Tag: Humanities

I Care, I Bother.

Yo what’s up guys welcome to politics. This project was called “Who Cares and Why Bother?!”.  This project focused on our processing skills as we;

  • Investigated human nature and how humans organize themselves
  • Learned about the government system in Canada
  • Looked at issues important to young people and why or why not they vote
  • Developed a presentation to showcase the Canadian govt system and encourage young people to vote

  That’s the overview of this project so let’s jump in.

Lord of the flies

Investigation #1 was an analysis of Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Lord of the Flies is an allegory and its deeper meaning ties back to our quest to learn about politics. I chose to listen to an audiobook playlist on YouTube which allowed me to take some pretty detailed notes while listening. After chapter 8 I stopped taking those notes because I realized that audiobooks take a lot longer to listen to than it would be if I just read the book. I think it was super important for me to read and analyze the historical context and learn a bit about William Golding because that allowed me to already engage in deeper thinking beyond the text. In the discussion we had post-reading, I displayed complete knowledge of the book and as we all know, I love to talk, so I had a perfect opportunity to stretch my communication skills 💪.

Learning about politics

At the start of this project, I was a person who didn’t know much about Canadian politics or government and to be honest, I didn’t care. But thanks to my photographic memory I now have an immense understanding of everything we talked about and learned in class, especially the structure of government that was drawn out on the white board. Learning about how politics worked made me much more interested in it, and I think that’s is one of the reasons why youth don’t feel like they want to be involved in government processes. So who cares about politics? Usually older people, but in this project I learned that a lot of young people do care about politics and they should! Getting involved with the government and voting is a great way to contribute to positive change, which young people these days always seem to be fighting for. So when it comes to convincing young people to vote, focusing on issues they care about and telling them what each party can do to help seems to be an effective strategy!

Group project

For my group’s presentation, I created the keynote and edited and storyboarded some of our TikTok’s. My main contribution was actually keeping everyone organized and mapping out what we should be doing individually and as group work. I think without my organization we definitely would have struggled to complete the presentation on time. I think myself and the group could’ve used more of our time to practice presenting and of course it was a bit of a hitch in the plan to have 2 group members missing for our final presentation.

I think the most impactful part of our presentation was the TikTok’s we made on issues in Canada that we care about. Showing the youth that the issues they care about are being acted on by some parties (and not acted on by others), is a motivation to vote to create the change they wish to see. 

Conclusion – Who actually cares? And Why Bother?

Who cares about politics and voting? I care, my classmates care, the adults in my life care, and many more people around the country and world. And why ultimately bother? To create the change you wish to see in the world. This project showed me that I can process ideas and further my understanding with deeper analysis and synthesis of information. I am proud of the work that I did and I know I am taking with me a lot of knowledge and regard for our political system and what my role can be.

This was a message from Brooke. do doo do do *← the theme from messages from the govt of canada*

Commemorating Canada

Hello all and welcome back. This post will be regarding my most recent humanities project, Save Juno beach! In this project we got to learn about World War II and Canada’s involvement and significance in said war. I have been fascinated by WWII for many years now so I was super excited to do a WWII project! So without further ado, lets hop into the project.

Driving Question

Why is it so important to preserve the Juno Beach Centre?

The Project; Keystones 1&2

We kicked off this project by learning all about WWII. Who was fighting? What was going on post WWI? Great Depression era? What was Canada doing? And how do all of these events and a grave economic collapse lead to WWII? Good thing I took extensive notes on all these topics in class because now I have a bank of knowledge that I can refer to anytime. Here are examples of some of my notes;

In keystone 1, we used our understanding of the criteria for determining historical significance to ascertain the 3 most important reasons why WWII was significant either for Canada as a nation or Canada’s impact elsewhere. Luckily my extensive note taking was coming in handy because I immediately knew what I believed to be some very significant events. I ended up choosing my 3 to be, in no particular order, the Battle of the Atlantic, Battle of Dieppe, and Elsie Macgill’s manufacturing of Hurricane planes for the Allied airforces. In case you were curious about these events or why they are significant, here is my writing for keystone 1 – Historical Significance of WWII

