Category: Digital Literacy

Graphic Arts Poster Series

Poster 1

Poster 2

Poster 3

Poster 4

Poster 5

Poster Series

Summary:

During my time in Graphic arts, we were assigned this project where we were asked to make a poster series for the evergreen art gallery. The poster series had to consist of five different posters that have a similar style to them. Each poster had to feature a piece of art from one of the artist and was stylized based on the featured art.

8. I challenge myself to increase my technological literacy by working with apps, software, or mediums that I have not used in the past

I have not used much photoshop at all until this class started, so using photoshop was still quite new to me when I did this project. So I challenged myself in the process of this assignment to use new tools and to explore more ways to feature this art.

14. I ethically use content that is not created by me by using Creative-Commons licensed audio, video, or images and by properly citing these resources within my work

When using the artist’s works of art, we needed to add a few pieces of text in order to give credit to the artists. We needed to add the artist’s name, the name of their art, as well a link to the evergreen website to ensure that we are giving credit and not claiming it as our own.

Parts of a Cell

The actual Powerpoint was deleted by the teacher, so I am unable to link that here.

Notes

Summary:

This project was a very unique because it was a huge project that the entire class worked together to make. Each person was assigned to research a specific part of the cell and presented their part to the class along with a powerpoint presentation. Each person was only allowed to use a maximum of 2 slides and one minutes for their presentation. In the end, we would have a very long presentation on all of the parts of the cell where everyone would take turns going up to the front of the class to present their assigned part of the cell.

2. I tailor my work to appeal to my intended audience, and use language and visual design elements appropriate for them

In order to make my presentation more engaging, I added a few jokes and pictures to make it more entertaining for my audience. However, I had to make sure that I didn’t put too many jokes since that may have made the entire presentation less educational. I also needed to change some of the wording from the sites I researched so that everyone would understand what I was saying without having to have prior knowledge on the topic. There was also one instance when a section that I took out ended up being put back into my presentation just before I went because one of the other presentations explained what a chloroplast was.

5. I enhance the impact of my research or presentation through creative use of technology

I took advantage of the animation feature in powerpoint to further enhance the presentation. I added a lot of movement to keep my audience engaged, and to make it seem like I put more effort into the project. For example, I animated a few oil containers to pack together into a box to show that leucoplasts store starch and oil in a cool and (hopefully) impressive way.

Midsummer Night’s Dream Character Analysis

Character Analysis Writing

Final Product

Summary:

For this project, we were put into groups and were asked to choose a character from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to analyze. My group members were Amin, David, and Mike as we chose to analyze Oberon, the king of fairies. So after reading through A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, we had to write about a few specific topics, these include: three traits that define Oberon, two wants and two fears that Oberon has, how the Oberon’s conflict(s) was resolved, and his connection to our thematic question, “What makes a good relationship?” After we each completed our assigned topics, we came together to create a poster that displayed all of our writing as well as a drawing of what we imagined Oberon would look like.

1. I use digital spaces to plan and execute collaborative projects with my peers

This project involved a lot of communication between our group members as we needed to assign tasks, edit each other’s work, and connect our writing in order for the final product to flow much better together. So we used programs like Google Docs to communicate and comment feedback on each other’s work to make sure our groups project was high quality.

3. I respond to the work or ideas of my peers in a way that is compassionate and productive

When editing each other’s work, I made sure that the comments and feedback that I gave my group members was constructive feedback that they were able to build on. For example, if a group member had trouble coming up with ideas or needed help refining more broad ideas, I always gave suggestions, but never forced any of my own ideas onto them. I didn’t want them to have to write about an idea/topic that they didn’t really know too much about or understand. I also did not insult, or reject anyone’s ideas, and instead chose to take each idea into consideration and discussed it with the group before rejecting the idea.

4. I constructively build upon or synthesize the ideas of my peers

Before we started to write, our group came together to collectively brainstorm for each person’s topic. For example, we had to come up with three traits that described Oberon the best and wrote about each trait. So, we all brainstormed as many character traits as we could. No one’s ideas were invalid or immediately rejecting. Instead, we built on, or refined everyone’s ideas. The idea of Oberon being a jealous character soon became the idea that Oberon was an emotionally driven character due to everyone building on, and refining that one idea.

7. I design my work with consideration given to aesthetics and design, such as consistent colour schemes, symmetry or organization of visual elements, and overall layout

When we put the poster together, I really took the aesthetics of the poster into consideration. First off, because the drawing of Oberon was something we couldn’t change easily, we decided to base the colour scheme of our entire poster on that image. So we ended up using blue for the background with a beige outline around the text, and a red title. We also wanted to make the poster symmetrical as possible considering that all the text had different lengths. Then before we glued anything, we made sure that we were happy with the overall layout of our poster by laying out all the pieces on the poster. Once we were sure about the layout, we then proceeded to glue down all of the cutouts.

