Ah, Another project in the works. Through all the ups, downs, happy, sads we made it. Winter break, and Christmas are upon us. In this post I will be reflecting on my most recent project. 

WW2:In Their Own Words

The driving question for this project was; How Might We Use Stories To Understand The Causes and Consequences of WW2.

The competencies for this project were: 

Global Collaborator: How might I use technology to connect to the world.

Responding To Text: Have I constructed an original connection between myself, the text, and the world.

Using Evidence and Resources: Have I found diverse sources and evaluated them for their relevance, accuracy, and reliability 

Analyze Cause and Consequences: Who or what influenced events to occur and what were the consequences of those events.

I would firstly like to talk about how I have grown in this project compared to the last one (Greatest Canadian). The biggest improvement is my SCRIPT. In the Greatest Canadian, I had an almost non-existent script. Even when I made my script, it wasn’t word for word and was just a spine. I had rough outlines of what I was going to say. This led to the filming of my podcast very tedious and I constantly had to restart because I was saying different things every take.

In this project I made sure I changed that. I made my script in advance, and I made it exactly word for word. This way when recording it wouldn’t take nearly as much time and would be way easier. This also allowed for the recording process to be much more swift and productive. Consequently this allowed me to have more time to mix and edit my podcast episode.

Another Milestone I found greatly beneficial in this project was Milestone 3. Story Connections. Every week we read or listened to a story about WW2 and how the person recounting the story was affected by the war. With this task we completed a pages template analyzing the story. The plot, theme, three act structure, climax, and more. By completing these sheets, it gave me a sense of how I needed to organize/create me podcast. This linked in with the script because I planned out a three act structure for my podcast so it was easy to listen to and follow. This was one of the baseline expectations for the final podcast.

Something I found hard to keep up with during this project was revisions. I often knew that I could hand in a 80% complete version of an assignment of milestone and just use the extra 1 week of revision time. This is not a good trait because just because a teacher allows me to fix my work, doesn’t mean I can take advantage of that and take extra time to do it. Especially, because it ends up crossing over with other milestones and I end up having to revise a script for Friday, but have the final podcast due before then.

I showed myself being a global collaborator in Milestone 2. Research. I used my ipad to connect to the world by finding links and videos that related to my topic. I was able to use these to my advantage and connect them to Michele Altomare’s story and how it was impacted during the war.

I responded to text in this project in Milestone 1. Nationalism connections. I connected how Nationalism relates to myself, to the world by using an external source talking about Trump, and the text of Helmut (A German soldier during WW2). This allowed me to see how nationalism can be applied in real world scenarios and avoided in times of conflict.

I also used evidence and resources to extend my learning in this project. The main example of this is again in Milestone 2. Research. Instead of using the same old websites for researching Michele Altomare, Bella Ciao, and Italy in the 1940s, I used a variety of sources. I used experiences that Michele recalled, I used youtube videos, articles, and websites. This allowed me to have a 360 degree knowledge of my topic. 

And finally, I analyzed causes and consequences in this project in Milestone 3 as I mentioned earlier. While reading/listening to the stories, I was able to see what caused certain events to happen in the story and what the consequences were. The consequences were me learning.

In conclusion, This project was very fun and not only did I learn about WW2 but I also learned how to make a podcast. You can check out my completed podcast episode HERE! You can also listen to my previous one here!