top of our work. And every once in a while we had to answer a question about the place we went to that day.

I had two main Focusses for my video. Northern lights wildlife centre in Leo’s buffalo ranch. Both of these places give me such great information. They both gave me two different looks on the driving question. First let’s talk a little bit about the wildlife center. Bradley, The worker we interviewed plus more about the animals and how climate change is really changing their environment. This help me answer the driving question because their place is changing because of us humans. This was something I really needed to include my video the first answer the question and second to spread awareness. We are making it very difficult for animals and humans, to live in this world.

Sorry I went a little off topic, now let’s talk about Leo’s buffalo ranch. I’m gonna say this place was my favourite. Leo was such an interesting person, and he definitely showed me lots of cool things about buffalo. The reason I included this interview in my video was because whenever Leo talked about the land and the resources it sounded like he was very passionate about it. I noticed that and I felt like it was important to add.

All the places we went to definitely helped me make my way to answering the question. But now you get to be the judge on how well I did it!

https://youtu.be/2pGurWnizMs

I personally think I did quite well with answering the question. I love this trip so much. I look at Alberta way differently than I ever did before. Now I see it is such a historical an important place that I was lucky enough to go to.I hope next year we go on another trip it will be as good as this one.

– Emily ✌️

 

❄️Winter Exhibition 2018❄️

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This term my class did a big project called the winter Exhibition. It’s all about what we’ve learn in the topic we where given, in my case we did the worldview of religion. How it works is everyone in my class was separated into groups of 5. Each group was given a specific religion. My group was assigned Judaism for our religion. But their was lots of other religions such as Buddhism, Sikhism, Hinduism, Islam, etc. After we were assigned our religion we had to make a poster. We had to make 4 drafts.

Here is our first draft/idea. As you can see if you knew nothing about Judaism you would think this is a good poster. But the five main points were definitely not the main more important parts in Judaism, and the gas mask is pretty offensive because what happen was they were invaded and had coked to death because the invaders released a deadly gas that killed many, many, many Jews. And the invaders were wearing the gas mask so that’s how they survived, but since the Jews did not have any gas masks they were killed. So if they had the gas masked they would of survived. So adding that picture of a gas mask means that they were not smart enough to think to use the gas mask. So when my teacher saw it all she said was “You know you can’t use that poster, right”. So that’s why we thought of this idea. 

This was our second draft/idea. We had completely redo this draft because our first draft was offensive. So for this draft we thought we would make it clear that we had 6 main important parts. Each group member had to do one main event(and one together)and a picture that suited the part. And in my opinion I think we did pretty good compared to our first Poster. After every group had finished a poster draft our teachers numbered each poster from best to worse. Our first one we were last, but in our second one we were in third! I’m not going to show you all of our posters but here was our end result! 

This is our last poster draft! The changes were not that big but we did change the text on all of them a little bit, and fixed up all the pictures. And after every group had finished they last draft our teachers number us, and guess what place we came in. FIRST! and we were the first group to have a thumps up to print it! After everyone had finished all their final poster, that’s when we were aloud to start planning the rest of the project.

So what we had to do was think of a food to make and a game to play. For my group we did cheese dreidels for our food and for our game we chose to do the game dreidel! The plan was everyone had to make 40 cheese dreidels, and one person would make 4 clay dreidels. The end result of our station was pretty awesome! We had lots of people coming and looking, eating, playing and asking questions about Judaism. Our project was a hit and in conclusion I think my group awesome and that I really liked the idea of the Winter Exhibition!

– Emily✌️