“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:

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

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)

When you think of an average high school project, you probably of think of a worksheet or an essay right? Normal things that you would expect to see. What about a livestream? Probably not what you expected, but It’s what we did. How you may ask? Well you’ll just have to read the rest of this blog, won’t you.

Welcome to a blog post about our latest humanities project, “Hey Boomer”, where we investigated what life was like in Canada following WWII and what happened during that time to form modern Canada. Fromm what we learned we were then to create as a class, a satirical radio play to be preformed and live streamed by us. It was a daunting task but I think as class we rose to the challenge.

We started by actually learning what our play was going to be about, which included Canada’s history from the around the 1950’s-1970’s, watching and analyzing the movie “Pleasantville”, and learning about satire and it’s uses. 

For our Canadian history notes, we were challenged to focus on aspects of our note taking such as organization, being concise, and having brevity. It took a little practice but I was happy with how my notes turned out, although it took so long to format everything after that I think I still need to work on being selective with what I write down. If you want to take a look at my notes I’ll put a link to them right here: My Notes

We then moved onto the film “Pleasantville” which was set in the 1950’s and explored the the aspects and stereotypes of the time period in an entertaining and satirical way. It acted as a great rough visual representation of what we were trying to do with our product and was also a good opportunity to practice our ability to critically analyze and summarize media. Here is what I wrote about how Pleasantville satirizes the 1950’s:

“Pleasantville satirizes the 1950’s through the story of two teens who find themselves inside of a black and white television show from the time. The movie highlights many aspects of life at the time and reveals the multitude of societal elements that were flawed during that era. The two main characters soon realize that although the world they have been thrust into appears perfect and everyone acts happy, many things are wrong behind the scenes, accurately representing 1950’s western life with its unrealistic “perfect” standards for everything. Many historical elements and themes are also shown through satire, such as a fear of change and progress represented by town members fighting back against change as people begin to find happiness and independence, which leads to them becoming coloured. Humans’ discrimination against “different” people is also critiqued when the city begins to shun and separate those who were coloured  from the uncoloured people despite them being happier and having found something they enjoy. The film also challenges stereotypical gender roles, exposing them as limiting and absurd. There are also some very literal and historical examples of totalitarianism near the end of the movie with new books and artwork being destroyed and burnt by the city in order to censor an outside reality. In conclusion, Pleasantville provides a critique on the constrictive, idealized ways of western 1950’s living.”

It took a lot of revision to get right, and the realization I used the same phrase six times, but after all that I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. We then moved on to doing a bit of research into satire and all of the different forms it can takes and when it is often used. After that we were able to move onto creating our script for the radio play. 

our class was broken up into different groups so we could all focus on our individual sections like the overarching story, the sound design & production, the script itself. I worked on the very last scene in the play (which ended up being a parody/copy of Pleasantville for some reason), and after a few revisions and script run-throughs I was actually very happy with, and I was also chosen to be the voice of the dad in our story which I enjoyed but unfortunately I only had two lines. If you want to hear our radio play in its entirety I’ve linked it here: Our Radio Play

From this whole experience I learned a lot about post WWII Canadian history I had no clue about which I found really interesting, and started truly thinking about how emerging ideas whether from a group or an individual can profoundly influence societies. I was pretty happy with my own performance in this project and I felt that I put in an adequate amount of effort for the result that I got. I was a useful; member of my script writing team and I tried to extend by asking for a role in the production side of things, but was understandably turned down as I would be missing for a week due to school band trip.

Going forward I still need to work on time management and timeliness, but I definitely felt like this project was a step in the right direction and I made progress both in my learning and myself.

On that note thank you for reading and I hope you tune in again soon to hear my justification of how going to Disney World was part of a school project.

Apparently it was time for a sprint project, and you may be wondering what that is so I’ll explain. F1 fans may know what a sprint race is, which is essentially just a shorter version of the normal thing and that’s pretty much what a sprint project is to; Just a shorter version of the normal thing. Our project this time was called “Healthy ever after” where we focused on how we could educate others on how to be healthier around a topic of our choice.

We started by learning a bit more about this project’s format, which was new to us although rather similar to our Project Based Learning (PBL), Challenge Based Learning (CBL) focusses of creating your own spin on the essential question as well as asking and answering your own questions. We learned soon after that would be useful for our upcoming field study “Change Makers” which uses the same CBL format. We also learned we would be making a short video to educate others on some aspect of personal health.

