“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.”
This is the pledge that we are required to state at the beginning of our presentation. It serves as an introduction to what we will be presenting during our MPOL. These conferences are specifically designed to allow us to reflect on our learning, while also providing our parents and teachers with an update on our progress. Over the past year, I’ve grown a lot as a PLP learner, but also as a person. This is a program that lets us take responsibility of our own learning, really allows us to thrive. I’ve learned a lot about myself and others, as well as gained a bunch of new skills that I can apply not just to school, but to the rest of my life. In this presentation, I will show what exactly I’ve been learning in PLP, and that I’m ready foor whatever gets thrown at me next. Lets get into it!
Throughout the course of the year, we’ve done numerous projects that have all been designed to give us new skills and opportunities to collaborate with others. A great example of this is a project called metaphor machines. This project, like many others, was a huge challenge of our group’s resources and mental capacity, and really made us use our critical thinking skills to come up with new ideas and strategies to get our machine to work.
This project revolved around giving a new form to the idea of a revolution. We used a number of different mediums to understand our revolution, the final product being a Rube Goldberg Machine. Creating it took weeks of planning, testing, adjusting, and decorating. Our first keystone was an infographic of our revolution. Our group was assigned the Meiji Revolution from Japan, which was full of awesome battles and technological advances. It took place during the 1800s, and was focused on bettering the economy and governmental system. Preparing for the final product was difficult, as there were so many moving parts, but we spent a ton of extra time outside of school making sure that everything would work. I don’t think that I’ve never worked with a group that dedicated on a PLP project, and it showed in our final result. This gave us an opportunity to create and present an amazing machine that I’m still proud of to this day, despite the hardship and numerous trials it took to get there.
A second influential project that we did this year was Let’s Get Riel. This was 
a Humanities project in which we learned all about the influential Canadian figure Louis Riel. Riel was a Métis leader, as well as a scholar and a resolute. His story is an important yet tragic example of someone being sacrificed for the greater good.
I think that through this project we learned how history is written by the winners, and how it’s important to look at other sides of a story. This is important to understand not just in school, but also in life. He was the founder of Manitoba, and was a man who wasn’t afraid to stand up for his people. However, in the eyes of the settlers, he was seen as a dangerous rebel who needed to be taken down.
We learned a valuable lesson from this project about how differently something or someone can be seen depending on who’s doing the person perceiving them. This lesson is applicable in other projects, as well as for other aspects of life.
Finally, the most difficult endeavor of PLP in the past semester by far, Destination Imagination. This wasn’t a project so much as a competition. I wanted to include DI because I have learned the most by far from this than any project this semester. I was thrust into a mismatched group of people that I didn’t get to choose, and had to make it work and create a catapult, as well as a story and performance to go with it. This all had to be done according to a long list of rules with a ton of regulations. Although we managed to get through it and finish out performance with few mistakes, it really was a challenge.
This was by far the most challenging thing I had done all year due to the difficult nature of working in groups. However, I learned so much about storytelling, engineering, and learning to take responsibility for your own actions, as well as the actions of others. There was no one in a leadership role specifically, which made it very difficult, so at the end I kind of stepped up to fill that.
We had about four months to work on this, which gave us a disadvantage to other schools who had started sooner. However, we were determined to do our best, and worked relentlessly. Our story was about a man named Dan and his dog Cuddles, who got hired to NASA even though they weren’t qualified. The final script was difficult to make, but was something that I can say I’m proud of in the end.
To summarize, PLP is pretty difficult. It’s full of challenging group projects, tedious assignments, and new challenges. But, like I always like to say, where there’s a will, there’s a way. I went into this program with high expectations, and I feel like they’ve been exceeded. It’s now been a year and an half since I first joined PLP, but I still remember my first day. Even though there will always be new challenges to take on when it comes to high school, I feel more ready to face them now that I have experience with this program.
As I was writing this, I noticed how much I’ve improved in this post as opposed to the one I did last year. I feel like this program has allowed me to grow as a learner, but also as a person. This is important to me because I always strive to do my best, and I feel like with this PLP, I can do that now, and in the future.
Thank you for reading, and have a great day!
Louis Riel, and how he’s been portrayed throughout history. The Métis are a group of people with mixed ancestry that still reside in Canada today. Sadly, they were not very well liked by the local indigenous or the settlers, which led to feuds that would eventually become bigger problems. The relationship between the Métis and the settlers has been complex and difficult due to the lack of respect that the colonizers had for the balance that existed before they started to get too greedy. This seems to be a similar issue that the indigenous people had with the Métis, as they saw them as colonizers trying to take their land and resources.
We were first introduced to the concept of revolutions by our first project, which was based around the book “Animal Farm” by George Orwell. We read this book as a class, and had multiple discussions about the author’s intent and the hidden meaning behind the events in the book. The story itself is actually a metaphor for the Russian revolution, and revolves around a farm on which the animals stage a rebellion and and take new leadership. Unfortunately, the pigs begin to abuse their power, and eventually lead the farm to downfall. This represents how after a revolution, affairs often return to the way they were before, with slight changes.
This is a picture of our finished product.
recall the eye opening moments that impacted me and my class. Let me begin by explaining the purpose of our retreat. It was meant to give us a new perspective on the people around us, as well as ourselves. We were meant to gain leadership skills and bond as a class, and understand that our actions have impacts. We know that these are all important skills to have within school, but we were also asked to think about how we can apply these skills to our everyday lives.
In the end, this trip was a lot of fun because I got to experience it with my friends. The teachers and staff were very supportive, as well as all of our classmates. We got to wrap up our trip with an awesome dance party, where we could let all of our troubles go. I also feel like I have to include this, or the PLP teachers will be mad: The food was amazing.
The goal of our Alberta trip was to find an answer to the driving question, “how has the geography of the west shaped who we are?” Our big project for this trip was all about how we’ve changed the geography of the west, but also how it’s changed us.
Another staple of the Rocky Mountains is the Lake Louise. People come from all over the world to see the famous lake, and it even has its own chateau for people to stay at while they take in the view. This was a very important stop in our trip, as the geography of the surrounding area was literally changed so that humans could have a more pleasant experience. People used to just come to see the lake, but after the CPR was put in, it became a whole destination.
Hello, and welcome back to another blog post! In our latest project, which was called “Using The Moving Image To Tell A Story,” we examined how we can use the moving image to tell a story. This project was connected to our Rocky Mountain field study, and the assignment for this project was multiple videos that related not just to our driving question in maker, but also our humanities project. Our project in humanities was about how the geography of the west has shaped us, and in it we learned quite a bit about the geography the Rockies.
Our final video we actually started after we got back from the trip, which gave us the most time to film and edit it. This was the “at home video challenge,” and it was all about what inspires us! My video was largely about how life isn’t always perfect, but it’s the good things that keep us going! I talked a lot about how sports always keeps me motivated, and my family and school always inspire me to be a better person. This video took a long time to edit, because I wanted it to really reflect who I am. I learned a lot about myself through this video, as well as realizing who I want to become. I feel like this was a perfect way to wrap up our project!
We all were rushing to finish our ads before the exhibition, but we were all able to do it in time! When we were planning for the exhibition, we had to establish roles that we would take. I was given the role of DRI, which stands for “directly responsible individual” and is the person who is responsible for most of the organization, and if something goes wrong. It was incredibly stressful for me, but I pulled through, and we ended up with a pretty good presentation at the exhibition!