Keystone 2 reintroduced us to elements of rhetoric that would help us write our final composition for this project. We had previously learned about ethos, pathos, and logos in a project from grade 8 so it was definitely time for a refresher to step up our game. Part 1 of keystone 2 had us analyzing a text to look for its usage of rhetoric to get the message across. I started off my analysis by annotating the text as I read it to try to catch any usage of ethos, pathos, or logos. This ended up making it much easier for me to write about when writing my analysis to hand in. The question to be answered for keystone 2 was “What is the author saying and what are the choices they made to effectively communicate that message?” and I saw many areas appealing to different rhetoric schemes but found the main usage to be that of  pathos, appealing to emotion. 

Keystone 2 Analysis

Writing Process

To solidify our message for our final writing composition, we needed to develop a thesis. I wanted to recognize the importance of the Juno Beach Centre representing Canada globally and bringing people together. The final thesis that I came up with was;

“It is important to have Canada represented on the world stage when it comes to WWII memorials like the Juno Beach Centre because it is preserving the memory of Canadian soldiers, promoting international understanding and cooperation, and calling attention to the shared history and values that unite Canada and its allies.”

And before we jumped straight into drafting, we also did some brainstorming to make the writing easier because we would already have laid out what we wanted to talk about or make points of. 

After that, we finally started writing drafts of our composition. I ended up making 4 drafts in total before landing my final copy. I utilized a plethora of feedback from my peers and teacher to mold my writing and fix any mistakes I made. I found it super helpful to have multiple sources of feedback because sometimes certain people would catch mistakes that others didn’t or have a new idea for wording something that I wouldn’t have thought of. 

Overall I am really proud of my final work and my performance through this project. So, why is it so important to preserve the Juno Beach Centre? Here is my answer in my final composition, “Commemorating Canada”. LINKKKKKK

As Always, Brooke

One of the Most Toxic Relationships I’ve Ever Seen

Heyo wanna hear about the PLP 10 humanities project that I did last semester? Well you’re in luck because this is a blog post just about that. What is the topic you may ask? Its a doozie for sure. For never was a story of more woe, than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

The Project

So obviously if we’re doing a project on Romeo and juliet, we need to actually know what story we are talking about. To help us understand the concepts and themes discussed in the sometimes hard-to-understand world of Shakespeare, we created a theme book to identify a topic within an act, include evidence as quotes from the text to support the topic, and connect that theme to one of the film adaptations we watched in class (I’ll talk about that last part later). We did this knowledge tracking twice for every act, so 10 different quotes and entries in total. As we read aloud certain scenes from every act, readers theatre style, we would make note of any quotes that we felt represented common topics in Romeo and Juliet such as; The Nature of Free Will, Honour and Obligation, The Naivety of Youth, The Power of Love and Hate, Violence and Death, Gender Roles, Revenge, and The Multiplicity of Identity. We would then write about how we thought Shakespeare was trying to convey that theme in the scene. 

My themebook  

The Product + Driving Question

How has William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet remained relevant to contemporary storytelling?

So remember when I previously mentioned connecting identified themes to film adaptations that we watched, and then I said I would talk about that later. Well this is later because the best answer to the driving question is the film adaptations we reviewed and lead us to create our own. Yes we actually watched movies as schoolwork and were encouraged to watch more movies as homework. The films all were somewhat based or modelled off of Romeo and juliet (hence why we refer to them as film adaptations). My group re-enacted the balcony scene for our video, with myself playing Romeo and Ines playing Juliet. We chose to film it in a pseudo-Maury Povich/The Office/reality tv style with a hint of Taylor Swift. It was really fun to create and I think the final product is pretty good. So here it is!

Conclusion

Overall, this project was really fun and I actually really loved learning about Shakespeare and his magnificent play, Romeo and Juliet. I also enjoyed being able to read aloud in class and gain confidence on video. I think I did good. Thanks for reading!!!!

