It’s that time of the year again, Mpol’s (Mid Year Presentation Of Learning), or formerly known as Slc’s are happening as we speak, and if your one of my teachers your probably reading this as I’m speaking! In this learning portfolio post I will be talking about my second year in PLP so far, my growth as a learner, my goals, the positives and negatives of the year.

I guess I’ll start off with some of the work I am most proud of, at the beginning of the year I feel like I didn’t really try as hard as I could of and I feel like I slacked around a lot. But one of the most early projects we did this year was at Camp Capilano, we were split off into little groups and tasked to make a video that would demonstrate the intro to a television series Without any dialogue. I’m proud of this video because we had such little time to film and produce it and I know that it’s not the greatest video in the world but I do think it’s really good for the amount of time that we had. I really contributed a lot to my team with that video as I did quite a bit of the editing and planning of the video, I’m very proud of the final product and I learned a lot about teamwork during this assignment. It reminded me a lot of a DI instant challenge and I quite like instant challenges as they require quick thinking and communication. I have made a post for this whole trip and you can read it here, and maybe even watch the video if you want.

The second thing that I’m proud of this year is the winter exhibition portion PLP grade 10 and 12 held. I have made a Learning Portfolio post for this before which goes more in depth with what happened and why. The reason why I’m proud of my three mini “Podcasts” is because I’m generally a shy person, I’m more of the quiet one in the classroom and I generally just don’t really talk. I have been trying to break this, and a big challenge for me was this exhibition. On the night of the exhibition we had to get around 2-3 interviews with a visitor coming to the exhibition, we had to ask them questions an use follow up questions to further the interview. In preparation we had to prepare what sort of questions we would ask, I got two interviews during the night and both were very strong. One was about an elderly lady moving from England to Canada, I could really relate to her as my family is from England and my mum has told me several stories about moving here. And my second interview from the night was of my Friend Alex’s dad Daryl, I asked him about having children and what struggles came with it, it was quite funny for me as he told me older stories of Alex and just how important his kids are to his life. It was a very personal story and I am so great full for these interviewees telling me their stories. I was quite nervous as I am generally shy but as soon as I got in the room and started the interviews it was very natural and easy for me. I’m very proud of the final products and I learned a lot about public speaking and going out of my comfort zone to produce these projects.

With good there comes bad, I do have projects that I am very proud of but there are also a few projects that I feel weren’t my best work and definitely could still use improvement. These projects would be my WW1 podcast and my Math Golden Ratio Project.

First I’ll talk about my WW1 Podcast, I feel that some of the information that I had was pretty good I just think that I chose a poor soldier as he didn’t really have enough interesting information on him. I wasn’t that interested in the whole idea of “Podcasting” as I really like editing videos, it was a big curve for me as I don’t really like to listen to my own voice and I’d just rather have pretty visuals on the screen. This is no excuse but as I had this project going on I was also very sick and it didn’t mix well, I just don’t have fond memories of this project and I am not proud of my final podcast. Looking back on it, my podcast isn’t as entertaining or interesting as it should be and I sound very depressed in my podcast.

My second project I’m not proud of would be my Math Golden Ratios Project, I am not the strongest in math so when I found out we were having a project and building something Math I instantly wasn’t interested in the project. I also feel that the criteria and expectations for the project weren’t clear and there was a lot of confusion, before starting the project and during the project I didn’t really understand the math so I had to ask my grandparents for help as my grandfather used to work for BC Hydro and he knows a lot about math. After handing in the first draft of my math project I quickly got to revising it and in the end it was a lot better but I still wish I could’ve done a lot better on this project.

I’m am so glad that I am working on my talking skills and starting to actually break out of my “shell”, I do still see myself as quite shy but all of the projects and meeting new people really helps and that’s a great thing, a couple things I feel that I should improve upon is taking notes in class as I generally don’t and I think it become very useful if I started to. I should also start doing more math in my free time as it’s not my strongest subject and I’d like to achieve a better grade by the end of this year. At the beginning of the year I set a goal to not procrastinate with my work and to use my time more wisely and sadly I have not stuck to this goal. For the past month maybe, I’ve been getting a lot better and I’ve been handing in more quality work on time but at the beginning of the year I was a disaster and I am NOT proud of some of my actions. This is something that WILL change and it has slowly been getting better recently. I’d like to set another goal for the rest of this year and that would be to get my work standard higher so I’m creating higher quality work on time, it’s been a struggle for me to hand in projects on time and it is going to change.

