Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.
Introduction
Grade 9 has gone by so fast, and looking back, I can see how much I‘ve grown this year. This year I have gotten rid of some old bad habits that have brought me down, and created new habits that have lifted me up. In this post Iwill be talking about some of the strengths I‘ve developed and built upon, some ways I can still improve, and going over my goals and intentions for next year.
VMV
Growth Over the Year
Over the year my quality of work has gotten so much better. At the beginning of the year I didn’t pay much attention to details and I didn’t create work that was visually appealing. My filming, editing, and storytelling abilities have grown so much.
Video features Peak Potential and In the Name of the Nation
In that short video, you can see how my use of angles, editing, and audio, and storytelling has grown from my first video this year, to one of my most recent videos.
Over the year in science, I have gotten a lot better at showing my understanding of what we are learning. Science has a lot more memorizing and there is not as much room to be creative with science. At the beginning of the year I got kind of bored of making observations so I didn’t do the work that helped me actually learn the subject. I was starting to see a lot of ghosts in my Showbie spots. This was a big mistake because once it was time to start the fun part of the project where I could incorporate what I’ve learned in a creative way, I had not learned anything so I was lost. In the end I didn’t have much of an end product.
Once I realized that I needed to learn the subject throughly before starting to create my end product, I was able to be more successful. I started to see less ghosts in my Showbie, and the observing and memorizing became more enjoyable because I knew that it would help me be successful.
Asking for help and feedback is something I still need to work on a little bit, but I think I’ve gotten better at it over the year. Another good habit I have started is using all of my class time effectively. I used to leave a lot of work for homework and I would not be working very hard in class, but now I use all the class time I have to do my work.
Areas For Improvement
One thing I can improve on is managing my time effectively. I can create good work, but a lot of times I don’t give myself enough time to do that work. I will have an idea for a project and think it will only take a hour when in reality it ended up taking like 5 hours. Because of this, I find I often get burnt out and overwhelmed with the expectations I set for myself. I also end up not finishing a lot of work or have a messy and rushed looking product.
Another thing I need to work on is completing my reflective blog posts. I need to start keeping record of all my projects so I can learn from my mistakes and keep seeing the progress I’m making.
Am I Ready For Grade 10?
With the new good habits I have gained, I think I am ready for grade 10. Seeing how much I’ve grown just over this year is crazy. Being in grade 10 means there is less time to get to my vision from my VMV, and I have already seen progress this year. My mission was to create work that I was proud of. I can say that this year there are a number of projects I am really proud of. I am now one step and one year closer to reaching my vision!
Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.
VMV
At the beginning of this school year I created a Vision, Mission, and Values. (VMV for short). My vision was to be proud of the work I accomplish in school. I want to be able to look back at my work and be happy with it knowing I worked hard and did my best. My mission, or how I am going to make my vision come true was to apply feedback, persevere through challenges, and reflect on my work. Some success behaviours that I wanted to use more frequently to help me achieve my mission were agency, self-regulation, and preparation.
Applying Feedback
One of the projects I am most proud of this year is my Frankenstuffies: The Rise of Change project. For this project we learned about the Industrial Revolution. Our final product was a film that showcased aspects of the Industrial Revolution while telling a story story that starred our Frankeinstuffies that we sewed. One of the reasons I like the outcome of this project is because I was always improving my work. When I thought I was done an assignment, I got feedback on things I could improve on, and I applied the feedback.
Perseverance
A project that I am not happy with at all is my TYKTWD project. I didn’t put any effort into this project. When I look back at this project I just regret not trying harder because it was a really cool project. For this project I had a plan of exactly how my TYKTWD video was going to look, but once I started to make the video I gave up because it wasn’t turning out the way I wanted.
On the other hand, when I persevered through the challenges of the Vive Les Machines à Métaphores project, it really paid off. There were a lot of challenges that I faced when building my metaphor machine, but I tried my best and didn’t let my group down. Im pretty proud of how that project turned out.
Reflection
I need to work on completing my reflective blog posts, because reflecting on my projects is when I can get the most out of what I learned. It is also a really good way of documenting my work and having it all in one place for me to look back on. In my vision mission and values I said I wanted to look back at my projects and be proud of them, but if I don’t document them or put them in my learning portfolio, I don’t have a place to look at my projects.
Conclusion
For my mPOL I need to find the answer to the question: What supports (inside and outside of school) am I using to succeed in my learning?
