Month: November 2020

Screen Time Project review

faiths Science ,

Final Product

Hi I started quarter 2 one week ago and we are already done our first project. This project was all about how much screen time we did in a week! Our driving question was what fraction of my time is screen time on an average day. The answer that I got for this was 7/20 or 35%. That meant that I spent over one third of my time on my screen for the whole week. My average was 8.25 hours a day. That is way too much screen time.

 To get the answer to this question all week we had to keep track of how much time we spent staring at a screen, and add that information into a chart.

In order to do this we had to first learn how to make a chart. We used numbers to make (and learn how to use) our charts. What you see below is what the chart looked like when we first made it.

The next thing we needed to do is code the chart. I found this part very fascinating. We learned  that by creating a formula you can make the chart automatically add or subtract numbers. Also because I had spare time, I made it so the chart could also calculate the average screen time in a week. Without this step I would have had to add up all of the numbers on my own every single day.

The next part was learning how to make pie (and other) charts! I loved learning about how to do this I found it cool that (as long as you do it right) it will automatically change as you put more information into the chart. 

We also had to track something other than our screen time. It could be anything you want for example I decided that along with screen time I would also track how much sleep I got, and how much exercise I did. I found out that I sleep for an average of 7 hours a day and that I exercise for an average of 1 hour a day. I also learned that 60% of my exercise was playing volleyball. 

Over the whole week when we were tracking our screen time we also did some quizzes on fraction because in order to fine what fraction of my time was on screen I needed to learn about fractions. Last year in grade 7 I learned a lot about fraction so most of the math worksheets were just review. The first quiz that I did I got 100% though on the second quiz I got 1 wrong though I did get all of the bonus questions right so in the end I got 13/10. Even though I don’t like doing fractions I do think it was a important step. 

 

The very last things that I did for this project was one, hand in my final draft and two, present it in front of the WHOLE class. Just to let you know I strongly dislike presenting things in front of the class.  So as you can imagine I didn’t do so well on this step, I did well on the final product but not on the presentation.

 

Curriculum Competencies 

Applying and innovating: I showed how well I could do this by how well I spent my class time and by showing what I thought about how much screen time I had. I didn’t do as well on this because I had already done all of my math homework in the LAC block before so I found myself getting distracted easily, my table partner is also very loud and distracting. I did though help her with math questions whenever she asked. I also helped her understand how to create the pie charts. Finally I noticed that I have about the average amount of screen time that my class does though I still believe I have too much screen time.

Understanding and visualize: I showed how well I did this skill by making my numbers chart. Overall I think I did really well on this competency I not only put the sum of all my screen time but i also put the average for all of the things I tracked. I also got really good marks on the 2 quizzes I did and barely got anything wrong on my math worksheets. Finally I recorded all of my screen time hours on my sheet every day. 

Communicating and representing: I showed how well I could do this skill when I made the pie charts. I also did pretty well on this competency I had many pie charts and all of them had the right information on them. The pie charts not only show how much time was on/off screen but it also shows 2 other topics. I sadly didn’t do well in the presentation part because one I strongly dislike talking in front of a lot of people and 2 I haven’t presented in front of a whole class since March. 

Over all I think I did a good job on this project. I loved learning about how to use charts in numbers. I loved learning that I have way too much screen time and I loved learning how to make the table calculate by itself. I enjoyed this project.

Final reflection on medium is the message project

faiths Humanities ,

 

This project was all about advertisements and what they mean.  What you see above this is our final project our DCM ad. Myself and the other learners have been working really hard on creating this ad but we can talk about that later right now i am going to tell you about our driving question.

 Our driving question is “How does what we hear read and see effect us”, this is the question all of the PLP 8 learners have been trying to answer for the whole project, and I think I have an idea of the answer.  I think it can influence us in many many different ways. One example is that it can change our opinion on things, like if you see a celebrity saying that a brand is bad and before you watched that ad you might’ve thought it was great but hearing somebody big and powerful who you trust saying it’s bad might make you think they’re right. What we hear see and read can influence us also by changing the amount of stuff that we buy they can make a spend much more money by making products seem more appealing. They can also change how we are as a person by changing will be surround ourselves with. 

now how did i get to that conclusion, well i got to it by the many steps that we did in this project and I am going to tell you about a few of them now. 

Milestone 1 this is the milestone that got it all started without it i wouldn’t be able to tell the message of an ad or find the target audience very well. In this milestone we had to write a paragraph saying what the message and target audience was of an advertisement called welcome home. 

