“Thank you for coming to my presentation on 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.”

This year has been a hard one, but one that has transformed me as a student and a person. I’ve faced many challenges, beaten many of them and been beaten by some. I’ve learned a lot of history, skills, and things about myself that I’ll try and capture in this final post of the year.

I started this year strong, feeling confident and organized for a couple months, putting everything I had into my projects and creating results I was proud of. That’s not say say I did everything perfectly, or even well, but I felt good about what I was doing. I created some projects that I was proud of like my podcast on diversity in the Canadian military.

A project I would like to highlight from this time of the year was Atomic Habits, where we read and analyzed a book on how to form good habits and break bad ones. I think this project highlighted both my biggest weaknesses and my largest strengths and I’ll try my best to outline that here:

Strengths:	Weaknesses:
Passion – I got to do something I enjoy (design and show of a skill of mine well developing my skills) which helps we focus better	Hyperfixation – I focussed too much on the thing I designed instead of stopping to think what choices benefited the project and my learning goals
Presentation & Reflection – I think this project showcased how I am able to pitch an idea and hold a conversation, and then meaningfully reflect on that experience	Time Management & Efficiency – I spent far more time than was necessary on my design and did it much slower than I could of with more forethought. I also didn’t do enough on other parts of the project.

And then moving on in the school year I slowly fell back in work ethic and the quality of my work, not assisted by thing like the band and PLP trips, taking us away from our other classes. This was a major setback, and sent me reeling, so combined with some of the burnout I was feeling things weren’t going great, but over the course of the rest of the year I managed to get things back on track. I know this could probably be fleshed out a bit but I’d like to have time to touch on some other projects.

A huge step forward for me this year was in my sophistication of both my work and life, especially nearing the end of the year I’ve noticed the quality of my work climbing back up and with the creation of a resume, gaining of some certifications and real-world experience, I’ve gained a better understanding of the world and how I can fit into it.

In my mPOL and VMV Statement, I noted some of main goals for this year which I’d like to talk about. So I’ll now talk a bit about where I’ve made progress or met challenges in those areas:

Engagement:

I’ve managed to work on my engagement throughout the year, I’ve had some points where it was getting good like our spring exhibition where I was fully engaged with all the work I was putting into that.

Self-Regulation:

This is one that it still being worked on but I noticed improvements and I am learning what works for me, although that would be hard to explain now.

Communication & Collaboration:

Both D.I. this year and our spring exhibition serve as examples of how I can communicate and collaborate well going forwards.

Thanks so much more reading and caring about my learning journey! Have a good Summer, as there will not be another post until after the break

We’ve had some hard tasks in PLP before, but I’m not sure that I say we’ve ever been given a harder directive in any project than in this one. Well after that buildup, you’re probably curious as to what in the world I’m talking about. The task in question was to capture Canadian identity in a moving vignette of sorts and dance. I don’t think I could tell you which one was harder.

This blog post is kind of about two different but related topics: Our project “Never the 51st state” which dived into the creation of modern Canada, highlighting events throughout the latter half of the 1900’s and gave a speech, and our PLP Spring Exhibition where we acted out scenes of important events in the creation of modern Canada, most from the previous project. So because of all that, I shall be breaking this blog up into two main sections.

Never the 51st State:

This part of our project had three main goals:

1. Teach us about the relatively recent events that have shaped modern Canada
2. Introduce us to a new note taking format 
3. Work on our public speaking skills

We started by learning our new note taking method, zettlekasten, which is the idea of having a super connected note system, using backlinks, tags, and ideas to create a web of ideas and connection in our thinking. At first thought I really liked the idea, as I felt it presented a very interesting solution for ease of deep thinking, but I found in practice (partly due to a lock of practice), it was very had to do in a way they that felt right, and I was unable to find a method that matched to original idea of the inventor who had all of his notes hand written in a filing cabinet. If you want to learn more about that or the idea interests you can click [here] to learn more about it. 