The answer to this question is asking for help and feedback. This can be asking my teachers for clarification on assignments and also applying the feedback they give me, or it would be showing my family my work so they can give me feedback prom a different perspective. Sometimes I cant exactly pinpoint why my work isn’t turning out the way I want it to, so by seeing other peoples perspectives and getting feedback I can do the best work possible.
What you just watched was a successful run of me and my group’s Rube Goldberg machine. It is the outcome of months of hard work, research, building, and team work. A Rube Goldberg machine is a machine that preforms complicated tasks to accomplish one simple task. Our machine is a metaphor for the Haitian Revolution. Every action represents a things that happened in the Haitian Revolution.
Our competency for this project was processing. We needed to be able to process ideas and further our understanding of revolutions to be successful in this project. The driving question for this project was “What Factors Precipitate ‘Revolution’ and How Have They Shaped the Modern World?”. If you would like to see my answer to this question stick around for the conclusion at the end of this post!
Learning About Revolutions
Before we started learning about revolutions we needed to actually know what a revolution was, so read a book called Animal Farm. This book represents the Russian revolution, but the book is from the perspective of farm animals rebelling against the owner of the farm. This book was very interesting and it made revolutions a lot easier to understand. I’m glad we read this book before learning about the Haitian Revolution.
We also learned about Crane Brinton’s Anatomy of a Revolution. This theory is that every revolution has 4 stages. If you would like to learn more about my understanding of that theory you can take a look at my Animal Farm infographic. It goes through how the events in the book apply to Crane Brinton’s theory. (Animal Farm Spoilers Below!)
Learning About The Haitian Revolution
After we learned about what revolutions are, we started to research our assigned revolution. I was researching about the Haitian revolution. We made more infographics, one individual and one group infographic. The one on the left is my individual infographic and the one on the right is our group infographic. To be honest I did not contribute much to the infographics because I did not finish my individual one and I was away when my group was creating the collaborative one. I will say that learning about the Haitian revolution was very interesting. I had never heard of it before this project because it is a pretty overlooked revolution. If you would like to watch a Crash Course about the Haitian Revolution to learn a little more, you can click here.
Creating Our Rube Goldberg Machine
As I mentioned before, I was away for some part of this project. My group designed the first draft of our Rube Goldberg machine without me, but they didn’t start building much before I got back so I did not miss much of the building process. The original design of our machine was going to resemble a table with a spiral in the middle.
We started building the machine and our progress was moving really slow. We had been working on building for a while and we had not been seeing a ton of progress. We built the base but when we attached the other elements it looked really messy and our machine was not working very well either. Less than a week before the winter exhibition we made the last minute decision to redesign our whole machine. It was risky but we thought it would be a better idea to make the design more simple and clean. We had to rush to draw a new design and we also had to figure out a way for every action to represent a part of the Haitian revolution.
After making the design we worked really hard to create our new Rube Goldberg machine. We tested it so many times. We also had to quickly make a script/what we were gonna say to people when we present. I think it was stressful trying to finish it but when we actually were at the exhibition it was pretty easy to present. I think every member of my group did a really good job at contributing to building our machine.
Winter Exhibition
The day of the winter exhibition went pretty smoothly. There were no big disasters that happened, and my groups Rube Goldberg machine turned out looking really good! I think it was a really good idea that we re-designed because I think it turned out looking a lot cleaner and professional than the original idea would have been.
We needed to have a food to hand out to everyone so some people in my group baked espresso brownies. If you research more about the Haitian revolution you would find out that the crops that were grown on the plantations in Saint-Dominque (modern day Haiti) were sugar, coffee, and tobacco. We obviously are not going to include tobacco in our snack, so we decided to make espresso brownies because they contain coffee and sugar.
Our machine ran about 70% of the time. I think this is pretty good. If I were to do something differently to make it work closer to 100% of the time I think I would make it more seamless. When our machine didn’t work it was because the marbles got stuck somewhere or the marbles fell off the ramp. The ship going down the ramp didn’t go a few times. So over all I would just make things a lot cleaner because I think the objects were getting stuck on rough parts of wood or pieces of hot glue.
Presenting was pretty easy because after presenting a few times, we all kind of knew each others parts so we were able to present when a group member was on break. I think we all did a good job at not memorizing and reciting the script. We were all talking in a really natural and conversational manner which was really good and a lot more engaging to the people that came to see our project.