As Always, Brooke.

Our Second Official Language – French.

Hello all, Welcome to my blog. Today I’m going to be talking about a project called “A Case for a Nation”. This project was about Nationalism and the ripple affect that comes along with it. We did most of our whole class learning on Nationalism in Canada, but some people later picked different cases of nationalism to research.

Driving Question

“How can an understanding of nationalism of the past, help us make sense of today?”

I think that the best answer to this question would be the caption that my group came up with for our instagram post (this will make more sense later on in the post).

“French Canadian nationalism started with France’s exploration of North America. New France showed their distinct culture through their language, religion, & way of life. Harsh conditions led to their defeat in the 1756 Seven years’ war. After the war, British rule suppressed French Canadian culture while the economy in lower Canada dwindled. In 1837 French Canadians started the “Patriot’s War”, a rebellion in Lower Canada. Holidays like Saint-Jean Baptiste Day were created to give the French Canadians a further way to celebrate their individuality & nationalism. Today, Quebec even has political parties that are devoted to the idea of separatism.”

In the last few sentences of that paragraph, it links the two timelines together by showing the connection of French Canadian nationalism to present day, which is exactly what the driving question is asking.

Current Events

After briefly looking into the concept of nationalism, we worked on an assignment to understand nationalism in todays world, thus revealing the “Current Events Presentation”. For this, we researched a relatively current event that was happening around the world that could relate to Identity and Nationalism. We than made a document with some images, sources and facts. We than presented our documents to a small group of people through the first portion of the project. I did my presentation on the boil water advisory crisis affecting First Nations communities across the country. This little exercise helped me practice my research skills/presentation creating and was a start into identifying nationalism.

Building Knowledge

Before we split into our final groups for the project, we needed to form bit of a backstory as to where we are in history. We learned about the formation of Upper and Lower Canada, the Canadian Confederation, and cases of nationalism across the world. We did a few different knowledge-building activities to dive into each of those three topics. First, we started to learn about nationalism as a concept across the globe. We read printed out pages from a textbook that discussed different places and their struggles with nationalism, and conferred with our groups to take notes and discuss. Then, we learned about Upper and Lower Canada. We did a pseudo-simulation called the “Rebellion Scene Investigation”, taking us back to the two colonies to explore their differences and learn about the people who lived in the majority French vs majority English parts of Canada. This part of the project helped us practise taking historical perspective of life back then to learn why they may have acted certain ways or made certain decisions.

The Product

Finally, we split into groups of 3 based on which topic we chose, but I accidentally picked a group who already had three people so we became the only group of 4. There were many topics to chose from and the topic we chose was “Quebecois / French Nationalism in Canada”. I chose this topic because I felt like I had enough prior knowledge to do a good job at executing the work that would coincide with it. Plus I think that it is important to learn about the French existence in Canada because it is a big part of how our country was formed. 

The finial product of this project was an Instagram post. We had to create 3 images with our group that would be the images displayed in the post. So to start off with, we individually had to create 3 images. One had to be a image digitally drawn on, another had to be a quote, and the last one was a choice. My first three images were as follows ; 

The people in my group also created 3 images, Declan, Faith, and Zach. We picked in class one image from everyone to make a compilation that we think best showed French Nationalism in Canada.

Next, we worked on the caption. We looked at our topic and thought about the story behind it. We used different strategies like the “story spine” and started to condense the years of change and nationalism into just the most important points.  Again we first created a caption individually and then later would combine ours with our group. Here was mine; 

“French Canadian nationalism has been prominent in Canada since upper and lower Canada were formed way back in 1791. From Politics and economics to social ramifications, French Canadians have a history of being oppressed by British rule in the formation of the country that we now call Canada. Citizens had to fight long and hard for French representation in their government systems even in areas where it was a 95% majority of French Canadians. Modern day Quebec even has political parties that are calling for Quebec to separate from Canada and become its own independent nation.

