I’ve learned many skills over the span of this semester including how to improve my skills at taking photos. I learned this in the project making interesting images and I did this by taking many different pictures and changing the lighting and taking pictures from many different angles. Another skill I’ve learned this semester is how to make animations in keynote. I learned this in the keynote slice project and to learn this skill I Made a keynote document with a Sillouette of my head and inside of it I added different images and emoji’s using different animations, one was blinking, another one was falling from the sky and one was even removing a top hat to reveal a bunny and then putting it back on. The last skill I’ve learned in PLP is drawing on my I-pad. This may sound like a small thing but I thing It’s important for me to talk about it because it is one of the skills I enjoy the most. When I first joined PLP I couldn’t really draw or even write on my I-pad without an image for reference but now I can make good creative drawings without even looking at an image of that.
Learning is a hard thing to do so I usually use a couple of strategies to help me the main of those being brainstorming which I usually use with essays. I just started doing this recently and I think its a great way to organize everything I want to say and it also helps when I can’t really concentrate or when Im exhausted because it doesn’t require much concentration and brain power. Another strategy I use is looking at other essays. This may sound like cheating but I don’t look at essays about the work Im doing, I actually just look at essays about anything. This really helps me check if my essay has everything an essay should do and it also gives me ideas of what I could add to improve my essay. The third and final strategy I use is just working alone. This helps me a lot studying and finishing up my work because the classroom can get really loud and its hard to concentrate meanwhile my room is quiet and there is no one there to distract me (which doesn’t happen a lot).
I may have done pretty well in PLP so far but there is always room for improvement and one of the things I think I need to improve on is finishing my work at school. What happens is that I cannot concentrate with all the noise or I just get distracted so I end up doing the work at home. This may be good in some cases but in general I don’t think its that good because I end up accumulating a lot of work from all the classes I had during the day and I work all day and stay up late trying to finish it. To stop this I think I could maybe block some apps in certain times so I can’t use them and I can concentrate.
It hasn’t been a long time since I joined PLP but I still have done a decent amount of progress most notively I’ve finally started to hand in my work in time. I know this isn’t such a big deal for most people but at the beggining 90% of the work I sent was late and it was extremely hard for me to finish it in time this was because of procrastination and maybe cause I was getting use to things i PLP but in my opinion it was mostly procrastination. After a while in PLP I started to get use to the projects and writing essays so I slowly started sending my work in time until one day it became hard for me to send work late. The occasional incident happened were I sent something late but it was incredibly rare. Another thing I have improved on is the length of my essays. While this may not mean that the work is perfect it let’s me do more thinking so in my opinion this is a good thing. This wasn’t something that happened over night so here is a picture of when I first started PLP and this is a picture of now. As you can see this has much more detail and I think that this is due to all the essays I’ve had to write in PLP (mostly reflexions). This happened because I started writing way more essays than I did outside of PLP and I think all this practice made me significantly improve how long they were, they also had much more detail which was what the PLP teachers told us to do to improve our essays.
At the time of the pandemic I had online classes so I wasn’t able to do presentations at all. Thanks to this I started to get nervous during presentations (something which had never happened before) so when I had my first big presentation in real life (7th grade) I was extremely nervous and Im not really proud of how it. I entered PLP knowing that I got really nervous during presentations but that was one of the reasons I joined, so I could lose some of that fear. When I first heard about the Winter exhibition I almost fainted because it was the biggest presentation I had ever done in my entire life and even worse I still had that fear. When the day came I just said what I had rehearsed and it ended up going really well and I think people genuinely enjoyed my project. So thanks to that I think that I have lost some of that fear which I think will help me a lot in the future, I still get nervous but I feel way better than I did before.