Conclusion
As I mentioned in the introduction, if you stuck around until the conclusion you would get to see my answer to the question “What Factors Precipitate ‘Revolution’ and How Have They Shaped the Modern World?”. I think we can see a lot of similarities between when different revolutions in the past were just beginning, and our societies today.
Some of the main factors in the Incubation Stage (the stageof a revolution before the revolution actually starts) are economic crisis’, government injustice, weak rulers, and half-hearted “reform”. These are just a few examples, but there are more components as well. You can take some time to think and ask yourself if you see some of these things happening in your own country. These components of the Incubation Stage have affected the modern day world in a variety of ways. Lots of people are suffering from the affects of economic crisis, feel a sense of injustice, are disappointed in their rulers, and are infuriated by their governments lazy attempts to “reform”.These feelings can eventually can eventually lead to violence and chaos as we have seen in the past, and it’s even happening in the present as well.
Overall this project was pretty fun. It was challenging at times but my group worked through those challenges and I’m really happy with how the end product turned out! If you would like to see my group members perspective on this project you can check out Julia’s, Ella’s, Madeline’s, Maya’s, and Milaina’s blogs. Thanks so much for reading until the end! Have a great rest of your day.
Ive come a long way since the beginning of this year. I’ve learned so many new things, a lot of them being about taking leadership for my own learning.
POL Declaration
Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.
Enthusiasm
Over time I’ve learned to be a lot more exited about learning. Learning is really fun, and this year I was able to change my perspective on school. It used to just be a boring place to learn, but now I see learning as an opportunity to maybe find some of my interests or I see it as a way to prepare myself for the future. I was really exited to learn about the immune system in science. It was really cool to learn about because I got to understand what goes on in peoples bodies all of the time to help keep them alive.
Resilience
At the begging on the year I would quit everything when it got too challenging. Now when work gets challenging I keep on working hard and I get through my challenges. An example of this is the winter exhibition. I gave up on making some props because it was difficult and was taking longer than I thought. Now I try to push through challenges with a clear goal in my mind, doing anything I can to achieve that goal.
Balance
After my mPOL, I decided that I need to change how I use my time, making sure I keep a healthy balance for everything I do. In the “The Wilderness Must Be Explored” project, I Was able to manage my time very well. I kept a good balance when going on the Oregon trip, making sure I used my time in the vans to work on my book creator. I also made sure I got even a small amount of time not interacting with anyone every day. This made me not feel overwhelmed on the trip, and I was able to enjoy doing all of the activities without stressing over not having time to get things done. During the exhibition week, I was able to keep a healthy balance of stress. I did not want zero stress because then I would not really care about the exhibition, but if I have too much stress I get really overwhelmed. I took time to not think about the exhibition at all, so I could focus on other things.
Improvement
For next year, I would like to set more goals for myself and stick to the goals I set. Sometimes I don’t really have a plan or an end goal for what I’m doing, and I would like to set goals for myself as a learner. I also want to make really specific goals. For example, if I want to improve on being more engaged in class, I could set a goal to raise my hand once in each class to share my ideas.
Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. l am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.
Learning plan
I would like to start off my by talking about my learning plan. I have chose three main points that I would still like to work harder on for the rest of this year. These are communication and collaboration, agency, and preparation. I would like to communicate better with my teachers and ask for help when I need it. I need to be more organized with my school work, and I have started to use a calendar to plan my days. This will help me to stay on top of my work and to stop leaving my home work until the past minute, or even handing it in late. I would also like to improve on asking more questions in class if I am unsure of my assignments. Of course I still need to improve on all of the categories on my learning plan.
Humanities
The two humanities projects that really stood out to me this year are It’s the End of the World as We Know It and Power Play or How It Started. Since Power Play or How It Started and Radical Innovation or How It Is Going both contributed to one end product, I will be talking about them both. These projects stood out to me the most in humanities so far because they were the most enjoyable for me. (Even though the song my group made in “Its the End of the World as We Know It” was embarrassing”
The driving question for It’s the End of the World as We Know it was “How can a text help me understand myself as my worldview is changing?”. We read the book The Outsiders and our end product was a song about how our worldview is changing. In this project we learned what Worldview is and how it impacts us. We also identified the worldview of the text or characters in The Outsiders. We did this by filling out investigations and sharing them with our group every week.