#frenchcanadian #quebecois #canadianhistory” 

We then sat down as a group and looked at all of our captions in a shared pages document. We highlighted what we liked and wanted to keep on each others captions and then glued them together to create one final masterpiece. Here is my groups final caption;

“French Canadian nationalism started with France’s exploration of North America. New France showed their distinct culture through their language, religion, & way of life. Harsh conditions led to their defeat in the 1756 Seven years’ war. After the war, British rule suppressed French Canadian culture while the economy in lower Canada dwindled. In 1837 French Canadians started the “Patriot’s War”, a rebellion in Lower Canada. Holidays like Saint-Jean Baptiste Day were created to give the French Canadians a further way to celebrate their individuality & nationalism. Today, Quebec even has political parties that are devoted to the idea of separatism.

#frenchcanadian #quebecois #canadianhistory #francophone 

@that_snail_kid @declan.rattray @zachv24 and Faith”

Conclusion

Overall, I think this project was rather enjoyable. I learned much more depth into the formation of Canada, and the impact that French Canadian history has on Canada today. I also gained a lot of skills on how to write your opinion and support it with all the stuff it needs to make your writing effective.

Here you can check out the instagram account that the whole classes posts will be up on soon. Hopefully you will go quickly check those out and drop a few likes :D.

Historical perspectives instagram account!

Thanks for reading!

As always, Brooke.

mPOL 2022 Here we go

Hello and welcome to my first mPOL (mid-year presentation of learning). Now normally, this would not be my first mPOL, but because we did not do them in grade 8, this will be my first one. In this mPOL, I will be answering 2 driving questions. “How have I demonstrated growth as a learner so far this year?”, and “How can I sharpen my Learning Plan to ensure I will reach my learning targets by the end of this school year?”

I shall start off with the first question. 

How have I demonstrated growth as a learner so far this year?

I feel the best way to show the answer to this would be to start with the projects that I think demonstrated my best work for each class (except maker because that is next semester).

Humanities

“Working with Words” 

You can check out my blog post for this project here.

I chose this project because it has been my favourite humanities project that we have done so far. Because of this, I worked hard in the project, and I am really proud of the outcome. I think I enjoyed this project the most because I love poetry and liked how we could really make this project to our own specifications and tailored to us as an individual.

I learned a lot about poetry in this project, as well as presentation skills and public speaking. This project taught me the importance of creativity, looking inward and trying to decipher who you are, and how to bounce ideas off of peers. I think during this project is when I grew most and had the most fun in school since the beginning of the year.

Scimatics

“Chemistry stories“

You can check out my blog post for this project here.

I chose this project because I think it shows my perseverance. I was struggling internally a lot during the time of this project so I am proud that I was still able to produce good quality work. I also enjoyed learning more about atoms and the processes that go into making the matter that is all around us.

How can I sharpen my Learning Plan to ensure I will reach my learning targets by the end of this school year?

Though I think that my learning plan is has good goals for me to work towards in the rest of the year, I am actually quite content with not meeting the proficiency requirements that I have set on my learning plan. Due to the recent influx of stress, I have come to the conclusion that my mental health was being damaged greatly by trying really hard for extending marks and always being 100% attentive. So yes, I would still like to get extending marks whenever I can but I am not going to be disappointed if my grades do not match what I have set on my learning plan.

Some things that I feel I have done well at that are in my learning plan would be;

  1. I have been using things regularly for both school and non school related tasks and it has helped me greatly.
  2. I have set up routines that help me focus on my homework and help me not to get discouraged.
  3. I have been using more positive affirmations to help me balance mental health with academics.
  4. I have been asking my peers/parents more often when I need clarification on concepts that I do not understand.

Some areas that I want to have more growth in by the end of the year would be;

  1. Asking my teachers for help when I need it.
  2. Give myself more time to write better reflections and responses (humanities).
  3. Take more notes when I think I may forget the information that if being shared. Especially when I am having a hard time being “present” in class.
  4. Starting homework asap so that I don’t put it off until the point where I am then rushing to get it done.

