MPOL 2022: Midyear Presentation Of Learning!

MPOL- mid year presentation of learning

Hello everyone! This is my MPOL blog post, and I don’t suppose you know what that means, if you don’t do PLP. MPOL is an acronym for Midyear Presentation Of Learning. And since we are approaching the end of semester #1, we’re nearly at the halfway mark of the year. It’s crazy. All the projects have been wrapping up at the same time and so I’ve been busy with other blog posts and homework. This is going to be a pretty long blog post, because we have to explain our growth as a learner in this first half of the year. I will explain a bit about my learning in each PLP subject, but before that, we need to know the 2 driving questions for this MPOL.

  • How have I demonstrated growth as a learner so far this year?
  • How can I sharpen my Learning Plan to ensure I will reach my learning targets by the end of this school year?

Let’s begin! Shall we?

Declaration of learning:

“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.”

Humanities 8

Humanities is a mix of english & social studies. This semester we’ve completed 3 projects. The first one was “ the Medium is the Message”, the second one was “ The Outsiders” and our most recent project was “ Working with Words”. 

In the Medium is the message project, my learner growth started the moment we contacted an actual, real-life business, who we were going to create an add for. I thought that it was amazing we were making an add for a real life business, so I wanted our add to be beautiful and professional, so that maybe our business would use our add! 

This project taught me about making my own graphic designs/ powerful advertisements using the tools we had access to on our iPads. One of the most important lessons I learned in this project was from our zoom meeting guest speaker, Mr. Derek Hepburn. He taught us that 99.9 % of your ideas will get shut down by your creative director. Don’t take it personally, but instead learn to take the criticism. I did find that tip helpful because we made about a dozen adds, but after each one, we had to revise and take the constructive criticism to further improve our advertisements to meet the client’s needs.

  • This is my 1st individual add draft.

I revised my adds until I was proud of my work. Unfortunately, I don’t think our client will ever use the add because someone noticed a spelling mistake in “ Vancouver” in the address to the business, after we we had finished this project. That was a small FAIL (First Attempt In Learning), because I wanted our business to use our add and it wouldn’t look professional with a spelling mistake like that; we wrote “Vanvouer” instead of Vancouver. See?

Our most recent project was “ Working with Words”, which was about expressing ourselves through poetry! Back in grade 7, I won a Poetry in Voice certificate for beeing the school’s poetry recitation champion and therefore moving on to the bilingual stream of the 2021 Junior Online Finals. I didn’t win the finals, but it was still a great experience! I searched for deeper meanings in the poem I recited and learned how to put emotion, tone and passion when reciting the poem. I think poetry is an awesome tool to express yourself, your thoughts and to create change.

I thought that this project was an amazing experience to learn about yourself by writing poems about your worldview. For example, one thing I learnt while writing my found poem, was that I miss eating lunch outside with my good elementary school friends. I also explored what I could do in book creator to make my ebook look exemplary, one that I was proud to share with my family and the world.

An opportunity for further growth in Humanities is to not only state my opinion on the specific topic or task but questioning the “why” I think this, and what specific experiences have lead me to think this way ( worldview!). My future goals in Humanities are to keep creating exemplary work that I’m proud to share and that show personal interest in the topic.

Maker

Maker is a PLP non optional course that replaces an elective. My favourite parts of Maker this year were making my Memoji laptop sticker in “ becoming a  PLP learner”, and the constructing creative communication project  (Carr/ Herzog ).

Maker has helped me discover and learn new things on my IPad. I have the option of using all the apps and tools at my fingertips, some that I was pretty familiar with, and others that were brand new to me. I thought I knew a lot about keynote, but then we made Memoji laptop stickers on Keynote, and I learnt that it could be used for way more than just presentations.

The second project we did was the “constructing creative communication project”, in which I learned more about the powerful tool of the IPad. There were two parts to this project: drawing with the Apple Pencil and photography. I love art and this project was very enjoyable. When doing photography, I learned how to edit my photos after taking them. It was also really fun to do a class gallery walk and see everyone else’s creations too, and sometimes would spark new ideas and perspectives.

An opportunity for future growth in Maker is Destination Imagination. My team is working on our solution to the Festival Frenzy improv challenge. We have been staying organized and on top of our tasks and “ to- dos”. It seems like they’re are a lot of things that the improv groups don’t need to do compared to the other challenges, because we don’t really need to build any props or do team- choice elements. I like building and creating things hands on, so I would’ve liked if the you had to make a backdrop or some props. I feel like sometimes our group is not beeing as productive as we should be, because as the improv team, there are several tasks that don’t have to be completed. So, even if we don’t have Maker next semester, I make it my goal to make sure our group is beeing productive. If other teams are doing something that doesn’t apply to the improv teams, we can go practice some improv scenarios or do more detailed research on festivals, so that we know them and can incorporate them into our skit.

