Hi teachers, parents or anyone else reading this post and welcome to my mPOL blog post where I will be reflecting on my learning growths and failures, in all my classes over this first half of the year. For this post I will be going over the 6 main ideas of PLP for me and support the conclusions I have about my learning with examples form the different projects I have done. I will also answer the 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. With such a great half a year of work completed I feel like I have improved so much and learned a ton so sit back and relax because this is gonna be a long one. Let’s jump right in! 

The first thing I want to talk about is teamwork. The ability to work as a team is one of the most important skills in the world. Wether we’re talking about playing sports like soccer or football. Working as a team once we get jobs. Or in the case of PLP working on group projects. Bad teamwork skills can lead to incomplete work, anger and failure in general. Luckily PLP is preparing us for this real world skill extremely well as almost every single project we do is a group project or has group milestones. Because of this I struggled to work well as a team at the start of the year. This is clearly evident in my ghost town video project,

All the videos of maker term one!

from maker on our Alberta trip. Although we tried really hard to make a great video, my team ended up making a lot of mistakes. This was largely due to my lack of team work skills which in turn left us pressed for time. I reflected on this and tried to improve in this area. My improvement in my teamwork skills is even visible in the next maker project. This project was our run video

I’m Never Going For a Run In The Forest Again!

and me and my group performed really well. I made sure to split up tasks between our members, disuse ideas so that the whole group could understand, and we made a final video that I’m proud about. I kept working on my teamwork skills and although other problems brought some set backs overall I have improved a lot. 

next up, time management. This skill is another one that can be applied to almost any aspect of life. Time management is what helps you get things done. PLP really makes you need to master this skill because you get a huge variety of things to get done after skill and if you can’t manage your time it doesn’t work well. This is one of my biggest weaknesses as I procrastinate a lot. PLP has a huge work load (at least compared to my last school) so I found the start of the year difficult. All the blog posts, especially the first one I ever did in scimatics, have been very challenging for me. If you read this blog post

Alberta PGP Reflection

you may notice there are some grammar and spelling mistakes because I left them to the last minute and had no time to edit. Like I said early I consider this skill to be my biggest weakness. For this mPOL blog post I tried really hard to block my time and get work done. In my scimatics project “like terms” I tried to use any other extra class time to do work, I forced my self to do homework in the mornings and even still I find myself leaving most of it to the last weekend before the presentation. I think although I have improved somewhat there is still much growth for me to be had in this skill throughout all my classes. 

Planning is the next skill I want to talk about. Planning is what allows you to understand how your going to do something and then do it in the most efficient way. PLP encouraged planning for me right at the start of the year with our First Nations project

The journey of Creating my Alberta Video

. We had to plan out interview questions and locations we would get video footage. Although I think I planned some aspects of this project really well there were some parts that I needed to work on. Another aspect of planning is goal setting. For goal setting you have to plan out the steps to reach your end goal. We did this at our first PGP meeting and I’m proud to say that I completed the goal ladder I made. My goal was to 720 on skis which is where I spin twice around in the air. I followed the steps I laid out and I landed my first 720! Overall I believe that I am a pretty solid planner though I could still be more detail oriented.

Now I want to talk about writing. Writing is a skill we mostly used in humanity’s this term. Like most things that I am talking about in this post writing is another very important skill. From writing emails to writing essays it lets us transfer our thoughts and opinions through pencil and keyboard. At the start of this year I think my writing was already quite strong as other schools I have gone to really focused on this skill. That being said my writing skills have still improved in some aspects. My blog post writing skills have improved a lot since my first post. I can write longer faster and my post are much more structured and reflective of my thinking. This can be easily seen when you compare my first blog post insert here, to my most recent. My opinion writing skills have also improved thanks to our focus on movie reviews

The Phantom Menace Movie Review.

Among other things my grasp over literacy terms has also improved. All in all my writing growth this term has been great I enjoyed almost every second of it.

Video making played a huge part in the first half of this year throughout all our classes. This is one area that I think I had some of the biggest growth in. At the start of the year I didn’t know how to even use  iMovie or clips and had to ask my class mates to help me. Now I feel comfortable editing all the aspects of videos including sound. My growth is very visible in my All The Videos Of Term 1 ( link up above) post where I showed all my videos throughout term 1. My 4 shot film all the way to my live event show a massive improvement. I got to use and practice this skill in all my PLP subjects. In maker we focused on this skill a lot. Maker is where we developed all the strategies and techniques that could help us develop our videos. We made a ton of videos in humanities and we got to try a variety of video types. Even in scimatics we made an animated video to show the bonding of ions. This video making skill should prove very useful in the future as technology plays an even more important role in our daily and work lives. I’m happy to say that throughout all my subjects my video making skills have improved ten fold. 

I have also learned lots of mathematics and science. These two things are obviously based on scimatics and not my other classes. In my scimatics class I have learned and mastered a variety of different math and science techniques, and applied them to different creative assignments. My growth in each type of math and science I learned is implied but where it is most easy to see my growth as a learner is in the projects them selfs. From my first card game project

The game of exponent laws

to my most recent ionic bonding project

Chemistry Stories.

my confidence, work complexity and presentation skills have all grown. With math being such an important skill in everyday life and science being what shapes our world I’m happy to say I feel like the first half of my scimatics year has been a success. 

Now that you have seen my growth and failures let me show you answer the driving question.

My learning goals for the rest of this year are largely based around the failures and struggles I have with the things above. My first goal is to become better at managing my time. As you know from above I still feel like this is my biggest weakness. I am also a very busy person between work, school and sports. Because of this I will complete my goal by using the things and calendar apps to block my time and to allow me to get my work done before the last night. What I mean by this is actually using the fantastic features the thing app has. I normally just type the title of what I have to do and put it in my today section. I want to start using deadlines, checklists and different sections to help me organize my work. For the calendar I want to start adding homework times that remind me when I should be doing work.  My other goal for this next half a year of school is more of a secondary goal. I want to try to be more engaged in class as sometimes I just zone out. Because of that I end up having to re-read lots of the stuff I should already know from class. 

Overall I have had a great first half of the year in PLP. As you can see I have had lots of struggles and failures but I have also improved and grown a lot. I am exited to see what projects and adventures we get to go on in the next half of the year as well as to try to meet my learning goals. Thank you teachers and parents for reading my mPOL blog post, I hope you learned something about me and my first experience of PLP. I am exited to give my mPOL presentation this Tuesday!