I hope you enjoyed my mPOL and I will see you again at the tPOL’s! (Transitional presentation of learning)

As always, Brooke.

Insert Name Here – Worldview in Poetry

Salutations! I am back with a very exciting humanities blog post. This project was called “Working With Words” and its all about poetry. Now you may have remembered that i actually did a blog post on poetry in grade 8 for the student blogging challenge -> A Dive Into Literature – Poetry, and if you read that post you would already know that I am a big poetry fan. So lets find out what this project was all about!

The Driving Question

The driving question for this project was “How might I construct text that shows who I am right now?”, and the answer is… through using different types of poetry! This project taught us how to find creativity and joy in poetry, comprehend poetry to make meaning, and how to use creativity, joy, and meaning to create effective texts. I chose to try and improve myself in the competency of “Positive personal and cultural identity” because I felt that it was the perfect competency for a poetry book about my worldview. Wait did I just say worldview? Yup! This project also brought back the idea of world view and its 7 different aspects (time, geography, beliefs, economy, knowledge, society, and values). And overall I think that I did a great job at demonstrating and growing in the area of personal and cultural awareness throughout this short project, so keep an eye out while reading my eBook and see if you think I did :).

The Project

Of course a lot of people do not know much of the technical side of poetry so we started off with building our knowledge on poetry terminology. Over the course of the project we would be learning 18 new vocabulary words and creating 9 different types of poems. With each new term  came a new activity and a lot of practise analyzing and presenting poems. Here are some of the poetry terms that we learned;

And as we were starting to make all of these poems, we had to create a place to put them all… 

A super duper amazing eBook! The eBook would display all of our poems and include texts and audio messages to complement each one. We also had a bio page where we have an about me video and link to this wonderful blog that you are currently on. Ok enough of this, I think the best way to learn about what we did in this project would be to just look at my book! Here it is;

Conclusion 

The final showcase of this project will be a live-streamed “coffee house” performance that we are putting on tomorrow night at school. I am not entirely sure what it consists of yet but I’m sure it will be quite entertaining! Overall i think that this was my favourite humanities project that we have done and I am hopeful that this will motivate me to write poetry more often. I think that it was at times a little challenging to think about how to put my worldview into words but i think that I got the hang of it by the end. I am very proud of the work that I did in this project and hopefully we can use poetry in another project soon!

Thanks for reading!

As always, Brooke.

Guilty as Charged!

Bonjour and welcome back to another Humanities blog post.

This project was called “Revolutions on Trial”, and in this project, as you may have guessed, we took famous revolutions and put them into a mock trial.

Crane Brinton – The Anatomy of a Revolution

Most of us started this project off not knowing much about revolutions, so one of the first pieces of building knowledge that we did, was learn why revolutions happen and what the different stages of a revolution look like. We studied Crane Brinton’s theory of revolutions, consisting of 4 main stages. The stages were incubation, moderate, crisis, and recovery, followed by a question of either peace or war? We were asked to create a diagram to showcase Crane Brinton’s theory, here is mine;

Animal Farm

A new thing that we did in this project, was study and read a book that was related to the topic. This book was called Animal Farm was written by George Orwell. This story of animals rebelling on a farm was created as an analogy for the events and characters in the Russian Revolution (Mar 8, 1917 – Jun 16, 1923). Every week we had new chapters to read and after every one, we had to write a little summary of the chapter with any questions we had. When we came into class, we would have to discuss what we read and our thoughts and feelings towards the chapters. We analyzed the events in the book to coincide with what we had learned about the anatomy of revolution. This was a good chance to practice identifying the stages of a revolution because we would need to use these same skills later on in the project.

