For the last few months in humanities, my class and I have been learning about the WWII. We had just previously finished our unit on WWI and I had a lot of fun learning about all the different aspects of the war, let’s just say I was pretty excited to learn about the next greatest war in history. We started off our journey at the very beginning of the war, we began to look at why the war had started and we focused on how the Nazi empire lead by Hitler grew in Germany.
But before we got very far into our studies spring break hit us and we got to take a break before we fully delved into the war. Over the break, we had to choose and research a book about WWII, which we would later turn into a book review. I chose Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. Reading the book was challenging for me, not because it was a hard book to understand or that it was very long, but because I went away on holiday to Hawaii. Between the early morning adventures, the skim boarding on the beach or the swimming I often found myself with little or no time to fully sit down with the book and read. I often went to bed too exhausted to even pick up the book, let alone read it.
When the class came back from spring break we started the book reviews that I mentioned earlier. After several drafts and revisions got to our final products, which we turned into a blog post. I had never written such an in-depth book review before, so it was quite interesting to learn how to write one as such.
While we were writing and learning about the book reviews we also had some class studies dedicated to learning about some of the important battles of the war. Some of which being the Evacuation of Dunkirk, and Operation Barbarossa which was the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, which started on June 22, 1941, and ended on December 5, 1941. We also started to learn about how to properly cite Websites, videos, books, ect.. This was probably one of the more boring parts of the unit because it was very tedious. Every single part of the citation had to be perfect or else it was “improper”.
These are some examples of the different citation practises we had to do:
Dunkirk – 26 May – 4 June 1940
One of the biggest projects of this unit was the Perspectives of War website, where we split up into groups and researched and learned the perspectives of a certain country involved in WWII. I was in a group with Hannah and Ethan, we chose Canada as our country. I chose Canada because as much as I love the country I live in, I really didn’t know a lot about its role in the war. We started by researching about Canada post-WWI, Canada during the war and about its military and some of the technological inventions. We found out that Canadian scientists developed the Plan Position Indicator (a type of radar display) that are still in use today. We used an app called Google Docs which allowed us to all write in the same document and we started to cram in notes and research about Canada. Soon those notes were turned into paragraphs and before we even knew it, we had pages of writing about our country.
Before we went into the long haul which was creating the website we got the amazing opportunity to interview a German war veteran whose name is Helmut Lemlke. Helmut fought on the eastern front against the USSR. Being able to interview him and to hear his stories was one of the most interesting things I have done this school year. He shared his perspective on the war and told us about some of the breathtaking experiences he had in the war. After the interview was done we each took a part of the interview to talk about to form a podcast.
I decided to make a podcast on Helmut’s response to what we can take away from WWII. His answer was so insightful and I really enjoyed making the podcast on his answer.
Our class and Helmut
Now that we had finished all of the assignments for the unit it was finally time to create the website. We used an app called Weebly to post and format our work. The whole class had a lot of trouble using Weebly on our Ipads (work would randomly just get deleted, and we had a lot of troubling formatting our pictures and videos), but once we switched over to the computers it worked a lot better and we got the website done in no time. Personally, I enjoy posting my work more on this blog rather than Weebly because I find it to be an easier interface to work on. Once the website was completed the class presented it to a guest, Kathleen Barter. Kathleen gave us specific feedback so that we could fix up and finally complete the websites.
In PLP we get to do a bunch of different things to engage us and further teach us about the different units. For instance, getting to interview a WWII veteran. I have learned so many interesting things about WWII and how I can use technology to share that knowledge with the world. Throughout this unit I have done many assignments that I am all very proud of, but my favourite part was definitely doing the Helmut Podcast. This assignment tested my editing and interpretation skills because I was reflecting on Helmuts stories. I am very proud of my final product because I was able to take the tools I had learned earlier in the year and apply them to my podcast.
Thanks for reading!
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