We then moved on to learning the actual history part. I’m never the biggest history fan, but the significance of the events we were learning about in my life really struck home and I was interested to learn about them, even if not particularly excited (Partly because we had to do a lot of notes in a very short time, and I didn’t get everything out of it that I wanted too). Experimenting with the zettlekasten was interesting but I still feel if I want to have any success using it, I need to revamp my entire system, which I may do for the next school year.

Then we got into the public speaking aspect. I’ve found in the past that it’s pressure that usually get’s to me when giving a presentation rather than nerves. While they are related, I find that I don’t necessarily feel nervous, I sometimes just can’t think straight or speak like I did when practicing. After some public speaking practice with peers, we wrote our script, and while I got off on the wrong foot, kind of spiralling off onto the wrong focus (older history instead of what shaped modern Canadian identity), I feel that after the 6-or-so revision I did from various sources of feedback, I had a solid script. I felt my speech went well, other than a lack of eye contact and few small stutters, although I felt the same pressure, and I think I just needed to practice more to bring the stress down to useful levels.

Versions of my script:

We were also meant to have a sort of exhibition where us and guests could come in and talk to others with different lived life experiences surrounding Canada, but in the end we didn’t have enough people to run the event. I really should have asked my parents if they new anyone who could come thinking back on it, but I just assumed that there wouldn’t be anyone.

I learnt a lot about Canada and the later stages of our formation, how place shapes change, and a lot about myself and how I can approach problems with better decision making and realized I still need to develop my extended thinking whether that be though zettlekasten or another method. Overall, I discovered how sharing stories and gaining an outside perspective on the things that are normal to you can be eye-opening as well as helping shape your decisions and be more empathic and understanding towards others.

The PLP Spring Exhibition (The Story of Canada):

For our spring exhibition this year we were tasked with acting out scenes from the events we had just recently learned about in a unique way; instead of acting out a scene from start to finish, we were supposed to act as if we were actually the people from the time, and help our visitors live the experience. My group chose the creation of the new Canadian flag in 1965 which we were all excited to get as it was an interesting topic with what would be an engaging story if we told it right (no pressure).

If you’re curious about the story here was our summary: “In 1964, Canada’s Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson formed a committee to discuss and design an official Canadian flag. This move was considered controversial at the time, with many people not open to losing the Union Jack from the flag. Out of three main choices, the committee selected the flag we all know today created by George Stanley. Another popular flag design was made by John Ross Matheson, but Lester Pearson feared losing his minority government so ultimately turned down John’s design and then formed the committee.“, or if you want something more official, [here] is the page on the event from the Canadian Encyclopedia.

We then moved on to prop creation. A lot of stuff we could just bring from home, some stuff was made at school, and stuff had to be designed for purpose. My main contribution were bringing many of the props, making some tasty maple-leaf shaped sugar cookies (Unfortunately no photo 🙁 ), and designing a pulley system that could be mounted onto the basketball hoop at our location to act as a flagpole. This took six iterations of the course of just two days and was hard to 3-d print, but was very satisfying when it worked. I’ve put the 3-d model of the pulley connector below if you’re interested.

https://collaborate.shapr3d.com/v/dR32uB8OtqyCFWyB_ON9H

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A drawing of our final plan. 

Then the day rolled around and I as Lester B. Pearson invited guests to draw their own submissions for the new Canadian flag, handed out cookies, and raised the flag on the flagpole. I also participated in the group flash mob that we were made to do, and look I’m all for dancing, but doing it in a makeshift suit made of my band clothes and a white shirt while having a crowd of people watch me do it just isn’t my cup of tea. Overall I think it went really well and I was proud of my group. We could have known the significance behind more aspects of the flag, but that was my only personal critique. 

Conclusion (you made it!):

I know that was a very lengthy post, but thanks for reading, whether you read the entire thing or just skimmed through. I think it probably one of my best put-together blog posts to date, and I’m happy with how it and the projects turned out! (and that I will probably never have to do another flash mob!)