 

I’ve faced many challenges this year and at some points we have so much homework and so much to due I get overwhelmed, along with having to go to work after school and everything outside of school I get very overwhelmed and stressed. In PLP we always have so much on our plates, I do get frustrated at times with the amount of work but I just need to stay on top of my work and not let it pile up. I also get very very stressed at times and I’ll make bad choices like going out with my friends to relax instead of doing homework but these are just very poor choices because in the end I’ll just end up getting more stressed about it not being done and it being overdue, which then leads to me staying up all night doing homework and then going to school the next day tired and just wanting to sleep. I need to get out of this habit and I know that signing up for this program is a big privilege and I need to put the work in. Thank you for taking your time and reading this Learning Portfolio Post, this post was for my MPOL and it’s just a collection of my ideas and thoughts from this year and mainly about where I could improve upon myself as a learner. I’d like to conclude this post with a question for my teachers, thank you so much.

How could I prepare and plan better to make sure that assignments are done either early or on time?  As I struggle with this

Before the winter break we started a new unit called disruption, the driving question for the unit is: How has technology disrupted. Before we left for winter break we were given two books to read, one book called Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. And the other book we had a choice on, I decided to read “Tubes” by Andrew Blum

The book is about a group of teens that are very technology savvy living in San Francisco. the bay bridge is blown up by terrorists, after the Department of Homeland Security puts in new security measures using technology which is heavily monitored. Marcus, the main character fights the envasion of privacy with the help of his online  friends by going anonymous on a hard to reach internet hub designed by himself called the Xnet.

The assignment that was assigned to us was to research a specific part from the book that was chosen by our teacher. We were to connect it to the overall unit and integrate it into the work we had been doing. We were assigned one of many different options, unfortunately by the time I got to choose my topic most of the ones I was interested in had already been chosen. I decided to choose SMTP

SMTP or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is an internet standard for electronic mail transmission, it’s basically how your computer or device retrieves your messages. Various forms of one-to-One messaging were used in the 1960’s, people communicated with one another using systems developed for specific mainframe computers. As more computers were interconnected, especially in the US Government, standards were developed to allow users of different systems to email one another. SMTP grew out of these standards developed during the 1970s. SMTP can relate to Little Brother as the whole story revolves around technology and the Department of Homeland Security monitoring everyone’s technology. With SMTP being the way you receive your messages the Homeland Security System would hack into the mainframe and could read all your messages.

Earlier this year, in December PLP had its winter exhibition. Last year if you’ve seen my older blog posts from grade 9 you’d know that we had one last year too.

These exhibitions are meant to demonstrate our understanding of our learning gas and show of the skills we have learned and overall just to challenge us. Last year the theme for our exhibition was Harry Potter and we were to make our own inquiry questions and answer it through a project, you can see my blogpost for that here. This year in grade 10 the project was very different, for the past couple weeks we had been learning about the importance of story’s and how everyone has important stories. The main point of these teaching was that during the exhibition the grade 10’s and 12’s would be partnered up, the grade 10’s would be interviewing three visitors that would come to the exhibition. The grade 12’s job were to find these people for our interviews. In preparation we had to have a list of questions to ask, these questions could be anything but they had to tell an important story that the interviewees would have. This was quite challenging as we had no idea who these people were and what stories they would have. We learned about how to ask questions and how to make your questions more open to the people that you would be interviewing, we also learned about follow up questions so that you could show your interest in the interviewees story. We learned about all of these from StoryCorps, its a website where people tell their personal interesting stories, there is a interviewer who could be anyone. I’ve seen stories where a father will interview his son or a couple will ask each other questions but the most common one is where a guest will come to StoryCorps and tell their story to a member of StoryCorps. These stories can be very personal and sad or very light and funny. It’s very interesting to listen to these short stories as they mean so much to that person. It may sound easy to interview someone but it was actually quite hard, we had to come up with these questions and meet people we have never met before, personally I’m a very shy person and I didn’t know how I would do at the exhibition.

The Exhibition: It took a while for my partner Chloe to find me a interviewee, but after she had found me an interviewee it was actually pretty easy. In all I got two interviews and both where very interesting. The first interview I got was with an elderly lady, she talked about her life experiences with moving from England to Canada and how it changed her life. I could really relate to her as my parents are both from England and moved to Canada around twenty years ago. We talked for about ten to fifteen minutes and I was surprised of how enjoyable it was, everyone we interviewed that night shared three personal stories with us grade tens and it was very interesting just talking with people I would usually talk to. The second person I interviewed was my friend Alex’s dad Daryl. We talked about how having children has changed his life and how it has impacted him as a person, it was quite interesting to me as one day I’d like to have children of my own and just hearing his experiences was very enjoyable. I used my second interview for the final product as my first interview had a lot of background noise and I just found my second one more enjoyable and interesting to listen to. While editing the podcast I added music in the begging and the end so it adds a little intro. I created my own music in Garage Band with the live loops feature, you listen to my interview here.

Within this project I improved a lot on my public speaking skills and just being more comfortable in front of new people, I also learned a lot about how to use and find good interview questions and how to properly use follow up questions to further the interview. I had a lot of fun with this project and I hope we do something like this again At is was genuinely fun and interesting.