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
Strategies to improve on myself
Go to the library if I’m overwhelmed:
This may sound rather odd as most people finish things at home when they are overwhelmed or if they have to finish homework in general but I just feel like I get more done in a shorter period of time when I go to the library as there are absolutely no distractions and I feel like I have a lot of time. On the other hand at home there are hundreds of distractions and I feel like I barely have any time even if I have hours.
Get my parents to set up timers on games and youtube:
My biggest problem when I have work to do is distractions on my own I-pad which are games and youtube. Over time I’ve tried different strategies like setting up timers on games and youtube on my own (which didn’t work as it could be easily bypassed) and Pomodoro timers which didn’t work as whenever I got stuck on something I just played games as there was nothing stopping me. But finally I concluded that the only way to completely avoid distractions was telling my parents to set up timers as I cannot bypass them.
Using Pomodoro timer so I don’t get tired as fast:
When I do my work I commonly get tired after an hour and can’t really accomplish much after that so to avoid this tedious issue I could use a Pomodoro timer as it is a solution which has been used in the past by my teachers and it has worked pretty well on me. Finally a Pomodoro timer is basically a timer which after a certain amount of minutes rings indicating that you should stop working and take a break. The Pomodoro timer also tells you to take a break for a certain time and it rings when you should get back to work.
Studying on my own so I don’t get distracted:
A problem I face a lot while working is not being able to work as there is too much noise around me but through experience I learned that there was two ways to avoid this problem. One is to wear noise cancelling headphones but the thing is that they don’t really fit my ears too well and it distracts me even more than the noise itself. The other solution though I can actually use. This strategy simply consists on working on my own, it could be in the library, my room or any place where I am completely alone. Thanks to this I have been able to complete countless projects while barely getting distracted.
Listening to music:
This is kind of a small thing but it has helped me many times. This strategy consists on simply listening to music when I’m working on something at home. This helps me avoid boredom easily which is something which I struggle with on a daily basis. This only works with chill music as if it is with something fast or loud I get distracted and I can’t really get anything done.
Using Things to organize myself:
Organizing myself is an issue I’ve been struggling with the whole year as I’ve been handing things in late non stop. To fix this though I have figured out one simple solution, using Things. Things is an app which allows you to organize yourself by putting alarms and reminders on whichever dates you select. At first I believed this app to be incredibly boring but after handing things late all year I’ve realized that this is the only way to hand things in in time.
“What did you succeed in this year?”
Quality of work:
Quality of work is something I’ve been struggling with my whole life. My work was always been pretty good until I moved to Canada. At the start of grade 7 the quality went down considerably as I got distracted a little too much and was way too confident. So going into grade 8 I was extremely self conscious of the quality of my work so I tried as hard as I could which resulted on some of the best quality work I’ve done in my life. This continued on for most of the year but these past few months it’s slowly been declining as I started getting distracted a little too much but the quality was still pretty good and up to my standards.
Teamwork:
Teamwork has never been my strong suit as I’m used to either doing all the work or someone else doing that so when I heard that PLP was going to have a lot of group work I was kind of nervous as I was scared that the same thing would happened again. Unfortunately it did, during the few group projects we did I either did everything or nothing but this completely changed in Oregon. When we went to Oregon we had something called a quest which was basically having to find a bunch of clues which told us letters to complete a sentence. This was all with a team and it was being timed. During every single on of these quests every single member of my group did something and thanks to that we were able to get first place in most quests. After this I actually did pretty good in the next group project in science, collaborating pretty well with my classmates.
Speed typing:
I’ve never typed much as in my old school we mostly used pen and paper so when I got here I was incredibly slow so I had to finish most of my work at home because I didn’t really have time to finish it in class. I went into grade 8 being a pretty slow typer. Luckily we did a lot of typing during the year. Slowly but steadily I started improving on my speed just because of the sheer quantity of essays and blogposts we had to write. Eventually I became just as fast as the rest and was able to finally start finishing work at school.