Here are some of my investigations I did while I read The Outsiders. What I struggled with a lot while reading was getting all of my investigations done on time. I often left my reading to the last day so rushed the investigations. I think if I were to do a project similar to this again I would really take more time to be more detailed in my investigations, which I could only do if I gave myself enough time to make do them. While reading The Outsiders I was able to understand how differently people thought back then, showing me how much worldviews can change. While reading I was subconsciously forming opinions about what the characters would do or say, I was even forming opinions about the book itself if I liked it or not.
Writing the lyrics with my group was enjoyable. We chose to make our lyrics a lot about going from elementary school to high school. While writing the lyrics with my group I thought about how much my worldview has changed as I’m growing up. Reading The Outsiders and completing the investigations helped me to write lyrics by helping me understand the worldview of the outsiders so I would be able to understand the worldview of myself.
Power play or how it started and radical innovations or how it’s going really stood out to me because they were both contributing to what I would be presenting at the winter exhibition. Similar the project before where we identified the worldview of The Outsiders, in these projects we identified the worldview of the Middle Ages, The Renaissance, and now. The driving question for Power Play and Radical Innovations was “What can we learn from the past, and why does it matter to us today?”.
In both of these projects we combined art from the Middle Ages (for power play) and from the renaissance (for radical innovations). I really enjoyed combining the art because it was fun to find art and then put my face on it and make a whole unique art piece out of multiple pieces.
I really liked learning about the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. We can learn so much from the past. While I was learning about these I really saw a lot of growth that happened over time. When we reflect on the growth that has happened it can help us to continue growing and it can help us to know that we can improve on the things we are not as good at now. I love doing art. Sometimes I stumble across my old drawing and sculptures, and at the time I was so proud of them and I thought they were so amazing. Now looking back at them I see how much I have grown, and it helps me to keep going because I know I will keep getting better at art. when we reflect on the Middle Ages or renaissance we might laugh at how strange it was but when we reflect on how much we have grown since then it makes us realize how much further we can grow to. But plants only grow when they have the proper nourishment and I will only get better at art when I practice.
Maker
Maker has helped me realize a lot of my strengths. When I did the Who am I as a PLP Learner project, I enjoyed using Keynote and designing my slideshow. Here is a short clip of my reflection on my Keynote presentation.
I really liked maker because I got to do a lot of things involving design and drawing. Maker was mainly just helping me get used to some of the apps used a lot in PLP and it was kind of getting me used to using my iPad. The projects we did in maker this year were independent so it aloud me to make any choices I wanted.
Science
Science has been really fun so far. I especially liked making observations when we did experiments.
When making my game I struggled a lot with finishing my game. This brings me back to what I want to work on from my learning plan.
I think I could have put more effort into my Mind Over Matter project because I don’t feel like I did my best. I hope to improve and do my best on all of my projects going forward because I want to be proud of the work that I accomplish.
In science I also just really enjoyed looking at pond water under a microscope. It was so cool to see all of the tiny organisms living in the water.
Conclusion
I think I have grown a lot this year. I’d say the two largest areas I’ve grown is with being engaged in lessons and conduct ethics and integrity. I’ve noticed I get a lot less distracted during class over the months, and I use focus modes to silence notifications during school. I also think I’ve improved a lot more from the start of the year with me sharing my ideas in class. I still need to work on it a bit more but I have noticed improvement. Going forward I will continue to improve and I hope I will fulfil some of my goals by the end of the year!
There are consequences for all of our actions. They can be good or bad. The consequences of The Age of Exploration have impacted how we live today, and that is a good, and bad thing.In this project we learned about the age ofexploration, along with learning how to identify the causes and consequences of it. The end product of this project was an AR (augmented reality) story/video. You can watch my video below 👇
Starting the Project
When we started this project, we learned about what motivated the Europeans to explore the Americas. The three main motives or the Three G’s are gold, glory, and god. Gold- riches and wealth | glory- power given to them by the king | god- they wanted to spread Christianity to everyone. Below I put an picture of some motivations for exploration, and the motives for famous explorers.
How It Impacted people
The motives for the Europeans mostly impacted only them in a good way, and caused other people to get hurt. We learned that around 90-95% of indigenous peoples in the Americas died from the diseases brought from Europe. Millions of people were taken from Africa as slaves and brought to the Americas. Those are just two of the horrible things that came out of it.
Some of the good things that came out of the age of exploration are different foods in the Americas, different animals, and plants.
