WWI in Canada Through an Artifact and a Soldier

Hi everyone, I have another blog post for you. This post is about a new project that I just finished, the purpose of the project was to answer the question how might we use artifacts and film to show significance of WWI. Through the activities I did while doing this project I will tell you what I think I did well, what I didn’t do well and what I learned.

Milestone 1
In this part of the project I had to create a 1-2 minute video on a object I thought represented Canada and why it’s significant. For a little bit I looked through websites of significant Canadian objects, I eventually decided on the maple leaf. Unfortunately some of my classmates already put their object as the maple leaf so I came up with idea that I think was better than the maple leaf my object that represents Canada was a maple tree. To see why I chose this watch my video hopefully I convince you that the maple tree is significant to Canada.

I don’t think that the video is the best quality video I’ve ever made because I had a small amount of time to create it but I think it was a good intro activity for the whole project. During this task I learned how to research certain objects and how to learn about the current and historical significance of certain things.

Choosing my soldier and artifact
The final product of this project was an explainer video about a soldier and an artifact from World War One for the canadian war museum using the WWI artifact box. Before making a video I had to choose a soldier and an artifact that I could connect in a creative way. First I chose my artifact, at first like the maple leaf I wanted a different object than what I got, but I am ok with the object I got because it was a challenge for me and I had a sort of connection to it. The object that I chose are called puttees, puttees are long strips of wool fabric that are used to protect and stabilize a soldiers leg. At first i didn’t really understand why the puttees were significant and I was pretty stressed out about explaining that but I think I did a good job of explaining that in my final video that is at the top of this post.

After I chose my artifact I had to choose a soldier that I could connect to my artifact. While choosing my soldier I chose to focus on a fun fact about the puttees, there was a regiment in Newfoundland nicknamed the blue puttees because they wore blue puttees instead of the traditional khaki colour puttees. So I looked up soldiers from Newfoundland in WWI, to see the links I used to find and research my soldier and artifact check out my final videos description.

As you know if you watched my video my soldiers name was William Elliot and he fought in the famous blue puttees regiment during WWI. Here is a picture I found of Lance Corporal William Elliot.

Competencies
As always I had to focus on competencies during the project and those were Global Collaborator and Historical Significance, allow me to tell you about them.

Historical Significance
How do I make choices about what is worth remembering? That question is what I should be answering we are focusing on this competency. I think at the beginning of the project I didn’t quite understand this competency which in turn made it difficult to do well but by the end of the project I think I was doing much better with the competency. For an example of my growth i have a task from he beginning of the project and one from the end to show my growth as a learner. Near the start of this project I had to write a paragraph on why I think my artifact is significant to WWI and I didn’t really explain the significance I just wrote about the facts and a couple stories about the puttees. Close to the end of the project I had to explain the significance of puttees in a script and I think I did a good job, go check out my video and see if you think I explained the significance well.

Global Collaborator
How might I use technology to connect to the world? I think on this competency I stayed on a even line of success, I don’t feel I got better nor did I get worse. I defiantly want to get my enthusiasm up for the next time I present because it will add to the amount people will engage and I’ll have more fun doing it as well. While presenting I told the audience the facts and had a good conversation but it wasn’t very fun and people wouldn’t come up to my station if they had a choice of going back to class or listening to me talk about puttees. This competency is something I think I could definitely improve on and get pretty good at.

This project was not one that disliked doing I actually had a bit of fun learning about WWI and would say I enjoyed the project. Thank you for reading my post and I hope you enjoyed learning about puttees and William Elliot.

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