Work that meets my standards
Example #1: Paragraph Outline
This project was pretty tough for me as I got distracted a little too much during class and barely got anything done so I had to do it at home. It basically consisted on a paragraph outline on how colonization affected different groups of people. The previous projects hadn’t been as good as the first ones I did so I tried my absolute best in this project. By this I mean that I did a lot of research and wrote down a good amount of text. This project meets my standards as you can see that I did a lot of research for it and you can also see that there is a lot of text in it which isn’t always the best but in this case it was. For next time though I should probably get more done in class.
Example #2: Travelogue
This project consisted on writing a story about our chosen explorer then adding images which relate to the story. This project didn’t have the best writing, it didn’t have the best images but it had something which in my opinion is far mor important. It was creative. It had a bunch of totally different images. Such as an actual picture, some drawings, some pixel art and a mix of an image and a drawing. The creativity isn’t the only factor that makes it a project that meets my standards, the writing is also pretty good and every sentence is historically accurate.
Example #3: Vaccine Source Analysis
This project was basically disproving a conspiracy theory about vaccines which in my case was disproving that they caused autism. This project had detailed writing, it had many more sources than I usually use in my work. Finally it also had a design which was appealing to the eye which is something that I struggle with pretty often.
Work that doesn’t meet my standards
Example #1: Vikings (Blue eyed brutes in horned helmets)
Vikings consisted on writing what our characters (we created our own vikings in the previous keystone) thought, did, felt and said. This is probably the worst project I’ve ever done as the writing is not detailed at all and there’s barely any writing in the say section. This happened because I was messing around a little too much in most of my classes and ended up having way more work than I could handle so I had to sacrifice quality in most of them to finish them. This being the worst example of those. For next time I should probably start focusing more in class so I don’t get overwhelmed.
Example #2: Gummy bear diffusion
During the Gummy bear diffusion project we had to come up with a hypothesis relating to the diffusion of gummy bears, I did “which ingredient will create the biggest gummy bear after being submerged for 24 hours”. This project was also a group project. This project wasn’t mediocre but it wasn’t good either as it had decent writing but the hypothesis wasn’t very creative as that’s what most groups did, the writing was very simplistic having once again not a lot of details and finally the design was pretty bad as it had one image in the entirety of the presentation. All this happened as a result of my group and I messing around all class and finishing it at the last moment possible which caused it to have this level of quality.
What I could improve on
Time management:
I’ve done pretty good this year specially if you compare it to last year, but there is always room for improvement and this year this is many things I’d like to improve. This year was way better than last year in many ways, the quality of my work was better, I worked in teams more efficiently but there was one thing that I didn’t really improve on but actually did worse in and that thing is time management. What basically happens is that I sometimes have a lot of homework and don’t really know how to tackle it then I just get overwhelmed and do something else to try to forget about it but it keeps piling on until it’s way too much. To avoid this I could start using things. Things is an app which helps you organize yourself by using reminders. At first I believed it to be a pretty annoying app but know I realize that this is kind of he only way to stop this issue.
Working in class:
I’ve never really struggled with working in class but for some reason this year I seem to be getting distracted much more than and I also feel like I can’t really concentrate too well in class because of the loud noises. This has resulted in piles and piles of homework which caused a slow decline of the quality of my work. To fix this I can do two different things, I could get noise cancelling headphones or instead of doing the work directly I could brainstorm so I don’t waste class time and finish the rest at home as getting ideas is the hardest part for me and the writing is much easier.
Conclusion:
Overall this has been a strong year for me, not only have I improved on the quality of my work but I’ve also improved team work and expressing creativity in my work which are two things I’ve been struggling with for a long time. There’s obviously been a few rough patches and things I could fix but I’m sure that next year I’ll be able to tackle them. Because of all this I’m 100% sure that I’ll be able to tackle on my next challenge, grade 9. Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. Goodbye