How might we use artifacts and videos to show the significance of World War I?
When I first heard this question I had no idea how I would answer is but I think I now have a pretty good answer. Let me tell you the story of how I got to this answer. There are always two sides to every story, the two sides to this story are two very important competencies.
The competencies we were focussing on were establishing historical significance and global collaborator.
First some important information, our class got the WWI discovery box from the Canadian War Museum, and everybody in my class picked their artifact to research. Every artifact put into the box was significant to Canada. We also picked a soldier and we connected them and told a story,
ARTIFACT RESEARCH+ SOLDIER RESEARCH
Trying to research things from a long time ago like World War I has proven to be very hard. Trying to find a soldier and then trying to learn information on what the soldier’s life was like was very hard and very meticulous. You had to read every document and you had to try and read the handwriting on the documents to find out where the soldier was what the soldier’s health was like and much more.

Soldier documents

For me trying to research prisoners of war and trying to find a Canadian soldier that connected to that was very hard. I went down many rabbit holes and found so much unnecessary information before I finally found my soldier. But going down all these rabbit holes gave me a new perspective on how much information is right at our fingertips. I feel like this was a good example of global collaborator because I utilized the technology I have to find information from over 100 years ago which is crazy!
Find my soldier here

BANANAS VIDEO
Then we watched a video about bananas of all things. And you may be thinking how do bananas connect to World War I well the answer is, they kind of don’t. However, the video techniques used in this video were very helpful for me to visualize what our video was hoping to look like. In this video, they had a good balance of photos and videos and different music they could bring in and I think the most helpful part for me was seeing their photo to video ratio. This connects to global collaborator because we used technology to help us communicate our ideas to the world.. which brings me to my next topic,

CREATING THE VIDEO
When writing the screenplay and creating the storyboard we had to decide what was important to our soldier story and the story of Canada. For me making this decision was hard because I wanted to talk about this soldier I had been researching for the past week but on the other hand, I had to keep it quick and engaging and make sure it connected to the big idea and my artifact. How I kinda decided have I kept some background info but then I mainly talked about his war experience and the fact that he escaped a prisoner of war camp. This made talking about my artifact easy since it was P.O.W documents. I did, however, struggle to try to find how prisoner of war documents were significant to the Great War, but while doing the project I realized that no matter how small everything was significant to Canada through connections. I connected prisoner of war documents to the sacrifice in that war.

EXHIBIT

Me standing behind my table with my artifact

The exhibit was when both competencies and all of our learning really came together.
For me sharing my learning with the Seycove community and the PLP seycove Instagram connected to global collaborator the most because to me global collaborator means to connect and utilize the world and the people around you and that’s exactly what the exhibit was.
Doing this also made me have to make desicions about what was important enough to say to people who came to see my artifact. Every time people came to my table I tried to improve and change what I said based on who was there and how interested they seemed.

Artifacts and video helped me tell show the signifigace of WWI because it keeps the stories alive without my artifact the stories of Canadian P.O.Ws in WWI. Every artifact tells a story that shaped our world forever, whether its as small as a bullet casing, it tells a story. The videos bring these stories to life. It makes the experience feel more real, for me it helps me to imagine what it was like in that time. Videos bring people to life with makes our history come to life. Nowadays videos bring the world together and I hope someday people will look at our videos and artifacts and tell stories.
Well if you made it this far.. thanks for reading:) farewell.. until my next project!