Hello! I’m back!

This project was about so many things. Stories, audio editing, and so much more

We started with the driving question: “How do I craft the story of my learning?” and the core competence of reflecting on learning. “I reflect on my learning to generate new ideas or reinterpret others’ ideas in new ways and use it to form reasoned decisions for my future choices.”

Now I want to start this off by saying that this project has not been my best project. It launched at around the same time as DI and got lost in the chaos of what is prepping for regionals, but that is not an excuse for not creating great work. Not balancing my time well in this project just means that I have lots to learn from it. Let’s dive in.

So, as I said, in this project we learned about storytelling and how we can use audio to tell stories. We were told that we could make our podcast about any sort of story from our lives. I think by far the hardest part of this project was thinking about what story I was going to tell. Everything either felt too small or too personal. I finally decided that there are stories that need to be told, and even if it was deeply personal, I had one of those stories. My podcast is on body image and how social media impacts teenagers (specifically myself).

The first thing we did was a pitch. This was mine.

This was a great starting place, and completing this small assignment really helped me get the ball rolling for the next one until it didn’t.

As I started the script writing process, it quickly became intense. As I said before, this is a very personal topic to me. Every time I sat down to write, I would get emotional. This led to me avoiding writing it completely, which wasn’t hard to do as I was DRI of our humanities project at the time and was busy with many other things. Eventually the script was completed when I was in Europe for the month of March, but this was a very low point for me. I don’t think I’ve ever pushed off an assignment like that before, and I hope that in the future I don’t let it happen again.

Finally I got to recording the podcast, and if you’ve read this blog before, you know that audio is my least favourite way to tell a story. However, this part really surprised me. I enjoyed it! I had a lot of fun making theme music and recording myself. I think that this is because I have had the chance to record audio so many times this year; I’m much more confident now. If I were to do this project again, I would focus more on getting some really cool audio effects in there. I think it would be more engaging to the listener. While I have gained some confidence in my editing abilities, I still have a lot of room to grow.

Here’s the episode:

I think this has been my worst project this year. And a year ago, I would have been endlessly beating myself up over it. But I’m not last year’s me, so instead I am going to go through what made this project a FAIL.

1. Poor time management—I should have finished as much of this project before I even left and time-blocked properly so that the work didn’t pile up and stress me out so much.
2. Not setting better reminders. Usually I am the QUEEN of using the app Things, and I can definitely tell that since I didn’t, I was less successful.
3. Spotting stress times in advance. A “stress time” is a point where I have a lot of schoolwork due, a lot to do at home, and still have all my extracurriculars to do. When I spot them in advance, I have the opportunity to avoid them by doing stuff before it is due so that I have more time later.

Next, let’s look at my VMV:

Self Regulation: 1/3

While I wasn’t a perfectionist in this project, I definitely did not balance myself properly. I know myself well. This means I know that for me to not complete a project as perfectly as possible, I have to be absolutely drowning in the other things I am doing. I am not a person who only puts in 50% of the effort. Up until this point I have been able to get by by pushing and pushing and pushing, but this is a strong example of how this method will eventually not work. I did, however, manage my stress throughout this project. Instead of freaking out every time something wasn’t done perfectly, I would take a step back or a break and then try again. Next time I think I would benefit from pushing just a little harder before taking a break.

Conduct and integrity: 2/3

The only reason that this isn’t at a 3/3 is that this wasn’t a group project. I gave reliably good critique and encouraged my classmates about their ideas.

Engagement: 2/3

This is the first time that I have given myself a 2/3 on engagement throughout the year, and while I demonstrated interest by picking a topic I’m interested in and participated a lot in class discussions, since I didn’t write this blog post on time, I do not feel that I have properly demonstrated my growth through reflective posts.

So, how do I craft the story of my learning?

I craft the story of my learning by taking a good look at how I learn. Then I can translate what I find into the other media that can help me push myself to learn more (like me and audio). By using the tools that are provided to me and that I have learned, I craft something that shares my understanding of any topic.

Thank you; see you next time!

Neko