Ww2 post

Hi, how’s it going? For this blog post, I’m going to be talking about our most recent project In Their Own Words. For this project we focused on WW2 trying to solve the driving question which was “How might we use stories to understand the causes and consequences of WWII?”

To assist with our podcasts and to help us answer the driving question we had to find an interviewee. For me, I ended up contacting my mom’s friend’s dad who was a WW2 veteran and was a London blitz survivor who had to be evacuated to Canada. The hardest part about contacting my interviewee was probably emailing back and forth since I have always been bad at formatting and writing emails. What I learned from this part of this project was more about how to write and format an email despite that I do still have lots of work to do on my emailing skills.

After finding an interviewee I had to decide on the story I was going to tell and then research more about that story. For my story, I decided to focus on Peter who was my interviewee his experience with the London blitz and having to evacuate to Canada. For my research, I mostly focused on the blitz doing a small amount of general WW2 research. From this part of the project, I learned more about MLA citations because they were a big part of our research and I’m not the best at them.

For this part of the podcast, the competencies were, analyze cause and consequence, using evidence and resources, and global collaborator. For the first competency analyze cause and consequence I felt like I met that through my research on why the Germans decided to bomb London and how that affected the people in London specifically children. For the second competency using evidence and resources, I feel like I met it because the whole point of research is so you have evidence to back up your claims and I did successfully research the topic. For the final competency global collaborator, I feel like I met it because I was able to use my iPad to look at resources from all around the world.

The final thing before I could edit and release my podcast was I had to actually record my interview. The biggest problem I had trying to do my interview was definitely miscommunication. I say that because the first time I was supposed to do my interview because of miscommunication I ended up missing it luckily though I was able to reschedule. Another issue I had was I had issues with Skype. Despite all of the issues in the end I ended up with a great interview that I really enjoyed doing. What I learned from this part of the project was that despite how prepared you think you are you can always be more prepared.

Finally for the editing and release of my podcast. I would have to say this was definitely the hardest part of the podcasting process since not only did the audio from me asking questions not record but also my audio recording as a non-standard file type. To fix the problem of my questions not being recorded I had to go back and re-record them all which was really frustrating. The file type problem was slightly easier I just had to put through a converter then I was fine. After solving all those problems I got to pretty boring editing it was mostly just cutting out pauses and putting different clips together. What I learned in the editing process was that the better prepared for the editing the less time it takes. For the actual distribution of the podcast, we used a program called anchor which allows you to post on tons of different streaming services (if you would like to know more I did a whole post on podcast distribution here).

For this part of the project, the competency’s were Analyze Cause and Consequence, Responding to Text, and Global Collaborator. Since I’ve already covered Analyze Cause and Consequence and Global Collaborator I’m just going to focus on Responding to Text. For responding to text I feel like I met it because throughout my podcast and even before that I was able to connect what I was working on to myself and my experiences.

In conclusion, this was a very interesting project I loved interviewing Peter. I also like learning about WW2 since that’s a topic I have been interested in for a very long time. Finally, my answer to the driving question was looking at an event through stories allows you to experience that event through the eyes of people with potentially vastly different lives which can give you access to different perspectives on the events that took place before and after the war. Ps if you would like to listen to my podcast you can find it here.

Podcasting lessons

Hi for this weekly recap I’m going to be talking about the distributions of podcasts which is something really interesting we learned this week. Before this week I just assumed that podcasters would individually upload their podcasts to individual services like Apple podcasts which is actually wrong. What happens is podcasters will use a program like the one we are using for this project (the program is called the anchor). What these programs will do is they will host your podcast making it available through a link that you can then link to the podcasting websites like Apple podcasts. Another interesting thing I learned is that things like Apple podcasts aren’t even podcast hosting programs there just an online directory that grabs the audio from your hosting program and allows people to listen to it. In conclusion, I think this was a very interesting week and other than the podcast hosting I also learned about editing podcasts and peer critique. Thanks for reading this week’s blog.

Canada during WW2

Hi, welcome to my 7th weekly recap. In this recap, I’m going to be trying something new and focusing on one aspect of something we learned this week. What I’m going to be focusing on is the short documentary we had to read and take notes on. The documentary focused on Canada’s involvement in WW2 which I thought was really interesting because you don’t hear about Canada’s involvement in WW2 that often. The documentary also talked about the increase of women in the workforce. What I think was the most interesting thing I learned in this documentary was probably that Canada supplied the planes that helped wing the war. I thought that was really interesting because not only had I not heard of the hurricane plane I had no clue that Canada even was big on making planes. Finally, I think documentaries like these are important because oftentimes people learn about WW2 through film and tv and lots of the time those shows and movies don’t show Canada and other countries helping. In conclusion, I enjoyed watching this documentary and would recommend if you have 40 minutes to spare you watch it too