The French Revolution

We were split into two different class rooms and assigned to a group with a revolution that we would be studying for the rest of the project. My group was the French Revolution, and we would be the ones arguing in defence of the revolution in the mock trial. After countless articles read, podcasts listened to, and YouTube videos watched, I had gained quite the chunk of knowledge on the French Revolution. We created graphic organizers to display some of what we had learned and if we identified any patterns of continuity and change. Here is my graphic organizer;

The Mock Trial

Once all the building knowledge on our revolution was done, we moved on to preparing for the trial. This included building an affidavit with the prosecution group from the other class, preparing a witness, and writing a script. We chose our witness to be Maximilien Robespierre, a prominent leader of the Jacobin club and headlined the famous “Reign of Terror” era in the time of the French Revolution. We worked side by side with the prosecution to concoct a script that we would be using for the trial. We had to come up with opening statements, closing statements, direct examination questions, and cross examination questions, all to hopefully prove that the revolution was, in fact, NOT guilty.

Now lets talk a bit about that. What do we mean by the revolution being guilty? Well, the PLP 9 court established a list of 6 criteria/goals that an effective revolution would have demonstrated. The revolutions would be judged on how many, if any, of those goals they achieved and to what extent they actually accomplished them. The criteria was as follows;

A revolution to be effective must include the reformation political systems aligning with the voice of the people, an increase of rights and freedoms for the people, a removal of a dictator with sweeping power, the achievement of financial stability, an improvement in standard of living, and the removal of internal conflict.

And as the defence, my team was arguing that the revolution was effective, and the prosecution was arguing the opposite. The mock trials would be taking place at the winter exhibition where we would have our live audience (a jury if you will) decide the fate of the revolution, guilty or not? Now unfortunately I was unable to be at the winter exhibition but luckily we were recording. Here is the video of the French Revolution, on trial.

Conclusion

Unfortunately we lost the trial to the prosecutors. But nevertheless I am very proud of how far my team came from the beginning and I am so sorry that I couldn’t be there in the end to help us win. Kudos to the prosecution though because they definitely were a very strong team and to be fair, we never stood a chance against them. Overall I really enjoyed learning about revolutions and I think that a mock trial was a super cool way to have us showcase what we had learned.

Thanks for reading!

As always, Brooke.

Congratulations You Just Killed a Turtle

Hello to whomever is reading this 👋🏼. Tis I, Brooke. And I’m back with my second blog post for this new school year. 

People and the environment. Let’s talk about it. The driving question for this project was “How do people and the environment affect each other?” And the short answer is rather simple. Both people and the environment hold a lot of power over one another.

The product of this project is a physical letter sent to someone who can create change on a specific environmental issue. I wrote my letter about plastic bag pollution to the Minister of Environment and Climate Change Strategy, the Honourable George Heyman. But in order to have a letter that is worthy of being sent to such an important person, we had to do a lot of writing practice.

The letter

The topic of our letter is an environmental issue of our choice in British Columbia. I chose to research and write about plastic pollution in BC, specifically plastic bags. I researched a lot about what BC is already doing about reducing single use plastic and I came across CleanBC’s Plastics Action Plan. I think that reducing single use plastic waste is super important and that is why I chose to bring this issue up with Minister George Heyman.

  • First letter draft

I only put two drafts into the slideshow because most of my drafts were just adding small details or re-wording a sentence or two. Overall I think that I could’ve done a more sophisticated job at executing the final letter but I am still proud of what I put into the mailbox.

CommonLit

A very important part of this project was CommonLit.org. We read 5 texts from CommonLit that all had something to do with the environment. We also did 2 writing lesson assignments that went along with 2 of those texts. The lessons taught us about writing explanations and using evidence with context. There were also 2 vocabulary quizzes that took place on CommonLit to help us use better vocabulary choices when writing about climate change. Overall even though I found the CommonLit assignments annoying at times, I can definitely say that they have helped me improve the way I write.

