My Learning Portfolio

Hello everyone, I’m very sorry about the Napoleonic wars blog post and how long it’s taking me to complete it. I have decided to also make an animated video on it so the project will probably revolve around when I can make the video, in the meantime how about you read about this blog post regarding the most recent project that we have been learning about in school. 

The project, which shocked me too, was about something historical!!! This project was about the Crusades, specifically the first crusade. It was an improvement in my book anyway. We started the project with, you guessed it, another novel study! This one wasn’t as bad though. It was actually quite interesting. The book, titled The book of the Lion by Michael Cadnum, was about a boy who was eventually conscripted into the crusades. It is quite a good book and I advise you check it out.

The Driving Question

The driving question made me think about things that I hadn’t considered so I have decided to add its own section, the actual question itself was “What can we learn from the past and why does it affect us today”. I believe that the past and our history are very important. We can learn things from the past that can help us prevent mistakes from the past happening in the future. I believe that learning about the past can help people in ways we might not know yet. The  thing about the past is that it does have affects on us now, some for good and some for worse. I think that it affects us today because we have chosen to remember things in the past, wether to prevent them from happening again or to try to remember them, in any case, I believe they affect us because we let them.

 The Novel Study… Again!

The way we did the novel study was almost exactly like the way we did the earlier novel study in ITEOTWAWKI, if you don’t know what that means, check out that blog post. The role sheets were very similar to those used before and they were used in the same system: we had a week to do them and do the reading then we would have a discussion in our group and repeat. For example…

We did the role sheets as we read the book. Once we had finished the book we then moved one to the main point of this project, we were to create a medieval art work with our face as its center.

The Image

 The first step to starting the final image itself, was to learn how to use an app called SuperImpose, which is an image editing app that we got at the start of the year. We started by learning the basics and exploring its features with some images that we had in our photos. Once we had learned how to properly use it we took the main image from our medieval art work chart, which was a previous assignment to help us with understanding medieval world view. After we had chosen our image our next job was to add our face on to a person was in the photo. There were many different ways of doing this. I decided to erase the person’s whole head then add mine in from another photo that I already had.  With that out of the way, I then moved on to one of the more tedious parts of the project. See, when we first started learning about world view, there were several main sections that were shown to us, time, belief, value, geography, society, economy and knowledge. I had to incorporate three of the photos from my artwork choice chart that represented three of those categories then add them to my photo that fit the theme. I decided that I was going to try and add as much as I could, I ended up choosing time, geography, value, belief and society. I selected the photos from my choice chart, put them in the photo, made it fit the theme and with that my project was complete! Or so I thought, see the truth was that it had a bigger purpose, which everything in PLP has. What I learned was that we were to create a new photo for the renaissance (which is our next topic), make a triptych about it and to top it all off, a skit that we would present to all of our parents and even some of the school… aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! For the record, I am no Tom Cruise, for that matter, so in my mind… this isn’t going to end well! However, I’m still going to try my best. Stay tuned for that blog post!

The Reflection

This book taught me that many things today are are very similar to back then and things form back then in medieval times have carried over to modern times in force. For example the. Way we run the economic has barely changed from what it was back then, except for some minor modernizations. This has changed how I understood how the medieval world view was back then and how it worked, it also changed how I saw the way that things have changed since then and what has stayed the same, this was a great and eye opening experience and would love to do it or something similar again!

links and Resources

Here are some fun documentary’s about the crusades if you would like to check them out!

 

There are four other parts to this amazing series done by Extra History, hope you enjoy!

ITEOTWAWKI
You see that weird title above you, want to know what that means, well then keep reading. As you already know, I have talked about the first maker project that I made in PLP, in this post I am going to talk about my first Humanity’s project. In that project we as a group of four people, read an amazing book called the outsiders, learned about what is world view, and we created a song based off of the song, It’s the end of the world as we know it that talks about our world view, see here,

The Novel Study

At first, I wasn’t exactly thrilled to here that we were doing a novel study but I had to go with it. How we did the novel study was a way that I had never seen done or heard of. We were put into groups of three or four people, we achieved had roles, members one and four (A.K.A me) were to do a specific sheet with a specific area about the book, the same went for group members two and three, they both had their own sheet. We did this for a while, we would have benchmarks for the number of chapters we had to read in the book, then we would write our sheets based on the text that we read. We would then have a discussion every Friday and show what we had written. We did this for the entire book. During this project the class learned about this thing called world view and helped us find out what ours was. We were then told that we had to make lyrics about our world view that had to go with a song. I know! I was terrified to but I eventually made the lyrics with some help from my parents. The song we were to match our lyric with was Its the end of the world as we know it by REM or as we like to call it I.T.E.O.T.W.A.W.K.I. Once all of us were done that nightmare, then it got worse, our teacher told us that in our reading groups, we had to combined all of our lyric into one song, sing it, record it, and make a video for it, now here is what my Brian told me after I heard that, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! OVER LOOAAADDD! 

The Song

Now my song was not like the others, see I was sick at the time so I had know idea when I had wrote my lyric that they were supposed to be about our school transition which is what everybody wrote about, the message that I got before I got sick was that I was supposed write about my world view which is exactly what I did but mine and theirs didn’t mix.  So that bit was a little awkward but eventually we were able to agree on what lyrics to include in our song, now it came to the hard part, recording it and making the video. First, one person for the group had to download the backtrack to our song into garage band, then we could start recording the song to the back track. We sang our verses that we had chosen and did our best to record us singing it and that’s where our problems started. One of the biggest problems we encountered was that the IPad was having trouble picking up our voices unless we talked at a specific volume. We eventually worked it out so that the sound was decent enough that we didn’t sound like robots. The next step of the project was fairly easy, one person in our group was to create the video in IMovie. The whole group submitted photos of us at various ages and doing different things and where put into sections where we sang, after all was said and done the group member submitted it and we were done.    