Making My Story
After I learned a lot about the age of exploration I wrote a historically accurate story about it. It didn’t have to be a real story that happened, but I could make up a character and made a story. To make my AR video I drew pictures of scenes from my story, and I went outside and placed my pictures and filmed my video. I had to do a little bit of editing and added my voice over/narration.
Conclusion
While doing this project I learned so much about cause and consequence and I learned a few fun facts about the age of exploration.
Our first humanities project of 2024 was called Working With Words. We wrote poems about our worldviews, and the end product was an ebook (just a book but in electronic website form).
What I learned
This project really made me think a lot about myself. It made me think a lot about what I value, and things that are really important to me. Making poems is not my favourite, but making the poems I did during this project were not too bad, because I had lots of examples to learn from.
My Poems
my poems have a theme of “value what you have now because things can change in an instant”. This can mean to be grateful for friends, family, and even simple things like trees or your favourite meal. If you would like to see my finished ebook, you can check it out below. In the ebook, I have recordings about all of my poems as well as a small written response about what my poems are about.
Sharing our learning with the world is a huge part of being in PLP. Just before winter break, us grade 8’s had our first PLP exhibition! Exhibitions are a way of sharing our community what we have learned. Its a lot different then what you would think, so in this blog post I’m going to be sharing what happened during the Winter Exhibition 2023, along with telling you about the project Radical innovations.
All of the work we have done so far in humanities has been leading up to the winter exhibition, and finishing our last project of 2023!
For this project, we used the the skills we learned in Power Play or How it Started to create a renaissance art and modern art to then add them together to make a triptych (artwork with 3 different panels) and then display the triptych in a tableau (basically acting out our art but completely still). It was a lot of work.
Research
We first needed to learn about the renaissance. This time we didn’t read a book, but we read a lot of articles about different people in the renaissance, new inventions that were made, and some problems that occurred. My favourite things that I read about was the inventions. Here is some work I did on a whiteboard with I did with 2 other people about the printing press, which was invented during the renaissance.
Once I had a better understanding of what the renaissance was all about, I started to gather images to create the final product. I chose a lot of artworks that represented inventions and rebirth, because the renaissance was the golden age of inventions!
Creating the renaissance art
when I was creating my renaissance art, it was a lot easier than the medieval one because I had a lot more knowledge about how to use SuperimposeX. While adding the artworks together I didn’t know that I would be put into a group, and combining all of our ideas from our artworks to create one big idea, and a final tryptic we would be presenting.
Getting ready for the exhibition
Getting ready for the exhibition was very stressful. We had to make a ton of props that we quickly switched out between scenes, in a short period of time. During the process of making props, I got paint on my favourite pair of pants, but it was worth it for the end result!
Photos of the end product
Even though this project was a lot to do, I still had a lot of fun. The night of the exhibition was exhausting because we had to present our tableau over and over again for hours. Here are a few pictures of how it went! ( you might have to turn your screen sideways to see some of them)
Only a few hundred years ago was the Middle Ages. That is what this project was about. The Middle Ages or a cooler name, the Medieval Times. (I also learned a lot more than just about the medieval times)
About this project
The name is this project is Power Play or How it Started. The driving question is, How can a Text Help me Understand Myself as my Worldview is Changing. Wait wrong one. But if you would like to check out my blog post about that project, you can click here. The real driving question is What Can we Learn From the Past and How Does it Apply to Us Today?
For this project, we made a piece of medieval art that represents the worldview of the Middle Ages, and our worldview. To make this art, I took medieval paintings and used an app called SuperimposeX to put them all together and I added my face to the person in one of the paintings.
Reading
when we started this project, we read a book called The Book of the Lion. To be completely honest, it was not great. That were times that were confusing, concerning, and made me fall asleep. I literally fell asleep reading it multiple times. This book was about a person named Edmond going to fight in the crusade. Even though it was not a very good book I think it still learned a lot about the Middle Ages, and what it would have been like to live in that time period. Each week I read a third of the book. At the end of each section, i filled out a role sheet explaining the section of the book. Here are all of my role sheets.
Learning more
During this project, we also learned about different governments. the feudal system, and the Haudenosaunee confederacy. I made a drawing to represent the great law of peace.
We learned about the two religions Christianity and Islam to gain more knowledge about the crusades. Here is pictures of what my group and I learned about the religions.
