“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

As my Grade 10 school year comes to a close, I find myself reflecting on my progress, accomplishments, and experiences. Grade 10 was a great overall year for me. I feel like I have greatly improved my quality of work as well as my quality of attitude.

As I said in my M-Pol, one of my biggest weaknesses as a student is getting distracted in class. I often find myself getting caught up in my own thoughts or getting sidetracked by things happening around me, and this can make it hard for me to focus on the lesson at hand. After revising that in the second half I do believe that I’ve found a balance in that area. Obviously I like to spend time with my friends, but there’s has to be control. In the second half of the year, I understood that there was a time and place for socializing and a time in place for work. Granted, on occasion I might get distracted and off task, but my focus has improved 

Another area where I wanted to improve is in my motivation and focus when faced with difficult situations or subjects that I am not interested in. It can be easy to get discouraged when things get tough, and I have found myself struggling to stay motivated in these situations. Now while I do believe I have Improved here, Im still a bit inconsistent. I think this past week was a challenge for me especially in the motivation sector. With the end of school being so close and your mind is just constantly on the end it hard to stay focused because you’re almost there but not quite, so next year I can probably aim to do better there.

Unlike Last semester, all of my classes this semester (with the exception of gym) were PLP classes and that was a big shift for me. If we take a look back at my leaning plan that I made at the start of the year, we can see that I aimed for extending. Extending is a great mark. A mark that I was determined to achieve.  

 

I thought that an Extending was my full potential, what I was aiming for. 

Well it turns out in reaching my full potential I achieved a grade that at the start of the year, didn’t even know existed.

Its known as a “flex” and I had no idea that it was even a grade. An extending is a 90% but a flex is a 95%.

When I eventually heard about it I thought that there would be no way that I would be able to get that grade. It sounded impossible for me and it was way off my radar. So I continued to work on achieving my set goal in my learning plan. An extending.

After My Mpol. When I got my new PLP classes, all of my focus was locked on these classes which mean a lot of time and effort was put into these projects. And for me its the little things, the things that teachers would notice but I do. I think that the most powerful thing for completing quality work is consistency. Consistency. Consistency. Consistency. If I keep the quality of my work up, my quality, than my grades would follow. Here a couple examples. 

Before I had learned about the app craft, my organization was horrid. Absolutely horrid.

Here’s a photo of my pages app:

I know this one says today but thats me writing this.

Blank 162 as you can see right here. Its impressive, but not in a good awesome way.

Here are some screenshots of my craft documents and folders:

I know that for some people, organization comes second nature. That’s just how their brain works, and Im sure that maybe for some people, this is the standard, but for me this is a little victory, a small accomplishment that I’m pretty proud of not because of the grade it got when I handed it in, but the personal satisfaction that I extended when I wasn’t necessarily handing in anything was a good feeling.

Now this wouldn’t be a T-Pol if I didnt show evidence of my learning so without further ado, lets get into some projects.

 

DRIVEN BY DESIGN (THE PODCAST)

In Maker 10 this year, we had to create a podcast that would influence people for good. Part of the Digital Communications 11 criteria, is creating media to influence others for good. 

My podcast explored the innovative design of Porsche’s cars, the inventive minds behind the aesthetic, and the effect the design and its creators have had on car culture and so much more.

The podcast strives to inspire listeners to emphasize deeply about the impact of design and engineering in our world, and how they can contribute to positive change and progress through their own work, interests and passions. It also inspires listeners to find beauty and art through automotive design but most importantly, all aspects of life.

I had a lot of fun with this project, but also learned some great technical audio design skills that I’ll definitely find useful in projects to come. Im really proud of my work that I did this project. I found myself always thinking one step ahed, and putting a professional level of quality in all aspects of my podcast.

ARCHITECTURAL THEMING (DISNEY WORLD)

In April of 2023, our PLP 10 class spent 10 days in Florida, specifically Disney World. While it was super fun, it wasn’t just a vacation. A lot of work was put into this project, before and after the plane took off.

This project was originally a group project. Groups were made to study and research of one way Disney’s theme parks shape and influence the cultural, economic, psychological, and social experiences of visitors.

My group was tasked with researching the theming of disney theme parks. After we had a PKM (Personal Knowledge Manager) of information, we got to work on scripting and storyboarding on what our video would look like, so we could focus on filming in Florida.

I had a full itinerary of when I needed to shoot and where I needed to shoot, which took a lot of tentative time management, especially when your in Disney Land.

I brought a iPhone stabilization gimble to make sure my shots were the best they could be, and I filmed a lot, to make sure that editing would be a break with such a variety of clips.

After I had all my clips, I edited them all together and made some great videos. I was one of the only in my group have to make two videos, in two different locations, about two different things. I’m very proud of my documentation style of filming and narration voice overs.