Scimatics

In scimatics we’ve done 3 projects this year. The first project was called  “Fractions of your Time”. I don’t have a blog post for this project because we hadn’t set up our blogs yet. In this project, we reviewed some adding and subtracting of fractions, as well as converting decimals and percents. We recorded our screen time in a numbers spreadsheet for a whole a week, and then made  pie charts with the gathered information. I thought that creating pie charts on Numbers was almost too easy because to make a chart we just needed to highlight the parts of our weekly screen time spreadsheet that we wanted it to include, and then write a legend and a title to our pie charts. In making an accurate pie chart on paper in seventh grade, I remember took a lot of steps and erasing, so doing pie charts digitally was much easier. Although I made 5 pie charts in total, including my daily average of screen time, the amount of time of my week spent on a screen and my total screen time, I wasn’t that proud of my final work. I think this is because there wasn’t that much work you needed to do because Numbers did all the hard calculations for you. If I were to repeat this project, I would try making a different way of representing my work instead of doing 5 pie charts.

Here is my numbers screen time spread-sheet as well as my 5 pie charts:

Our second scimatics project was “ Tectonic Chances”. In this project I learnt way more new things than the first project, because the subject of tectonic plates was brand new to me! I can’t believe how mountains, volcanoes and deep sea trenches are made! Then, with all our new gained knowledge and scientific terms, we invented a tectonic plate board game and game rules for it. While working in groups, I learnt that it can be hard to agree on things and to keep the whole group on task all the time. I think we could’ve incorporated more tectonic plate knowledge and terms into our game, but it was still fun to play!

Our most recent project has been “ Laser Laws” and this project has by far been the coolest yet! I loved practicing and solving problems with the Pythagorean theorem. When working with my team on building my Laser Triangle display, I noticed that there were some people that often needed reminders of what they could be doing to help with the project. A growth opportunity for me in Scimatics, is to work on my constructive teamwork and leadership skills when working in groups. So that I’m not frustrated, when people aren’t helping, but instead doing my best effort to constructively divide tasks and roles equally amongst ourselves. Check out our bright laser triangle in the dark:

How can I sharpen my Learning Plan to ensure I will reach my learning targets by the end of this school year?

My habits and systems:

This is a screen shot of my disposition, habits and systems from my learning plan. I  have been organizing myself using “ Things” to keep track of homework and important due dates. Using “Things” has helped me a lot, it sort of replaces having an agenda like in elementary school. I do find that sometimes, I pile up lots of homework on the same day of the week, because I have sports on the other days, and then don’t end up getting  it all done. Then I have to get up early in the morning to work on it, which takes away some sleep time. I think I will need to edit my habits and systems a little bit to make sure I’m not staying up too late by doing homework. To do this, I’ll make it my new goal to spread out my homework so that it’s not an overwhelming load on one day.

My chosen core competency profiles: 

I think that I’ve developed most of these competencies throughout this first half of the year. There are two competencies that I have by far made the most growth in, and those two are collaborating and creative thinking. I believe this because in almost all the projects we’ve done so far, we’ve been put into groups, and have to collaborate and share ideas to make progress. I believe this applies to almost all of our projects, but I’m specifically thinking about my Destination Imagination group, because there are a lot of decisions that we, students have to make and decide.

Also, I have developed my creative thinking a lot this year. When doing our photography / drawing unit, you had a pretty vague instruction, so you had the opportunity to be as creative  as you wanted with your photo taking and editing. I think that I have built my skills and created many new ideas by doing our poetry unit too. To make my poems meaningful and personal, I had to create new ideas and explore ways that I could put them in poetry.

One thing that I want to edit in my learning plan is to strive for extending in Humanities. In all subjects, I want to keep creating high-quality work and to keep on growing in my Communicating competency. I want to be able to communicate purposefully and think about the target audiences of my work that I publish to the world. I think that one of my 2022 new year’s resolutions should be to read at least 1 (or even 2) books a month. Reading makes you smarter and improves your range of vocabulary, and this can help with my growth in my Communicating competency.

The biggest step that I’ve taken since September has been to share my work publicly online, at live exhibitions and coffee house performances! The thought of my work and project reflections beeing published on my blog make me want them to be as professional as I can make them!

Well readers, that’s all for my 2022 MPOL! Thanks for reading this post. 😁😁😁

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