We then set our essential question around the theme of education others about health, and after a bit of workshopping I came up with “How can eating real food strengthen your personal physical health”, and then after asking some questions and subsequently following that up with some research I was ready to create a first draft of my video which I’ll show below:

I think I had the right idea, but it definitely needed some changes in production quality and I also got some miscellaneous feedback in a peer review session. Unfortunately that was right before I left on the senior music trip to Edmonton, which went well and was super fun, but broke my flow a bit, and after returning from our trip, my revision was put on the back burner for a while to catch up on other uncompleted projects, and when I did get around to it, I encountered a lot of technical difficulties and even after all that there is still some production flaws like audio desync but there is no more time to do another another take, as this project is already long overdue, but here is the finished video:

My two key takeaways from this project’s format were such:

1. Challenge based learning seems intriguing and I’m starting to understand it’s differences from PBL. I love the personal choice aspects but I’m slightly confused on how my class can still all focus on the core ideas of a project if we are so varied in focus.
2. I need to rethink how I catchup from setbacks like the Edmonton trip, which I will need to do again soon with our field school looming. I also need to figure out how to communicate with teachers better when something like this happens as I handled this rather poorly.

That’s all for today, thanks for reading!

Hey everyone! It’s been a little while since my last pose about destination Imagination where I went over what happened leading up and during the first Destination Imagination tournament of the year, and if you missed that go check it out here:

But after this there was still another tournament! I knew form the start of this that I would not be able to attend this tournament as I would be on a trip with the school band (which did go well and was really fun), but I still helped make some changes to our solution. I’d say may main creation was designing and fabricating a system to make our transporter machine easier to use for our other members of our group that will less familiar with its workings. Here is what it looked like:

https://collaborate.shapr3d.com/v/pOubR_miGVWu3I9bOGk_e

I know it looks a little weird but it connected to our existing machine though the spots for lego axles to connect, and acted as a weight and a way to easily load the other weights onto the machine.

It terms of a more general reflection about the entire project, I feel I definitely learned some things from this experience. I learned how much a having a dedicated group matters to me, as I felt much more under control this year with a great group compared to last year where I had some challenges and a slightly more difficult group for me to work with. An extra year of experience and time to mature was also a key factor in feeling more comfortable. This was a great chance to expand and develop my own skills as well as work on my teamwork and collaboration abilities. My team was instrumental to success of course, so thanks to them for being collaborative, and open-minded throughout everything. As always I learned what I can do better in the future, in this case that was to stop overthinking things before actually trying a solution and start working on planning work in advance and using a healthy work ethic.

Overall D.I. this year went really well and I was happy with my performance. Huge thanks to my team as well for managing to get second place even though they were were missing two team members.

Hello again, its me! I don’t know who else it would be, but at least you know now that I have not been replaced by a doppelgänger. Probably. Anyways…

Our latest Maker project was an exploration on podcast creation and storytelling. For our product, we made a short podcast episode about something/s that has happened to us, and in doing so learn about creating a podcast and how to tell a story. It went alright. I made a story about my experiences with a yearly event my school does and it was okay. My story wasn’t the most engaging or fun, but it had some decent plot elements and would probably be bearable if you had to listen to it. If you want to take a listen here it is on Spotify:

It was actually a decent amount of fun creating the podcast and I learned a lot of good techniques that I can use to improve my workflow in the future, using speech to text to write the script being a prime example. It was also useful to review and refine my storytelling skills.

I have some critiques about the project itself, but I’ll start with some more of the good stuff:

• Fun: This project allowed me to create some fun cover art and make some funky background music.

My cover art for this episode

• Creativity: It allowed for huge amounts of personalization and choice, which is always nice and it can definitely help me express myself sometimes.
• Storytelling: Definitely a good focus and a hugely important skill for life, both in school, out, and after.
• Revision: There was definitely an emphasis placed on revision and improving your own work

But I definitely found somethings in this project didn’t fit right with me:

• The criteria of this project was very shallow and just felt incomplete in some ways. The main problem was that the assessment section was not completed nor the learning evidence in the project guide
• It just felt rushed is what I’m trying to say, the final product is kind of odd after just doing a much more sophisticated podcast. It was all just too simple, and felt a little incomplete

I also have a little bit of (hopefully) constructive feedback:

This whole project felt like an introduction to the topic and that what I think it should be. I think having this project as an extended launch into podcasting would work well at the start of the year, before some of the later projects that could build off of what we learnt in this one and save some time doing so. Also there was a lot of emphasis placed on the podcast itself, which is okay, but its the storytelling that really matters I think, and a deeper dive into that at the start of the year would be good. 

