Hello and welcome back! In the past few months the entire world has been struck by the 21st century’s biggest and most destructive pandemic, COVID-19. If you have yet to be greeted by the oh so lovely pandemic you’re either Patrick Star and living under a boulder or Jared Leto coming back from meditation. Anyway, PLP 9’s first maker project since our online DI tournament is all about being witnesses to history. History being the current global pandemic. Our task was to learn to and execute a video essay covering how a topic of our choice is being affected by social distancing. Anyway lets dive in!
It’s been a while since my class has done a video in maker so we needed a bit of a refresher. We started by combining our maker and humanities projects to make an iMovie trailer. The goal was to tell the story of what was going on in Canada before the first gold rushes. I was very, very excited to get back on the video making train and in the end my trailer was really great! After we were back in the video makers mindset, we started to build upon our knowledge of COVID-19. While you’d think that we’d be completely caught up with the pandemic, lots changed every day or so globally. In an effort to control our curiosity on the global and more widespread effects of the pandemic we focused on choosing a community within our community, Deep Cove, or just North Van in general.
https://youtu.be/ekLDiBVE0s4
I chose to focus in on school. My peers, friends, and family are all greatly impacted by what happens in the education community. Obviously myself and all of my friends are students, plus I’ve got two younger siblings and educators for parents. Every single day all I would hear was one person after another talking about school or work or what the next steps would be. I got tired of sitting around and just listening to my parents, neighbours, and other family talk about school right around when we were assigned our first research task. I took it upon myself to sit down and interview my dad. Before I pressed record we had a hefty conversation that made me as a student and as a witness to history, much more comfortable and aware of everything happening around me. I eventually narrowed it down to asking three questions, each one concerning a stakeholder in the education community. In my video my dad answered each of those questions with extremely informative responses that added to my understanding of how our community will move forward. The three big “stakeholders,” per say are, the students, the educators, and the citizen that comes out of the education system able to make a contribution to society.
Once I had my research, interview, and script I started collecting lots of b-roll. The most challenging thing about making a video essay during quarantine is getting screen content. There isn’t a lot to film and when there was, I treasured it. I took a chance with social media and other graphics that could aid me in explaining the effects of social distancing. I think I did a good job with that and overall I’m writing this feeling confident in my video essay. The final piece of this project that I am 100% sure helped me to the finish line was simply editing my video. While editing wast a milestone or anything it certainly always helps me recognize my mistakes and learn to improve my skills. Not to mention, I am a person who typically has a lot to say. Editing helps me confine my thoughts and express them in less words, something I’ve been working on a lot lately.
As PLP students we are very familiar with core competencies. We focus on specific ones for each project we partake in. Being a witness to history has opened up fresh avenues for any student, not just myself, to being an active digital citizen. In making this video and writing this post I am actively connecting to others that may be going through similar things somewhere else in the world. In my video I used examples of social media, newscasts, articles, and other media to present my understanding and tell my story. Media is one of the biggest forms of communications in present day and we use all kinds of technology to get there. I used my photo and video skills to capture shots and my ability to find images free for use to incorporate into my video in order to get my message to my audience.
https://youtu.be/b5A3I5AZnrk
In conclusion, my time being an active witness to history is not nearly over and while that may not be ideal considering the circumstances, it’s reality. To tell a story through a video essay is a fantastic way of documenting one aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 70 years when a classroom filled with grade 9 students is learning about this period in human history I can only hope that they find resources like mine. Stay safe, wash your hands, wear a mask, and stay a hockey stick apart.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk
– Ciara