Creating the art
Once we learned a lot about the medieval time period, we were reading to start creating our end product, the art. I used Google Art and Culture to find medieval paintings, and one sculpture that I was going to use for my art. Once u gathers all of my images, I worked on what we called an Art Chart. Here is what it looks like.
After having a full understanding of what the images I chose meant to to the artist and myself, it was time to start adding all of the images together to create the final product. Like I said earlier, I used SuperimposeX. Here is the end product!
Have a great rest of your day (or night).Cya later!
The last day of elementary school. It felt so weird and unbelievable. How had time gone by so fast? The weeks of summer flew by like seconds. Before I knew it it was the first day of high school, or in other words The End of the World as I Knew It.
All throughout elementary school my teachers kept telling me about how high school would be. Now that I am actually here, I think they were lying to me. We had so many unrealistic expectations of how high school actually is. This seriously scared me. I really thought that it was going to be the end of the world. Luckily, our first humanities project help get that false idea out of my head, and also teach me a lot about how I think about the world.
The driving question for this first humanities project is How Can a Text Help me Understand Myself as my worldview is Changing. The end result of the project was a song, which you can watch here:
Reading The Outsiders!
We started by reading the book The Outsiders. Reading this book helped me to understand the character’s worldviews. While I read the book, I took notes on connections I made with the book, questions I had about it, and anything that I thought was interesting. We read the book in 4 parts, 1 part a week, and after reading each part I filled out a role sheet for the section. Our role sheets were directed, coder, passage, and symbol theme. In my small group of 3 (including myself), we would talk about our assigned role sheet for that week, and we would shear some of the notes we took while reading. SPOILER ALERT!!!! If you would like to see the role sheets I filled out, you can see the images below BUT they do contain spoilers so if you have not read The Outsiders, you have beenwarned.
Reading this book was one of if not the most important part of this project because if we had not read it we would not have been able to answer the driving question at all. I know only learned about how to see other peoples worldviews, but it also made me think a lot about myself. I will be talking more about that later in this post
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Making Song Lyrics?
When I found out that for this project I was going to have to make a song, I was not very exited for it. I had so many questions! “How do I make lyrics?” “How do I connect the lyrics to my worldview?” “Do we have to share it publicly??????” Luckily, all of these questions were answered with the help of small assignments we did to work our way up the ladder to eventually reach the end goal of making a song. Before I could even start on the lyrics, I needed to brainstorm. The song needed to be about growing up and becoming a teenager, but it also had to connect to my worldview (and the worldviews of my group members). The process of brainstorming was hard, because I first had to know what worldview actually is! Just reading The Outsiders alone was not going to make me understand what worldview is, so I read articles about worldview and the different components of worldview. Then I made a MindNode about my worldview. Doing this was really difficult for me because I had never thought about or even known about worldview before.
I learned a lot about myself while writing this. I learned about my values, and how I perceive the world around me. Looking back at it though, I think I could have improved a few things and made it more clear, and more personal.
Realizing What is Fake
With all of the assignments so far, we had not talked very much about growing up and becoming a teenager, so we had to mar an expectation vs. reality meme. I will not be showing it because some people in this photo may not want it to be online, but on the expectation side it showed somebody really tired and miserable doing work, but on the reality side it was the same person with 2 thumbs up. I chose this because before I was in high school, I thought that I was going to explode with how much how much work there was going be. Here is an amazing drawing of what the meme basically looks like.
Making this meme really made me think about all of the lies I have been told and shown over the years about high school. In my song lyrics it talks more about it.
MAKING THE SONG
It was now time to make my lyrics! If there were a form of punctuation that meant to opposite of “!” I would have just used it. I was not exited for this part because I didn’t know where to start! I had never made a song before and I struggled a lot with making the words line up with the words from the original R.E.M song this was based off of.
To be honest, I didn’t complete these lyrics. I think next time I need to ask my teacher for help if I am stuck.
Later on in the project I found out that the song would not be individual, rather we would be combining our individual lyrics with the lyrics of our discussion groups from when we were reading the outsiders.
When we were combining the lyrics, Madeline (one of my group members) had to do a lot ofwork to edit the lyrics and make them sound good.
After we had the lyrics it was time to record. We imported a sound file into garage band so our song would have music in the background, and then we started to record to audio. While recording we kept running into the issue that the background sound was too loud and it overpowered our singing. When we would record, we had to turn to volume up on the music so we could hear when to start singing the different parts, but it picked up on the music and it was overlapping. I’m not sure if any of that made any sense. We decided to re record the whole song the day before it was due, because the original was not good enough to hand in. In the end we were able to fix the problem my turning the volume of my iPad down when we recorded, and we met the deadline.
