Welcome to Gilead Learning Intention

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Hello Internet, and welcome to my first learning intentions post. As mentioned in my previous post, these will be short blog post that lay out what we want to get from our current project. So without further ado, let’s get started.

This new project is called “Welcome to Gilead”, and is all about dystopia. Specifically the driving question is “How does dystopia function as social criticism?”. I’m very interested in this project because by the end we will be writing our own dystopia story. But what do I want from this? I think this project will help me improve my creativity through story writing. I’ve recently found out how important this skill is through my last project. With authoritarian trends on the rise globally, having unique and individual ideas is becoming increasingly more important. I intend to do so by creating unique and interesting concepts and ideas to shape the world of my story. In turn this will help shape my writer voice and thus improve my speaking voice, which is my ongoing goal as stated in my VMV. To do this, I aim to write in my own voice, and by doing so I hope it will add a real world aspect to a different seeming world. However in order to do this I will also have to focus on maintaining agency over my learning. I am only able to improve if I seek to do it, and so I will have to keep myself in check and make sure I stay on task. Especially because we are reading a full book for this project and I historically dislike reading.

Thank you for reading this post and you’ll hear from me in about a month when this project is done.

Don’t Be a Whattator?

Hello internet, it’s been a minute.

Welcome to my first blog post of my last ever year. Grade 12…. I feel so old. To go with a new year, we have a new style of blog post. Because would it really be PLP without a new major change? This post is going to look different in formatting, but worry not, it will still be the same. Now that you know it will be different, let’s get started.

Learning Intention

First of all, I need to set out my learning intentions for the project. Unfortunately we hadn’t set this out beforehand, so I will be referencing my VMV. I stated that I would be a confident and strong spoken person, and in this project, I think I really improved on this.

But How?

Before I tell you how I improved, you need to know what we did. This project was called “Don’t Be a DICtator”, and  our end goal was the create a “tyranny survival guide”, in the form of a documentary. Our whole class would be working on this together. Once we had all finished the checkpoints that gave us our background in the topic, one question arose. Who would be the narrator? Immediately, I made eye contact with my teacher, and then I felt as if the whole class had eyes on me. I raised my hand and said, “I’ll do it”. My teacher has a philosophy, “everything sounds smarter in a British accent,” therefore, I was sacrificed.

Despite my hesitation, I knew this would be good for me. Getting my voice out there and becoming more comfortable with my voice without having eyes on me the whole time would be great practice for me. So I took on this task of narrating the entire script of our 20 minute documentary, and after 2 hours of non-stop recording it was finished. This was very helpful to me as it allowed me to hear my own voice in action, and everyone knows you are your own biggest critic. Because of this, I was able to listen to myself and figure out what was flawed and what went well. Unfortunately, I learned that my mouth makes a lot of sounds, and I also say some words with a more Canadian accent. Despite this making me cringe every time I listen to it, I think it’s very important that I realize these things so I can further improve them. There were some positives, though, as I realized my voice is very good at displaying a serious tone and can amplify important topics.

Strengths and Success Behaviours

Now it’s time for me to connect this learning to one of the 5 strengths and a success behaviour. For this, I would like to choose communication and self-regulation.

Communication

This project obviously took a lot of communication between groups. We had to make one 20 minute video split into 4 groups, each with 4 different people in them, so to make it flow, we obviously needed to talk it through. I think we all did really well in this factor, as we had one DRI that could help us communicate and work together. My role also needed additional communication with the other groups, as I needed to have the script to know what I was saying, and also be comfortable with what I was being told to say, as this could become quite the controversial topic if done incorrectly.

Self-Regulation

While narrating a 20 minute documentary might seem like no big deal, it’s actually harder than you might think. It also required some preparation, which included waking up early ON A SUNDAY, booking an audio lab, and also bringing enough water for many takes. The recording for this documentary took me 2 full hours of straight talking. Safe to say I had no voice on Monday. Despite enjoying this experience, it did take quite a bit of planning, and hence, self-regulation.

The Video

Now that most of the reflective part is out of the way, it’s time for the big reveal. The video itself. You may not have the time, as it is quite long, but if you do, I implore you to take a gander at our final product, as I am quite proud of it.

Conclusion

Well, I hope you liked our video, and I hope you enjoyed this blog post. I thoroughly enjoyed this project because we actually all got to work together as a class. But I also learned a lot about the current state of our world. I’m also very proud of myself for getting my voice more out there, despite how much it hurts me to listen back to it. Overall, this project expanded my knowledge of how terrifying the world is right now and helped boost my confidence just a little bit more. Thank you for reading my first post of grade 12, and I’ll talk to you next time.