You can probably already tell that this blog post is going to be long, and if you guessed that, you are correct. Its mPOL season baby! mPOL stands for Midyear Presenation of Learning, and its our chance to showcase our learning, and our growth as a learner, from the start of this school year to right now. Now that I have a full year of PLP under my belt, I’d like to say I’m going into this a bit more confident going into this mPOL. My last tPOL (Transitional Presentation of Learning) was in my words, actually really great because not only did I have good content, I brought something physical in to represent my learning! Using this tactic again this year, will enhance my performance and content as a whole and I think it will make my point very clear. 

As you know each project comes with a driving question, and like those projects this mPOL presenation too, has a driving question.

Driving Question: What is your learning goal that you want to reach by the end of this school year, and how will you meet it? 

I will go through each subject, give an example of 2 projects in that subject; one I think I succeeded as a learner as, and one I felt I needed to set a goal to achieve and become a better learner in that area. 

HUMANITIES

Humanities is a diverse subject for PLP students. It combines Social Studies, History, Geogrpahy and English all into one. When I see the driving question (above) I think of our project Revoutions Through the Ages. This project interested me the moment it was introduced. Our groups were made, and our task? Creating 4 different videos (plus an extra one at the end) for 4 different Revolutions. At the end, we would make a video about the revolution of our choice. There were 4 types of videos to choose from: Act it out (acting out scenes and having voiceover), rap/song (create a song, music and a music video about the revolution of choice), Animation (an animate video explaining the events occurred in said revolution), and John Green style (a sit down, spittin facts kind of video). Our group chose to make a song first, because we thought it would be the hardest, just to get it over with. This was probably the best decision we made throughout, because most groups struggled with making songs later, when we were supposed to be improving. Each video made, was more improvement in video skills, and learning of the 4 revolutions. Our first song was about the French Revolution, and our group connected so much with this one, it became our last revolution-choice in the end. The information was good, but the song and video skills, could’ve been better. Next we chose Act it out with the American Revolution, Animation with Russian and we almost made a video about the Industrial Revolution but ended up just learning about it so we could jump straight to our group revolution-choice video. The “Act it out” style stuck with us and so did the concept of the French Revolution. This is where I explain why I put this project into the succeded pile. This project was a lot of work and I lost a lot of sleep just editing and working on getting the right shots. It improved my time mangement skills, and definitely helped me achieve the concept of Habit 3: Putting First things First. If you compare our first video to our last, you can see the improvement, and honestly I can see the improvements I’ve made, how that helped in this particular project and I’ve developed skills like learning how to film a shot properly, where and how to add the proper soundtracks, and of course the added knowledge of 4 revolutions that went down into history. 

A project I think I could’ve done better at was the Alberta “This Land is Us” project. Although the I got an Accomplished mark, I, as a learner don’t feel like I worked hard enough during the actual Alberta trip (when we were supposed to be collecting information), vs after we came back from the province. I’m not saying I didn’t do any work in Alberta and just fooled around the whole time, but I would say 50% of the time I wasn’t fully engaged in my work and was more concerned about the drama around who likes who and the latest gossip. This is something I want to work on for the future, when going on these field schools being more focus on the task at hand while also balancing my social life. In the end I pulled through and created something that I’m actually proud of, which you can judge for yourself by watching it below. 

MAKER 

Maker is also a subject that varies in topics. RUN, the title of a short horror film that we were to recreate, using our techonolgy at hand (our iPads and the apps on it). Let me just say right now, this projet was a total disaster for my group. Between our filming, shots, planning, and editing, a lot went wrong. Even in this situation, time mangement was a problem. And its becoming to be something that raising a red flag, which tells me it’s something I need to work on until the end of the year. 

As you can see our version isn’t nearly as good as the original but it showcases some skills that we have and its not that bad in my opinion. 

We’ve made lots of videos in the school year of 2019/2020 and there are more to come! One video I was especially proud of was Live Event. This was a pretty free standing project, only guidelines were to film an event of our choice, and have certain camera shots in the final video (i.e. freeze frame, ken burns photos…). I’m proud of this video because it turned out exactly how I wanted it too, and I got to film something that I’m very passionate about, soccer! 

Live event gave me the creative freedom to film whatever I wanted and still follow some guidelines. This showcases my video skills I acquired during the revolution project and I think that shows my growth as a learner, not only learning the skills but using them in real life.

SCIMATICS

Aah, scimatics! One of my favourites. I’ve been attached to math ever since I was young, so when we started out with a math project I couldn’t have been more thrilled. Little did I know, a challenge was up ahead for me. I was paired with Jude DeVille! I was paired with someone I’d never thought I’d work with. I’m not saying Jude was a hard person to work with, but that we, both, weren’t used to each other’s learning styles. It was my first time working with someone I didn’t know very well and I think that experience has brought me a whole new set of skills and opened up lots of doors for the future. This skill is very important to have because in the future I’m going to be working (and competing) against people I’ve never met before! The start of this project, I’ll admit, was quite rocky but in the end it turned for the better and we made a really cool game that I would play in real life! I think the project itself could’ve used equations and exponents better but I’m still proud that I got to share our ideas to the class. 

Scimatics had a lot of good things in store for me, and I always thought they would be math related but turns out chemstry’s my calling! We started a chemistry unit, learning about atoms, ions, and different elements on the periodic table. Once we really got into it, we started to talk about Alkali Metals, Alkaline Earth Metals, Gases, Transition Metals, all kinds of different things.  Turns out, I’m not that bad at memorizing chemical names and mixing elements to create a compound! And of course, it wouldn’t be PLP without having to make a video right? Absolutely right! So we created a video on the chemical bonding of a polyatomic ion and a multivalent metal, and the bonding of 2 elements. I really think I excelled here because, again, using my video making skills I think I created something really great out of an app (Explain Everything) that I’d never thought would actually be helpful. I chose Gold (I) Carbonate and HydroChloric Acid as my 2 bonding atoms. 

PGP 

Last year, I had a really great experience in PGP (once I actually started to use the 7 habits and pay attention in class!). I’m happy to say, so far, this year is going pretty good as well. We have only done 2 official assignments in this course. First being a reflection on the Alberta Field Study and second being Take Your Kid to Work Day. TYKTWD was probably one of my favourite projects this year. I got the opportunity to go to my dads work and I went on a orginized tour that his union set up! It was such an amazing opportunity that I got to showcase, once again, everything I’ve learnt in PLP. I interviewed a complete stranger, filmed a lot, and even got some information about the company itself. 

One area where I wish I did better was when I was editing, I put everything different order and not chronological, so it looked very jumbled to me. We practiced this during the revolution project, and the reason it looked sort of messy was because of my time management skills. This has come up many times throughout the year, and it’s a goal that I want to achieve by the end of the year. There are lots of tools, apps, people and widgets that can help me with achieving this goal of being more efficient and managing my time properly, and I intend to start using my resources if I haven’t already. 

I leave you with this question:

Do you agree that time mangement is a skill I need to work on and by using my resources, do you think that its a goal that I can achieve by the end of the school year? 

Thank you for reading my blog post (I know it was long!). I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to always give an honest evaluation of my progress. We discussed my strengths and weaknesses. Thank you for reading and offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner! 

~Malaika