Would you ever think that you’d be going to Disney World for a school project? Me neither, but as you’ll soon see I was dead wrong.

The name of this project was “Change makers”, and our focus was to figure out how so called “change makers” imagine possibilities others don’t see and craft stories that shape the world. This was a split project between our Maker (A.D.S.T.), and PGP (Careers) classes as we focus on both how the park was ideated and created and how our project could relate to our future career.

We started this project by doing a lot of research on Walt Disney himself, his legacy, and how he managed to inspire people all over the world. We then looked at what made him successful like his passion, storytelling skill, and values. I’ve linked my notes here if you want to take a look.

We knew from the get-go that the big idea driving our project was: “Creative and collaborative careers turn ideas into reality and shape how we connect, experience, and imagine the world.”, and so we broke up into four smaller groups based on our interests to research smaller parts of our main idea. I ended up in the ‘Making the Magic’ group, where our focus was technology and how it can drive there creation of immersive and engaging experiences. I was really really excited to be in the technology group as it was where I had asked to be and it is what I’m interested in specializing in later in life.

Now this project had a bit of a twist that I talked about in my last blog post, but if you don’t read all of my posts and have perfect memory, shame upon you. I’ll let you in on what that twist is. This was another project that used project based learning which means things done in a slightly different format which led to more pressure being placed on our individual focus and our final product

After we finished researching Walt Disney, we moved on to doing more research on our group’s specific topic and starting to chose a personal focus for this project. My first thought was to focus on ride mechanics, as the inner workings of things always interest me, but after some thought I realized that it would be very hard to get any facts, videos, or interesting interviews about the topic as they try and stop guests from seeing those things, but that brought me another idea, What do they try and hide from you, and what’s the reason they do? This idea evolved into my final focus which was about how Disney (or anyone) keeps you safe but still immersed in an experience.

This seems like both a complex and simple idea in different ways. It was in fact easy to learn about some of the ways they protect guests, but once we were at Walt Disney world to do more research and capture footage for our video ( which was awesome and really fun. Overall a good, albeit tiring time ), it was hard to find things that felt significant but not obvious. In the end I found a few good examples of my topic:

• Bumpers
• Rails & Tracks
• Themed Safety Videos
• In-Character Staff
• Visual Distractions

And that’s just to name few and not getting into some of the craziest automation on any rides anywhere! And so after capturing a lot of footage (it took around 4 hours to send all of the right clips to my iPad, I had to do a lot of editing, which was very difficult and has never been something I’ve enjoyed although I’m getting better. After all that work, and a lot of in-class revisions, I had a finished video to show:

Now I am happy with my end result, but I made a lot of big mistakes in this project that set me back, but I’ll first go over all the great stuff that I learned.

• I learned how people can turn dreams into reality though ideation and innovation in many areas.
• Gained some insight on how certain careers play a part in different sections of the creative process and how modern techniques and technologies can change how we engage with the world through engagement, distraction, pushing the limits of what is possible.
• Disney World has really good buffets

But as I said before I made many mistakes (sorry for such a long-winded post, I tried to shorten multiple times and failed).

1. First of all I did the wrong sort of research and planning in a way, setting myself up to learn as I went at Disney rather than just supporting my evidence which led to confusion and a less polished result
2. I did not create a good schedule or filming plan which led to a lack of useful on-location footage which made things hard to edit.
3. I left my interview until too late, and therefore forgot to check video quality until it was too late and I was stuck with what I had.
4. And lastly the editing and storytelling could have been much more cohesive if I had layed out the plan earlier and had edited it slightly differently, and I don’t think I consulted my Pre-vis video even once.

Overall, more initial planning needed to be done so that more thought could be put into the final compiling and presentation

So in conclusion, I had a lot of fun, learnt loads, made mistakes, and gained a understanding of how to imagine possibilities other don’t see. I also drank some blue milk (It tastes like pineapple)