 

Reflection

This project taught me that I could make my own song, record it, and make a video from it, it also taught me that I could work with a group to create something that we were all proud of then show it to the whole world! I thoroughly enjoyed this project and I am very proud of the product we created!

Links and Resources 

Here is a link to my YouTube channel if you want to checkout other videos.
https://youtube.com/@GriffinA-wt5jw?feature=shared

I Became A PLP Learner

I Became A PLP Learner!

When I came into PLP I had no knowledge of it at all. See I had come in several weeks after the school year had started so I was already behind. One of the first project we started was the Becoming A PLP Learner, this project heavily if not primarily used the app keynote which I had never used before. During this project I learned how to use the app and include other smaller assignments in to the project to create a slideshow video to be able to post on YouTube. 

I came into class for the first time and sat down, I had just gotten all of my app required for PLP and was hopelessly confused, thanks to Mr Harris I was able to catch up to where everybody was at that point. I started to assimilate my project and slowly piece by piece figure it out how to make the slide show presentation in keynote. Once I had figured out the basics I realized that keynote was a fairly easy program to learn and use. 

Putting together the slideshow.

Originally the first thing the class had started to work on was the WordPack. The WordPack was an app that took word that you would put in and would make the words into a shape. I had tried to use and make my WordPack but for some reason it wasn’t working to I decided to move on and do it later. I started on my I am photo, I had forgotten to take the photo but I had a photo with me playing my saxophone which I love so I edited the photo, added some text and I asked Mr Harris and he said that it was great so I put it in the slideshow. The next thing that I made or integrated was my user manual. This was a previous assignment depicting us as robots that the buyer purchased and we had to describe our selves. This I completed and added it to the slideshow. I also added emojis of me in various facial depictions that related to the part of the user manual. I also animated everything in the slides up to that point. I then worked on the actual Memoji itself or as I call it “the heart and soul and the purpose of this project”. The animation part of it was initially very confusing to me but I was able to do some problem solving with Mr Harris but after that I was able to fully complete the project.

The Reflection.

This project taught me that I was capable of coming into a new version of learning with apps that I had never heard of and was able to create something that I was proud of and that I was okay with. It also taught me that I could work with something fairly new to me and be able to problem solve and work out away and to be creative with how I solved a problem and to again be able to make something I am proud from scratch. I thoroughly enjoyed making this project and working with others around me to complete it. I hope to have many more fun experiences like this one in PLP. 

Links’s and Resources

Here is a link to my YouTube channel, feel free to check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/@GriffinA-wt5jw

Hi, I’m Griffin and this is my first post on my blog, (that I have no idea how to use). I have contemplated what to make this blog about and I have decided to make it about history. I have loved history for a very long time and have been captivated by it so I have decided to make this about what I do in school and informational posts about different topics in history every week. So without further a due here is my first blog post, enjoy!

The first topic I’ll do is ancient civilizations since that’s pretty much the first thing in human history. So I’ll start with the probably most famous one, the Roman Empire. The empire was Founded around 27 BC, the Roman Empire proceeded the Roman republic until the down fall of it in the year 476. The first Emperor Augustus, created the Empire part, Rome at that time was what is called a territorial empire, it was still somewhat a republic in the sense that the Roman Senate was still a functioning but at that point they basically became advisers to the emperor. The Roman Empire went through a series of emperors. Their point was to basically conquer as much as they could to enlarge the Roman state. Some of the rulers of Ancient Rome were murdered or died in battle, most of the rulers that were murdered let all the power get to their heads or in some cases were unfit to rule and new nothing of ruling. They also didn’t do what was best for their people and more like what was best for them selves. Several of the more famous rulers that were murdered were Julius Caesar, Commodus, Julius Nepos and more.

Now on to the conquers and wars of the Roman Empire. In this section I will go over the main ones or the important ones. I will start with one of the most famous, the Punic wars. It all started when Rome was still a fairly small country, Rome had at that point been very keen on quick and large expansion of their territory. But at that point the major power in the Mediterranean was Carthage. Carthage originally was part of a chain of Phoenician trading posts and colonies. Carthage then grew to be the main power in the Mediterranean. Both of the powers wanted to expand an both of them first set their eyes on Sicily which was right in the middle between them. Both of them started to amp up their forces on the island and started to engage with one an other. It was at this point also that the Roman’s started to engage in sea combat the Roman’s had accidentally captured a Carthaginian ship and copied the designed. The Roman’s were known for doing that but what they would always do was they would modify it and make it better which is exactly what they did with their ships. The Roman forces were also far better trained then the Carthaginian forces so the Carthaginians were already losing on land and now they were losing on the seas which they thought they had. Already end mastered. After several sea engagements the Roman’s set their sights back to the land campaign in Sicily. The Roman’s then pushed the Carthaginian’s to the breaking point where they only had two major city’s left and to make matters worse they were both under siege and were separated. After a while aka 9 years later the carthaginians and the Roman’s were at a stand still and neither of their campaigns were going any where so the carthaginians opted to surrender. That was just the first Punic war, in the second Punic war came along one of the greatest statistic minds the ancient world had ever seen, his name was Hannibal. I will be doing a post about him and his part later so follow my blog for that.

I’m going to make this part one and I will do part two later because I’m realizing that I don’t have enough room to do all of this so I hope you have enjoyed, I have put links in for the resources I used and have seen in the past just in case you would like to check. I will also put a calendar of when I will be posting next, again, I hoped you enjoyed and I hope you will check out my next post!

links and resources.
You can find a whole history of the Roman Empire on Wikipedia at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Empire

Here is a fun little documentary about the Punic wars that I highly recommend.

 

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