Having the stories be from our life is a bit odd too; treating this like a launch activity would allow for potentially having the stories be personal choice, ranging from fiction, to interests, to whatever we can imagine instead of having to think of that one cool thing that happened to us once. (Although that is still a good prompt).

Thanks for reading, I know this was a bit of a change of pace from normal but it’ll be back to normal next time. Bye!

Hello, its me again! Aren’t you exited to read all about my latest school project? …You are? Awesome! Lets get right into it then!

I had always heard about kids learning about Shakespeare in school, but to be honest, I wasn’t sure if they still did that anymore, but low and behold, they do. In our case we knew we were going to be reading Romeo and Juliet and then creating a modern abridged parody and preforming it as a class. having just watched the other half of our classes performance, we were definitely a bit daunted by the prospect but we knew we could do it.

First, in order to understand the message of Romeo and Juliet which was one of the big parts of the unit, we did some practice interpreting theme and creating theme statements of stories by watching short stories like “KitBull”.

[Kitbull theme study]

We then had to read the play, I chose to read the simplified/modernized version in order to have a better understanding of the story if not the author or language of the time. I thought the story was alright, not my favourite but I’m also not exactly the target audience or even target century so I think that’s understandable. Along the way we had some small assignments and quizzes just to make sure we actually knew what we were reading. 

After doing a bit of a deep dive into the concept of parody itself, we broke up into groups to work on creating our modern parody which we determined (after a lot of discussion) would be replacing the two families (Montagues and Capulets) with America and Canada. We themed the story around the stereotypes of each country and tried to make it humorous as possible. In terms of teams, I was working on the audio and visual side of things. This meant that I helped with creating backdrops, finding audio effects, and a little but of practical effects but the practical effects didn’t work too well.

I also worked on compiling the full script together although I was not assigned to do this, but I felt I could do it well and it needed to be done, as we had each act in a entirely different format. To help fix that, I also whipped up a easy to use formatting guide that I was very proud of, and may have been one of my better products from this project:

I was assigned an acting role too, originally our teacher was planning for me to be the second half of Romeo (We had too so that there was less stress on each actor to memorize lines), but I told my teacher I wasn’t great at memorizing lines, and as proof of that, I then struggled to memorize the lines I was assigned, and so I used a script during the performance and still got some lines wrong, so that’s definitely something to work on.

One of the biggest challenges we faced as a group was trying to make our adaption relevant to a modern audience, but I learnt a lot of the importance of relevance for a viewer, and how that helps them connect with the story though finding common similarities between the story and their life or the modern world. It just adds an instant level of interest from anyone who sees your story.

So in terms of adapting Romeo and Juliet we found that relevance through shared experiences, good storytelling and performance, and good planning were all required to help modern viewers understand the theme of Romeo and Juliet. 

My favourite part of this project was probably either creating the full script and formatting guide, or doing some stage direction after I was done acting. I think there is some room for improvement in said acting, some of the initial ideas and execution of the audio and visual side of things, as well as just my performance skills in general.

Thanks so much for reading, and I hope to see you again soon!

Greetings fellow penguins! I believe this will be three posts this week. Can you tell we just finished some projects? Anyways, this was our latest Personal Growth Plan (PGP) project where we had a look at how other’s career journeys can shape our own.

From the start of the project we knew we were going to achieve this goal by shadowing a professional for a day and then interviewing them, although just getting an interview was fine as well, and then turning the audio we captured into an entire podcast episode! It did seem rather daunting at first, but I managed to make it work and I’m very proud of the end result.

We started by sending out emails to potential “mentors”, the people who we would be shadowing, so we did some work on how to send a good email before sending those out. My dad helped me connect with Ahren Britton, an engineer at AlgaFilm Technologies, and then I contacted him about what the day would be like. We then worked on some interview questions to ask after doing some research on the person/place in question. Here were my initial interview questions:

Interview Questions

We also did a bit more of a deep dive into the the career we were going to be exploring, and we showed our learning by making an easy-to-read overview on the topic in turn also expanding our knowledge on the subject as well as that of the reader. Here is what I created about engineering, with a focus on bioengineering:

Engineering Smart Brevity

Bioengineering Smart Brevity

Then it was time for the actual shadow day, It was really fun and I learnt a lot about engineering, and also AlgaFilm’s work.

