As one of the last reflections for this project, I would like to start off by reflecting on my reflections. Doing these reflections on the blogs remind me of the ones that I did for grade 8 Humanities. A few days ago, I found one of my old posts. As I was reading it, I remember myself thinking that the more I write, the better my post will be. Looking back on what I have written in the past, the first thing I notice is that I write a lot. This can be good, or it can just be long and wordy. The majority of my past entries for this project have been more updates on our progress, with some reflection. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, as I feel that details are important. However, I would like to incorporate some more reflection into these updates for my next project.
Last week, we did our peer review. I will admit, I was a little bit skeptical about it to begin with because many peer reviews that I've experienced mainly consist of people saying "Good job", with not a lot of real feedback. This time, I was pleasantly surprised by it. At first, our peer review started off as more of an interview than as a discussion, but as we got more comfortable, the discussion came more naturally. We gained a lot of valuable feedback from the peer review. Although obviously won't use all of it, it was great to hear what other people had to say. If you would like to see the notes that we collected, here is a link to it.
For the past few days, Andrew and I have focused on the video to get it done and to make it the best it can be. When it comes to editing, as I have mentioned before, it has been challenging. We have encountered multiple different issues in terms of effects, images, and the flow of our video. For these reasons, we decided that it would be best top postpone the date of our presentation so that we could have time to try and improve it. Looking at our video now, I am a bit concerned because currently, it isn't as good as I had hoped. However, there is still time to improve it. We have been working on the video as much as we can to make it the best it can be.
When I think about our project as a whole, I am proud of all of the things that I have learned along the way. Some things may not have turned out exactly the way that we had planned, as we changed our plans multiple times along the way, but I think that I have learned more from this project than from a lot of other projects that have gone according to plan. Not to say that it isn't a lot easier when things work out the way they were planned to, but I think that when you make mistakes, it allows for unexpected learning.
I am excited to finish this project and start my next one!
Talissa - I love to see the growth in your writing and reflections from Humanities 8, English 10 and now PDD. I would agree - process logs that indicate what you did are useful but can be more useful with a reflective piece. Perhaps to help with being less wordy consider adding headings like: What I did, Why, New thoughts or questions,…Conclusions. Or less formal - My Ah Hah moment for the week! These are possible headings. Maybe challenge yourself to add a bit of fun structure to your posts - some common or repeated "themes"/ language / messages or connections - thinking of Kid President Videos or some of the others we have watched. Let your humour, thoughtfulness, as well as your creativity come through with your reflective posts too! See if you can make it fun! For you to write and for readers to enjoy - although I already enjoy your posts, but I know you better than anonymous readers would.
ReplyDeleteI would love to hear more about how you think you learned more from some of your fumbles along the way than some of your previous successes - this is usually a big Ah Hah! moment and makes students (and teachers) acknowledge there is value in not always reaching your goal or achieving success. As much as teachers, parents and kids want to see success all the time - do we learn from it as much as we do from our mistakes? Likely not - there is that emotional connection to "falling down" that helps the learning stick better than the "easy wins", wouldn't you say?
PS Your "link" to peer review is not linked.