Whattup and welcome to the blog. We’ve just wrapped up yet another podcast episode, and project. This one was all about WW2. We were supposed to create a podcast episode that answered the driving question HOW MIGHT WE USE STORIES TO UNDERSTAND THE CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF WWII? Plus we were also supposed to find an interviewee to support our answer to the driving question as well. I promise there will be more about my podcast later (I know you’re just dying to hear about it) but first I want or go through the core competencies of this project, and what I took away from them.

One of the stories from milestone 3

Now in this project we had one overarching milestone throughout. It was the story connections work sheets, milestone 3. Basically every week we reflected on a story we were assigned and shared with a group. However this milestone is a perfect example of the Responding To Text. This is a milestone all about making connections from the text you read to yourself, other text, and the world. And I think I pulled this off quite well for this milestone I was able to find creative connections to myself, as well as do external research to connect further. It’s often surprising how much a little research can help you better understand stories and texts, and I was definitely shown this in milestone 3.

My most recent posts about post-war consequences 

The Second Competency I wanted to talk about was the main one that inspired this projects driving question, Analyzing Cause and Consequence. Analyzing cause and Consequence is a fairly simple  competency you’d think, just understand what caused an even, and what happened after. However many conflicts have years of building up before the event even happens, and you still see consequences decades after. However I think that I did a very good job of showing consequence in this project, especially through my blog posts. I focused a lot on researching some specific consequences of WW2 (like changes in economics, England’s politics, fall of the British empire post WW2, and art’s changes) it gave me a better understanding of not just specific consequences of WW2, but how so many things all over the world changed after the war. The massive rise of media, culture, new ideas, and to be perfectly honest the Cold War, were all consequences of WW2. And my blog posts helped me get a much better understanding of the this.

One big milestone in this project was the research Milestone. And you could probably guess guess we did plenty of research from multiple sources to find information for our podcast. And it was a perfect example of the competency using evidence and resources. This competency is all about finding many resources, checking how reliable they are, and using them as evidence. And I did this all in my research. Because so many people are writing about World War II there’s a lot of unreliable websites out there, so I had to do a good job checking that my source was legitimate. I was told to try not to use Wikipedia, so I ended up using some sources like Britannia Encyclopedia, The National Holocaust Museum, Imperial War Museum, sources that I knew were legitimate because I’d looked into them, been to the museum, or had used them many many times before. It’s good practice to find reliable sources, so that you can know whatever information you’re spreading correct information, and this milestone was a perfect example of that.

My podcast in GarageBand

Now what we all really came here for, my podcast (which you can listen and subscribe to HERE). Coincidentally my podcast is also a perfect example of the competency global collaborator, which is all about sharing what you create with the world by using technology. And really there is no better way to do that then with my iPad and my podcast. And the whole point of what we wanted to share with our podcast was an answer to the driving question (how can stories help us better understand the causes and consequences of World War II). And I felt like my podcast had a strong answer to this question, I focussed a lot more on consequences because for me that’s the most important to learn. I believe that understanding what happened because of events and how it still affects us today is the most important way to stop things like the second of war from ever happening again. And in my podcast my grandma story really help me understand this. She talked about how despite the fact that she went through her childhood being a war, she tried not to hate the side that made it happen because she understood that other people went through far worse than her, and it’s important to put things into perspective. It allowed her to continue moving on after the war and to not have that be the central focus of her life. And truly I think that’s one of the most powerful things to be able to do in life is Move On. And hearing the story of my grandma, because of this project, was both an incredible opportunity and incredibly interesting.

“I have seen war…I hate war.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt at in address at Chautauqua, NY – August 14, 1936

This project was incredibly fascinating. World War II was it absolutely enormous event, and we still see evidence of its consequences today. Even in our five weeks of class we still weren’t able to cover the whole war, and as Ms. Maxwell said people dedicate their entire lives to simply writing and researching this war. As I said before I took a really strong message away from this project after hearing my grandma’s story, and doing some research of my own. However if I were to redo this project I think I’d want to focus on causes a little bit more. As I said I thought consequences and the changes in the world after the war were the most important, and I still kind of think they are,. But you can’t stop events from happening if you can’t understand why they start, And that’s absolutely important to know too. Luckily we learned all about the causes of World War II in class, and I could probably identify most of them if tested, but I wish I’d focussed in on it a little more in my podcast. Overall I think this was an interesting experience for me, and I hadn’t realized how little I’ve known about the war before. I honestly can’t wait for the Cold War and Vietnam projects that I know we’re gonna be doing, because a lot of the reasons those wars started, were because of the Second World War, and I really want to see the history link together. 

Thank you so much for reading my post today, and I hope you have a wonderful holidays and break. Bye bye

Holly