Hello and welcome to my second mPOL blog post! Let’s start off with the mandatory introduction:
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.
So now that’s over with lets get into the mPOL. So far this year I’ve definitely had some2 up’s and down’s in my PLP nine learning. We’ve had two PLP trips so far this school year and many projects. This year I felt myself learning a lot more and actually absorbing the information. But you guys don’t really know to much about each one of our projects? Unless you read my occasional blog post or hear me talk about it you would be clueless. So I’ll chose a couple projects that really affected me and talk about my experiences with them!
Humanities
Rocky Mountain High:
This project was the one that was attached to our field study which happened earlier this year in September. By the title you may be able to guess where we visited. For this humanities project our driving question was: “How has the geography of the west shaped who we are?” We answered this through different videos and assignments. The first assignment we worked on was the investigative video.
Some of the more important parts would belong to the maker section but this is also a part of humanities. The video was more in the maker area but the questions were based on our humanities driving question. We had to talk to people and ask them questions about the Rockies. We also had to create a thesis to base our questions off. I created mine based on tourism because based on what we learned about the Rockies and I thought it was the most relevant. I asked people about why they were visiting the Rockies.
We also created a multi touch book (like all PLP trips) that showed our travels and what we learned. Each page we had to put a photo of the location we visited and then explaining how it showed one to more of the five themes of geography. If you’re wondering: “What are the five themes of geography?” Then I’ll be happy to explain.
The five themes of geography are basically five different classifications of geography. There’s location, (Which is basically talking about the surrounding area or the absolute location which is like coordinates or an address or something.) there’s place, (which is like cultural characteristics and physical characteristics.) there’s also human environment interaction, (It’s basically how the environment and humans affect each other.) there’s movement and (it’s like the movement of people, goods and ideas.) there’s region. (Which is like formal regions like B.C and there’s functional regions.)
Ok so enough with what we learned as a group but what did I actually take away from this project? Well I definitely learnt a lot about geography. Even now when I’m on road trips or just going through my neighbourhood I’ll be thinking about how the different things I’m seeing represent which themes! I also learnt a lot about the C.P.R and all the history behind it. I can now proudly say that I’ve been to the last spike and I can also tell you a bunch of history about it! What I really liked about this project is that I got to see all these amazing things I was reading about instead of reading them in a musty text book. I loved seeing all these cool places and picturing on how the early settlers saw it as well.
There are of course things that I wish I could have done and things I can improve on. I think at some points I forgot that it was a learning experience and I kind of just goofed off with my friends instead of doing work which caused me to fall behind and forget about some work. That’s some thing that I also struggled with the last PLP trip but this time I think I actually got more work done and was able to focus more on the learning aspect. Next time I would also like to to a bit more work in our free times.
Honestly I often think back on this project and really appreciate that I was able to first hand experience places that all this incredibly influential history took place.
Maker
Thrill Us:
Thrill us was a Maker project that we did at the start of the year to launch us into our video making year. (Last year in 8 we made a lot of still images and this year we’re focusing on videos) This project we were told that we were recreating a short thriller film. We were organized into small groups and given some time to create a story board and plan out what we wanted to do. Here’s the video that we where recreating:
If you watched that you can tell that it’s very professionally made. Us as teenagers with iPhones and no microphones could not make something that good but we definitely tried.
We had a week to create the first draft. (Sadly one day was taken away due to a blackout) Me and my group got straight to filming, we scouted our location and got set up. It took about two days to do all the filming and sounds. The last couple days we used for editing. I edited our movie and added all the sounds. I realized too late that the running sounds were out of time and didn’t sound the greatest. It was also greatly out of time to the original movie.
we could have done better. My group talked about how the location wasn’t realistic and didn’t really work in our favour. We also said that we wanted to try to make our monster scarier.
We had about three days to film and edit our second draft. We looked it over and found a new location to film that matched the scenery better. The filming went a lot smoother and we got it done much quicker then last time. I was in charge of editing again so I tried to match the running. It worked at the start…but by the end it didn’t match at all. My group and I didn’t have enough time to film the running audio so it didn’t really link up.
So you may be thinking… why I did I chose this project? There must be more influential maker projects? Well I think that this one really has helped me so far in the year. Every time we create a video in PLP I think back on what I struggled with on this project and what I improved on and it’s directly affected the quality of my videos. I now know all kinds of good tricks with iMovie.
DI
DI was the most recent fiasco of PLP. Turns out Plato the Greek Philosopher is a very hard person to replicate using modelling clay and paper mashé.
You may be thinking: “what the heck does that even mean? And who’s Plato?” Don’t worry that will all be explained later.
Recently we had to do a thing called DI. DI is a series of challenges that are verryyyyy strictly enforced by an 80 page rule book. Fun.
Anyways in DI there are four categories. Engineering, Technical, Scientific and Artistic. I was placed in the scientific category. We were split into groups that where mixed with 9’s and 10’s and we started to figure out what in the world we were going to do.
The point of DI was to build something and create a presentation that relayed your ideas. For the scientific section we had to build a puppet and create a story that shows some sort of archeological investigation. My group narrowed it down that we wanted to do something underwater. I think it was me who came up with the idea of Atlantis. So we got to work and built all our props. Finally it was time for the regional tournament.
That tournament did not go so well. We were quite under prepared for the competition. Our puppet was unfortunately very unmovable and didn’t perform well. We also had a couple giggles and awkward pauses. Once we finished off we were not happy. I definitely think that that was something I was not proud of. One thing that matters to me when I have projects is that I’m proud of my work, especially when it’s projects that I’m present to a crowd.
So my group had a meeting and we decided that we needed to make a change. We all thought of ways that we could improve our script and our solutions to our problems. Unfortunately one of our group members wasn’t able to make it to our provincial performance but on the day of DI we where ready.
We all got set up and took deep breaths. It definitely wasn’t the best work we had done but it was definitely a lot better then our previous performance. Our performance was the last one of the day so there were quite a lot of people that came to ours. Since the last performance we improved our script so our performance ran a lot smoother. We also fixed up our puppet so it actually had some mobility.
We got through our performance with only a couple of mistakes and with our script fully memorized. I’m genuinely extremely proud of my group for working through some problems that we had and pulling through. In the end we got third place which was a lot better then last time. DI was definitely and experience I wont be forgetting anytime soon.
Next time I DEFINITELY need to be more prepared since this time we got most of our work done the day before DI or just the day of.
Learning plan
My learning plan this year was definitely better then last years. I tried to set more achievable goals for myself and actually complete them. I definitely talked a lot about trying to stay on top of work
I think that I actually completed some of my goals this year. I still definitely have some work to do on handing in assignments but I’ve gotten better. I practiced agency and tried to keep some sort of organization. Organization is a word that has kind of haunted me through my life. On every one of my blog post through elementary my teachers would always talk about my slight lack of organization. And it’s definitely come back to bite me through the years. But I do think that this year I’ve seen myself improve.