 

 

MARKETING ME/MARKETING PODCAST/FINANCES

PGP was a first for me, but also a first for everyone else. CLE has never been a favourite of mine, it’s just set up to be not a very exiting class. PGP was different. It was actually a pretty fun class and out of all of my classes so far, its had the best real world application.

We learned how to create effective resumes that proved to be useful in applying for jobs that I would later use. Learning about marketing yourself is one of the most important things that you can do to compete in the job market. After making these resumes and business cards our shift focused to finances and financial management. We used a stock market simulator to indulge in the world of Wall Street. It was a lot of fun as well as being very informative. Investing is also another very important thing to learn about for the future. So I guess PGP is doing its job pretty well.

Finally for the spring Exhibition, we sort of combined maker with PGP and created business cards for podcasts. I found this to be pretty light work as I had already created the graphics for my podcast in Maker.

 

SAVE JUNO BEACH

This project was a bit odd in my opinion. It was a topic of interest to me, and while I did learn a lot, the execution of the final product was confusing. In this humanities project, I carried the organization practices that I had developed in the Disney project and used it to much effectiveness. This project used a lot writing and composition which proved to be a dare I say boring. Regardless, it was about the process and the learning where I picked up some knowledge on what rhetoric is.

The final product was a written argument about the significance of Juno Beach and why its conservation should be protected at all costs. I think I created a compelling argument using specific rhetoric and emotion. Because I finished early a lot of my time was then spent on revisions, a very important part of creating good work. The criteria of revisions was 2, but just wanted to make sure that my work was the best it could be so I made 5 separate revisions, each with a list of details and things that were changed. Even though the final product might have not been as exiting as I hoped it would be, its always nice to have some balance, because whether I like it or not, writing is very important in everything that I do in school.

 

THE WATER TREE (LIES AND INCONGRUNCIES)

This was our final PLP 10 project for the year and I wanted to end on a high note. Now lies and “incongruincies”  (which I would later find out isn’t actually a word) was a topic that I have been familiar with throughout highschool and elementary school.

This was another novel project where we had to read a book and keep a reading journal which I wasn’t too keen about If im being honest, but I did it anyway. Our final product however was a collage. When I first heard this I was like “How am I ever going to make a collage”.  Art is definitely not a strong suit of mine. I had no idea where to start but when we were researching civi issues, I stumbled apon indigenous water rights. I had heard about this in the news before but never really got into it very much. For my college, I decided to make my collage about indigenous water rights.  With my already apparent background knowledge, I did some further research into how indigenous community view water. They see water as life, the root of all creation. The root of creation… the tree of life… hmmmm.

I had the idea to cut out pieces of blue in magazines. Didn’t matter what shade the blue was, didn’t matter how big, didn’t matter what it was a picture of. I took these photos and plastered them all over my canvas, that I had wrapped in black construction paper. Onece i had created a little gradient from dark blue to light blue, I had to figure out how to but a tree up. I wanted to do an inverted tree so the canvas would stay black except for the tree which would show the cutout scraps. I had no idea how to do this part, because the drawing had to be huge, so I couldn’t print it out, and I am horrible at drawing and trees are especially my n my teacher had the great idea to put up a photo of the tree on the projector and size it to the canvas. Sure enough, it worked like an absolute charm. Now I needed to cut it out. After some stress ful and tenuous cutting. I plastered it on to the canvas and it looked good, but not great. I decided to use some blue paint splatter to maybe add the effect of rain drops on the canvas, because after all it was water. That went alright. It made it look more colourful and I liked it. Some people didn’t but that didn’t matter to me, it was art. When I was taking photos of it for this blog I made a super cool discovery that I totally did on purpose. When looking at it from a flat angle from the bottom. The two surfaces sort of look like a river bank and the tree was a river leading off into little streams which were the branches. It’s amazing how much metaphors could be created from such a simple art piece.

Some things I really want to work on next year is handing in assignments on time. I will admit it, im a pretty big procrastinator and tend to not be on top of my work all the time. Most of the time, I get pretty overwhelmed with work so in grade 11 I need to work on my personal productivity situation especially when things get difficult.

last year I recognized behavioural issues in the classroom that was effecting my   learning. This year I really tried to improve on this and thus far, I think I have. I believe I’ve been much more focused and less distracted and disruptive in class. Im not going to say I havent had issues with being distracted in the past semester, but I think that its gotten to a point where its no disrupting my work, but in these situations I need to be more considerate of others work.

This year was one of my best in terms of learning. I think I’ve mad huge strides as a person and academically. The work that I’ve done this year is some of my best ever, and which every new project I gain more and more valuable learning and lessons that I carry onto each project. This year I can confidently say that I am very proud of where I ended up. Thank you for sowing to my Tpol!