ZIP

Inquiry Question Proposal

Research Notes for ZIP + Annotated Bibliography

Script for ZIP Video

Final Video

Summary:

Zip is a fast paced inquiry project that tests our research and time management skills. We start by creating an inquiry question that we can answer. We had the freedom to choose any project that we wanted, whether that be a skills like song writing, or a more research based question like a historical war. My inquiry question ended up being, “Why do odd spellings like ph and ey exist and is there any reason to keep these spellings in modern English?”  We were then given roughly two weeks to research and put together an artifact to represent our learning. There were no restrictions on how we showed our learning as long as the research was somehow implemented into the final artifact. For my artifact, I made a video of me answering my inquiry question and I tried my best to cram as much information into it as possible. We then presented our learning to our peers as we evaluated each other’s work.

6. I determine and use the most effective medium to present my work

After I had chosen my inquiry project, I had to choose how I wanted to present my work. But because my question was more research based, rather than skill based, there was no defined way to show my learning. So I brainstormed a few initial ideas, and came up with an essay, a powerpoint presentation, an infographic, a trifold, and lastly, a video. I immediately crossed out the essay and the trifold since they are both not very creative and are not the most enjoyable to make. I also assumed that my audience wouldn’t find it as interesting as a powerpoint presentation, or a video. Then later on during my research, I ended up eliminating the choice of an infographic mostly because I had a lot of information that I wanted to share and knew that I couldn’t fit all of that information on an infographic. Then finally, the choice came down to a powerpoint, or a video. I decided that I would only make a video if I had enough time to do so since making a video is very time consuming. In the end, I made a video since I had more time and wanted to show that I actually put a lot more effort into the video.

9. I critically assess research sources for Currency, Reliability, Authority, and Purpose

During the research phase of my project, I constantly had to check whether a source was actually credible. Some information on certain sources actually contradicted other sources, so I constantly had to fact check with other sources. If you take a look at my annotated bibliography , I have a few sites that I simply listed for the use of fact checking. For example, I often used wikipedia as a baseline to refer to. I would read the wikipedia article first and if a source contradicted what I had read on wikipedia, I would look for another source with similar to see which source was incorrect. I would also search up the writers of specific articles to see if they were actually credible people that I could take information from. An example of this being an article written by a person named Anatoly Liberman. Most of his article was actually quite bias against the topic and talked about ways the English language could approve, so I did a bit of background research on him to confirm that his claims and ideas would be credible. I turns out that he is indeed quite credible as an etymologist (Studies the history of language) from Oxford university as he has written many books and other articles talking about similar topics.

13. I attribute credit to ideas that are not my own by preparing a Bibliography/Works Cited and by using in-text citations

I am able to attribute credit to research and ideas that are not my own by creating an annotated bibliography/works cited.

Part Time Indian Presentation

Part Time Indian Script

Part Time Indian Power Point

Summary:

For this project, we were put into groups of 4 and each group was assigned a topic surrounding First Nations Peoples. Each group then did some research on the topic and were asked to create a powerpoint to present to the rest of the class. However, our presentations needed to be clear and concise as we were restricted by a time limit as well as a maximum amount of slides we were allowed to have. The group that I was assigned to consisted of me, Tyson, Colby, and Gyu min with topic of the Indian act. The topic was split into four sub-topics and we assigned one to each person. Tyson researched what the Indian act was, Colby had the topic of the impacts of it, Gyu min found and shared current events on the topic, while I looked into the future of the Indian act.

10. I identify and discuss bias in research resources 

For my sub-topic, the future of the Indian act, there were two main views on the situation, the government’s perspective, or the First Nations perspective. The government wants to get rid of the Indian act and make the First Nations Canadian citizens, while the First Nations want to keep the benefits of the Indian act while getting rid of the rest. In many of the sources that I researched, the author of each article chose to speak from only one of the perspectives. This made it so that each article was very biased against the other side. So I talked about this with one of my group members and we ended up having to present both stances during our presentation in order to seem more neutral than bias.

11. I go beyond google and use databases to find scholarly research sources

Before we started our research, Mr. Morris actually suggested that we use the Canada in Context database that is accessible through the Gleneagle library homepage. The database listed a ton of helpful sources that we ended up using for our research on the Indian act. I often used the date function to find newer articles on the Indian act in order to make sure that the information was not outdated. An example of an article I used on the database is this link that I used to do a little research on what the Indian act was before actually diving into my assigned sub-topic.

12. I look at controversial issues or topics from opposed perspectives to gain a more complete understanding. 

As mentioned before, when I was researching the future of the Indian act, I was forced to research both the government’s perspective, as well as the First Nations perspective due to the bias views that most of the articles had. I needed to relay my research without any bias for any side, so I needed to research both sides in order to gain a complete understanding to be able to take a more neutral stance on the matter. In fact, I ended up working together with a group member to put a “debate” into our presentation where we took opposite stances and argued for our side to show both stances in the situation.