In this project we have done a series of things to answer the deriving question of How Do I Build And Strengthen The PLP Learning Team? This driving question is more or less asking what makes you unique in a learning environment and how can you apply that to the PLP team. This project was sort of our right of passage into the PLP team. It gave us an understanding of what future projects will look like. This project was also used to show us three things that we will need to know for the rest of our time in PLP. These three things are how to use our iPads to grow knowledge, how to become independent thinkers with PBL (project based learning), and why/how we are connecting our learning to real world experiences. To help us learn this we had 4 main things, the Big Life Journal, the User Manual, the Team Member Contract, and the keynote guided tour.
Big life journal is a journal that is asking us questions about who you are as a person. You need to know this because if you don’t know who you are and what your life goals are, then you have no chance of discovering who you are as a learner. Is you know what you love and want to do you can transfer that over to your learning. Later on in this project we had to pick our three favourite parts of the BLJ to improve and put into our keynote presentation (more about that later).
Our user manual was a way of telling other people about you, as a learner and a person. For the user manual we had to take our mentor text (the user manual that our teachers did) and make ours look as close to it as possible. The user manual had to include a lot of facts about ourselves like our age, some of our settings (different ways we act), warnings about us, and ways to maintain optimal performance, aka how to keep me happy.
Another thing that we did was the team member contract. The team member contract is a page that we made on our learning portfolios that is a promise to all our future team members. In it we talk about how we work as a team and what we will and wont do while in the team. Mine was mostly talking about how I organize people and take charge, a nicer way of saying that I am bossy, and the promise I made was that I would do my best to listen to everyone and not only use my ideas. Link to my contract
The final, and biggest thing that we did was the Keynote Guided Tour. Our task for this was to take everything that I just talked about, plus a few more things, and put it all into a presentation that we showed to all of the PLP 8 parents. Aside from the things I already talked about, I also included my physical representation and my I Am things. With my physical representation I had to pick one of three boxes that was filled with random things and I could only use that to make something that showed who I am as a learner. For this I made a little person holding a list and with a lightbulb. For my I Am WordPack I had to put down things that people should know about me, while with my I Am statement I put down something that people know about me just by looking at me. Once we had put together this whole presentation we showed it to that PLP 8 parents by setting up a themed area with our table groups. Me and my group (Cameron, Ronan, Kate, Julia, and Luca) had a sport themed area. The way that it represented our learning was that we work as a team, like a sport team. After presenting our tours we received feedback from our parents and then we were officially PLP learners.
With this project I have had a lot of different strengths and stretches. My strengths throughout this project have been being able to use my iPad in a way where I can really start to make things look really cool. I think this shows with my keynote tour because I was able to navigate many different apps in order to make it look the way it does and be original. Some of my stretches in this project have been the team challenges and even ushering my learning portfolio. With the team challenges, a bunch of random challenges we did with our table group to get us used to working as a team, my team would do good on a few, but I feel that with most of them we would end up with a mess on the floor. Most of the time when we didn’t do so well it was because we got cocky towards the end and messed something up. The reason that my learning portfolio (my blog) is a stretch is because I’ve really not gotten the hang of it yet and I sometimes find myself struggling with it.
To answer the driving question, how do I build and strengthen the PLP learning team, I’ve had to learn a lot about myself. Ive learned that the way that I strengthen the PLP learning team is by being the person that will organize elements of a project and enhance the team’s performance, making everything run smoothly. In the end, this has been a really fun introduction for the PLP and an amazing way to discover who I am.