About two weeks into this project we read a CommonLit poem called “Song For The Turtles”. We were then asked to go outside and write our own poem about our environment. Lots of people wrote their poems about the destruction of the environment but I chose to write mine about what I observed while sitting among the sunflowers in the school garden. Here is my poem;

Sitting Among The Sunflowers 

Sitting among the sunflowers
Their tall stalks jutting up from the earth beneath
Reaching towards the sun with their flowers of gold

Bees swiftly fly to and fro
Working hard for their hive
Ants climbing up the stalks
On a mission they have yet to complete

A soft breeze arrives and the garden comes alive
The leaves shiver and sway
But the strength of the stalks never stray
Sitting among the sunflowers

Ok so admit I’m no Edgar Allan Poe, but I think that writing the poems was a great  exercise in observing our environment.

CommonLit Connections

The CommonLit connections was one of the final activities in this project. We learned about identifying the theme of a text, and then had to identify the theme of our letter and the theme of one of the CommonLit texts that we read. We then wrote a multi-paragraph response connecting our letter with one of the texts, I chose to use a story called “He-y Come on Ou-t”. The common theme that I came up with for the two texts was “Simple actions can have devastating consequences on the environment.”

My CommonLit connection

What have I learned?

I can say with confidence that my writing improved greatly throughout this project. I have come to be more aware of the devastating damage that climate change is doing to our planet. I hope that my letter can help create change in BC with the help of our government.

Thanks for reading!

As always, Brooke.

The French and First Nations and British, Oh my!

What did European settlement mean for all the people involved? Well how bout I show you a video that will help answer that question.

As you may have guessed, I created that video along with my partner in this project. (Go check out Gwen’s blog here) The video was made using keynote magic move, then exported to YouTube. We made a QR code to out on the infographic that takes you to this video.

Just a quick overview of the project, We learned about European settlement in New France, the fur trade, daily life in early Canadian colonies, First Nations relations, and more things of that sort. We put three facts, one each of the British, French, and First Nations, into an infographic with an image to go along with each fact. We came up with a short thesis to answer the driving question using the three facts as supporting evidence.

Another part of the infographic was a statement on continuity and change between the time of the colonization of New France to Present day. We did practice on identifying continuity and change and at first I wasn’t very good at it but I think I’ve got the hang of it now. The general theme of our infographic was the power of human greed and we tried to make that the focus of the continuity and change statement.

Overall I thought that this project was fun and I really enjoyed working with my partner.

 

Here are the sources that we used for the information in the infographic;

Worlds Collide Episode 1, CBC, 2017

Coates, Sarah, James Miles, Janice Moase. Nelson Socials 8. Nelson Education, 2019.

HBC Heritage – Tales from the Bay

As always, Brooke.

Ah, the golden age of exploration.

Arrrgghh matey! Welcome back to my blog.

Before spring break, we finished another project. This project was all about the age of exploration. Our driving question was “What was the impact of global exploration?” And the answer to that question is very important so I’m just gonna dive right in.

Without global exploration, North America would’ve never been uncovered by the Europeans. Foods like potatoes would’ve never become a staple in the quintessential European diet without the Columbia exchange taking place between the Americas and Europe. 

The final product of this project was an informative video on the age of exploration, made with an app called AR maker. If you didn’t know, AR stands for augmented reality, similar to VR which is virtual reality. The video would follow a story that was guided by a script written with the technique called the “story spine”. I think that I have talked about story spine before but here is an example for a quick overview.

We learned a lot about analyzing cause and consequence, the premise of which goes really well with the story spine. You start with the underlying cause, then the immediate cause, the event, the immediate consequence, and finally the long term consequence. We did a lot of work with identifying cause and consequence of events and then we applied our knowledge to what we had learned about the age of exploration.

We created objects to put into the augmented reality that would help us tell our stories. I created my objects in procreate and then made the background transparent in keynote. In the end, AR maker was sometimes very frustrating to use but I ended up persisting and figuring out the ins and outs of the app. Seeing everything of mine come together in AR showed that I am an empowered learner that can use technology to appropriately and effectively construct my knowledge. Here is the final video that I uploaded to YouTube;

This project was very short and so is this blog post but I hope that you enjoyed learning about what I learned. Thank you so much for reading!

As always, Brooke.