Making The Video
The final part of this project was then stated. We had to make a photo montage that related to the song using the app IMovie. My group made a shared photo album to put all of our photos. We needed about 80-100 images to fill the whole 4 minute song, so it was difficult to find that much pictures to add. We decided to make a repeating part for the chorus so it would look more organized and clean. After some finishing touches, we came up with a song and a video that representing all of our worldviews, and talked about growing up.
Conclusion
I am really happy with the outcome of this project. Even though there were tough times, at the end I think it was all worth it. I obviously learned a lot about worldviews, but I also learned about teamwork and communicating with your team, and also to keep trying to improve when you think you can do better (which is always). If you would like to check out my group members blog posts about this project, and their perspectives on it, here is Madeline’s Blog and Marcus’s Blog. To get a more detailed explanation of what I learned you can read this very long paragraph about answering the driving question.
Worldview is both our individual opinions, and the outcome of what you have been exposed to, for example, when we read, we are getting exposed to the authors worldview. A text can help me understand myself as my worldview is changing because they give insight of characters/people to the readers (me),they can shape the readers worldview, and they can make the reader question things about themselves. When you read a book, or an article about a person, fiction or nonfiction, you are getting to know a lot about that person. When you spend a lot of time with someone, you can start to act like that person, or take on similar qualities. When we are young, we may not know that this is happening so we don’t think about it, but when we are older we start to understand and think about the qualities of the people around us and if those qualities are going to impact us in a good or bad way. Reading a book is not much different. We are spending hours getting to know the people in the book, and it can make us realize we have any connections to them. When we were reading The Outsiders, ponyboy and I are close in age so I can relate to the way he thinks about the world, and the fact that his worldview is rapidly changing. This brings me on to my second point; text can shape the readers worldview. If you have read my Project Competencies Assessment, you will remember the example I gave about a our western worldview vs the worldview of people who live in a completely different place than us. If you have not read it, I went on to give an illustration of how our worldviews have been taking shape since we were very young. Text has a huge impact on our worldviews. Like I said earlier, associating with people can make you act or think similarly to that person. When you read, you can take on the same opinions and beliefs as the author, therefore making your worldview similar to their’s. i think this is most commonly seen in news. Either news articles or watching news on a television. A lot of times journalists have their own bias opinion even if it doesn’t seem like they do. The same goes for authors of books. An example of authors saying our worldview is: imagine you are reading a very long book, about someone, fiction or non fiction. If the author in the book strongly believes that school is useless and unnecessary, the author may bring that out in their book. They might make the characters in the book drop out of school, and still are extremely successful, or not have any problems with their lives after they drop out, you might start to believe that school is useless too, because you are seeing evidence of it being useless. Even if the book we are reading is fiction, it still is shaping our opinions about the world. My last point is; text can make us question ourselves. Good books, movies, or even games make you think and question a lot of things. When I read a really interesting book, it makes me think so much about what I have just read, and how it impacted me. When we also take notes on a book while we read, it helps us to understand how we relate to the book. While I was reading The Outsiders, I took notes on it, and when I look back at some of the thoughts that went though my mind as I was reading, and watching the movie, it makes me understand my worldview. Even though the world was so different back when The Outsiders was written, we still can relate to the character’s ways of thinking. In my setting reflection, I went into more detail about how we can still relate to The Outsiders. An example of how The Outsiders made me think about myself was how much of a privilege I have right now to be where I am right now, physically and mentally. It made me feel grateful that I have friends and family who love me. In The Outsiders, the characters still had very close friends and family, and their friends and family were their hole lives. They didn’t have much physical possessions, so they values their friends so much. I could relate to this because I love my family and friends and even when times are tough I have them. I think books/text are so powerful and can communicate so much to us without us even knowing it. Text give insight of characters/people to the readers (me), they can shape the readers worldview, and they can make the reader question things about themselves. That is how a text can help me understand myself as my worldview is changing.
I hope you have a great rest of your day (or night) cya later!
when to start singing the different parts, but it picked up on the music and it was overlapping. I’m not sure if any of that made any sense. We decided to re record the whole song the day before it was due, because the original was not good enough to hand in. In the end we were able to fix the problem my turning the volume of my iPad down when we recorded, and we met the deadline.