Some of Algafilm’s Algae

More details are in my podcast episode, which was finished after some music creation and a whole lot of editing. The episode is still being published on Spotify, so for now, here is the audio file:

I hope you enjoyed that, there was a lot of work put into it, but let me know in the comments if you had any comments or there was something you think could be better, and I’ll take it into account for my next podcast project.

This experience definitely reinforced my interest in engineering but also got me thinking about I would want in a long term job, such as variety of work and level of personal control over the product of my work. Going forward I know I want and need to work on a personal system to manage my professional communications in order to stay organized and on top of my work.

Overall though I was very happy with my end products from this project and my learning and I was pleased at how real-world this projects was, which I definitely appreciate, especially after just being hired for my first job. Thanks for reading!

Hello and welcome to the Penguin Hideout!

Its come time time of year for mPOLs, our midyear presentation of learning. This year I was asked too reflect on progress made towards my “mission”, which was a kind of “where do you see yourself at graduation” type situation set at the start of the school year. Mine was “I am a student who can be engaged in my work, self-regulate, communicate, and collaborate. This helps me achieve my vision by reinforcing my good habits and helping me break worse ones. I also helps me enjoy my projects, which in turn makes me do much better work, as well as feeling proud of my own work and learning from it.”

Now that was all fine and dandy but now that we are actually a good part of the way through the school year, the teachers want to make sure we are actually making progress on our goals that we set for ourselves which I figure is fair. No point having a goal if you forget about and don’t work towards it. So now I’ve got to do just that.

So lets break this down. I said that I wanted to:

• Be Engaged in my Work
• Self-Regulate
• Communicate & Collaborate
• Learn from my work

Well that all sounds good, but how am I actually progressing these skills?

Engaged in Work:

I think my best example of this so far this year our WWII project where I created a sophisticated essay to go into our class zine. I really enjoyed this project, and I found the content interesting which definitely helped me focus and be engaged on my final product.

The War That Shaped Canada

Self-Regulation:

This is definitely a skill I’m still working on although I’m not to bad at it. I mainly get distracted when I’m overwhelmed with work and it feels like to much to handle or start. Better managing my time and working more efficiently will clear up some time so that these projects aren’t overwhelming. I need to do some more research and potentially creation of some methods that will me allow me to do this.

That being said I think I did this very well in our latest PGP project. I was able to focus on my work and just things done, and as a result, I had less work to do later and didn’t get bogged down with work, which would in turn make it harder for me to focus in the future.

(Blog Post Being Made)

Communicate & Collaborate:

I think a great example of where my collaboration and communication skills are at right now was our latest humanities project, where we read and analyzed Romeo & Juliet and then created a modern parody of the play. Throughout the project I maintained constant communication with the DRI and other main people working on the creation and presentation of the parody, and I was very happy with myself after I created a combined script for all the acts and a formatting guide, as the previous format had caused some chaos; I was just happy it all worked out in the end but I was proud of myself mor making something that ended up being very useful even though It was not part of my role.

Here is what I created

(Blog Post still being created)

Learn from work:

In terms of learning from my work and learning skills applicable in real life, I think the project that was designed to just done that has done so. Marketing me was one of our PGP projects were we essentially learned how to be professional and create a bit of a brand identity for ourselves. Not only do I find this really fun and have been using it for a lot of things, but I also now have a job interview scheduled, and i had sent the resume we made in class, so I think I definitely learned a lot of stuff from this project.

The name’s Streeter; James Streeter

Now moving forward, I’m thinking about how I can extend in my work and make some truly impressive things. I’ve feel already seen a large jump in the quality of my work this year, especially with my PGP podcast, which got praise from my interviewee that made me very happy. Continuing to refine my presentation and making real-world connections are what I believe will bring my projects to the next level

Building my collaboration skills with others though communication and practice will also be instrumental in my future success. It’s a skill I’m always trying to work on, but always find difficult as I prefer to work by myself, but Destination Imagination and our Romeo & Juliet project have definitely improved my ability to collaborate with others, and work towards a common goal.

Thanks for reading, come again sometime!