The next important part of the project was a worksheet to have us practised finding the message of an ad. This was the advertising survey. This helped me understand how to find the message in an advertisement. 

The next very important part of this project is milestone 4 the team launch journal. 

This journal we’ve been working on for the whole project.  It was the one we worked with in our advertisement group when we were thinking and creating our advertisement drafts. This was part of the project where my group had difficulties working as a team because we all have different opinions and it was hard to listen to other peoples’. I think this was a very important part  because it was one of the first times i work in a group in grade 8. I have not gotten a mark on this yet.

Next was milestone 6 the most important part of the project it was our final team advertisement. My group had to make an advertisement for Deep Cove Music and we finish just a few days ago. This was probably my favourite part of the project I loved creating the different advertisement drafts, you can see a couple of my individual and group draft below.  Without this advertisement I wouldn’t fully understand how much work goes into creating one and how we must think about the target audience. 

Here are some of my individual and group drafts. 

Individual drafts

Group drafts

Those are all the steps that most helped me to answer the driving question. I enjoyed this project and I love learning about media, message and how to answer the driving question.

I hope to do another project soon.

The medium is the message project reflection

faiths Humanities , , ,

This project was all about advertisements and media. The big question we are trying to answer is how does the things we see, hear, and read influence us. And even though we haven’t really got to fully answer that question we have done many other things. To start we did the launch activities but sadly i was away the first three days of this  project so i can’t really tell you what happened though i know for a fact that they did some similar thing that we did on the last project for example they put what they needed to know on  sticky notes and what they already knew on different sticky notes just like what we did on the last project. 

The 1 milestone I also away for though i still did it, only a few days later.  For this milestone we had to write a paragraph about an apple advertisement called Welcome Home.  For this paragraph i had to describe what the message was and how they got that across along with who it was for. I believe I did well on this one.  I earned a sun emoji. I enjoyed watching the advertisement.

The next main activity was Milestone 2. For this milestone, we wrote another paragraph, but this time it was on a historical piece of media. In this paragraph we had to answer the five key questions along with explaining what I thought the message was, who the target audience was, and who made the advertisement. I also earned a sun emoji on it.  I wish I had written down the five answers because I voice recorded my answers. Because of this the teachers could not see it and thought I did not do it! At the same time, voice recording saves me a lot of time.  Now I know how to make it so the teachers can see it.

The last milestone that we have done so far is Milestone 3. In this milestone we also had to choose a piece of historical media.  This time the piece of media had to be an advertisement. In order to write a paragraph on this advertisement we had to learn about the techniques and appeals that people use when they make advertisements. We did that in class. In our paragraph we needed to write about two to three techniques and appeals that the ad uses to catch people’s attention.

All of these milestones were leading towards the end product which was creating an advertisement for a Deep Cove Business. My group chose DCM as our business to do the ad on. In order to be able to create an ad fro them we had to do an interview with them. This is where we ran into our first problem!!

DCM did not answer our calls.  The person we needed to talk to did not contact us and seemed to be away.

One week later, we finally visited their business in person.  We did the interview. In this interview we asked Brandon an employee there, 5 questions about DCM and what we think the ad should look like.

The next day we reflected on the information and started our own individual drafts.  For my first draft, I looked at their past advertisements and tried to make mine based on what they liked before. I will say that I didn’t love my first draft. It didn’t;t seem to fit the DCM theme but as I did different drafts I got better and understood more about what I had to do. 

 

After every draft we created our group would have time to critique each other’s. They always said that it was too colourful and didn’t fit their past advertisements. I changed mine from portrait to landscape and adjusted the colour. I liked mine but it was different from the rest of my group.

One of the main problems that my group faced was when my group had to do our first group draft. Most of the boys in my group wanted to do their own thing and didn’t’t want to listen to other people’s ideas.  A few of them didn’t listen to the teacher’s instructions. Because of this, it took a long time to finish our first group draft. I did not think we would get them done in time. My group said I was too bossy and I sorta agree…I can be bossy. HOWEVER, I do believe that they needed to pay attention a little more so they wouldn’t keep asking me what we were doing when the teacher had just explain it i minute ago. Our first group drafts looked like this.

          

Right now, we are working on our latest group draft.  It is due tomorrow morning. We plan to meet before school to make sure can finish it on time.