Who Am I

This week, we have been given numerous amounts of challenges based on our smart digital learning. In this challenge, we had to get with a partner, and look through a presentation. On each slide of this 10 slide presentation was a picture of a famous person. What we had to do was find out who they were, where they were from, why they are famous, if they have a famous quote, and at least 5 facts about them. For this activity, I worked with Julian, and we had a whole heap of fun.

Summer Learning Journey: Week 1: Day 2 | Activity 2

Today, I completed activity 2 of week 1 for the Summer Learning Journey. For this activity, I needed to find 3 different New Zealand Sports Teams that included the word "Fern" in their name. Along with that, we needed an image of their team wearing their uniform next to the name. This activity was not too hard, although it was a challenge to find a third team as I was left for a solid 2 minutes searching for a team.

Summer Learning Journey: Week 1: Day 2 | Activity 1

Today, I completed the first activity for day 2, week 1 of the Summer Learning Journey. For this activity, we needed to write a blogpost explaining whether we would want to visit Tane Mahuta (The Lord Of The Forest). Yes I would want to visit Tane Mahuta one day. As it shows my respect for the native life in New Zealand. As he is the "Lord Of The Forest", and the size of the tree would be fascinating in a way. It is enormous in size, and I would want to see the peak towering over me.

Summer Learning Journey: Week 1: Day 1 | BONUS Activity

Today I completed the bonus activity for day 1, week 1 of the Summer Learning Journey. For this activity, you needed to fill in a footprint with different things that you should do to stay safe online. Why a footprint, well this symbolises our digital footprints. This challenge wasn't that hard although it was fun, and got my brain right to work.

Summer Learning Journey: Week 1: Day 1 | Activity 2

Today I completed the second activity for day 1, of week 1 of the Summer Learning Journey for 2018 and 2019. In this activity, we needed to describe Auckland, and where we live with different adjectives. This activity took very little time to complete. 

Auckland is a magnificent place. Known as the city of sails, with an attractive appearance, and great views, it can be called a great place to be apart of. I live in Pakuranga, and I love it there. We have elegant facilities, and great people in the community. I am always eager to get out into the community and see what I can do that's new to me, or exciting. I live right in front of the Tamaki River, and when the tide is up it's the best to go for a swim.

Summer Learning Journey: Week 1 | Day 1 | Activity 1

Today, I completed the first activity for day 1, week 1 for the Summer Learning Journey. For this activity, we had to go to the Fun Facts About New Zealand website, and find 3 interesting facts to blog. This challenge was fairly easy, but I found a few things out, while knowing the rest.

Fact 1: In New Zealand, you must drive on the left side rather than the right.

Fact 2: The largest city in New Zealand is Auckland, although it isn't that capital.

Fact 3: There are no snakes in the country.

Creating A Comic About A New Zealand Inventor

Today, the whole class did a a challenge in teams of 4. What was that challenge you may ask? To find a New Zealand inventor, and create a whole comic strip about that person and their invention. I decided to work with Julian, Ofa, and Joseph for this activity, and we wanted to create a comic about the first successful person to take flight Richard Pearse. We chose to use Google Drawing to create this comic and we had a lot of fun working together, and loving the turnout. After everyone had finished their comics, we had to find a few things out about the person and their invention. In the end, we found out that it was the 31st of March 1903 when Richard Pearse made his first attempt to fly. Although we did not find any information giving the date he succeeded.

Presenting Our Leader Speeches

For the past 2 weeks, the 2018 year 7's of Panmure Bridge school have been preparing a speech to show that they have the leadership qualities to make them the next leader for 2019. There are 4 roles that a year 7 can take responsibility of, the head student role, Manaiakalani leaders, the sports leaders, and the projector monitor.  I wanted to become head boy or just in case, Manaiakalani leader. This blog post shows an image of my presentation, and includes the entirety of my speech at the very end.

Head Boy Speech

Kia Ora koutou katoa, Ko Toku ingoa ko Jack, Whakaaro ahau he tika ahau mo te upoko
ākonga rangatira. My name is Jack, and I believe that I have the leadership qualities to make
me your next head boy or Manaiakalani leader for 2019. Ever since my first year at this
school, I have looked up to each and every school leader, whilst it was the head students that
I looked up to in particular.

Seeing them present every week allowed me to see them as role models that I could follow.
I believe that the head student role shows trust, and I think that I hold that trust from both
students, and staff. Being trustworthy is a reputation I am proud that I have earnt. Trust is
not something that you can ask for, you work for trust, and gain it overtime. Without trust,
you are limited in what you can do. Without trust you cannot be seen as a good leader.

I try hard to always follow our CARE values and am always happy to take on responsibility.
I enjoy learning and always try my best to set goals for myself so I can try to move my
learning to the next level. I think that these qualities make me a great leader. Leading by
example is one of the most important parts of being any leader, and I think that I hold that
trait well.

I have taken part in both the Summer and Winter Learning Journey multiple times. I have
been a part of different teams that involve different challenges and activities. These teams
involve our athletics team, and the Robotics team representing our school. I have been
available to help both my teachers, and my peers by helping to make a movie for the
Manaiakalani film festival, presenting in assembly on behalf of the head students. I have
taught Tamaki College students how to draw using Google Drawing. I have taught LS2 how
to draw using Google Drawing, and am now helping design different images for the 2019
LS2 Website. I am capable of being an ambassador for Panmure Bridge School, or a part of
the Digital Showcase team, and with all of this experience and teamwork I would make a
great leader in 2019.

CARE Awards: Silver Attitude | Tutoring Someone Who Needs Help With An Extra Skill

For my next CARE Award activity, for my Attitude, I created a slideshow that showed Ofa's improvement over the year after giving him a helping hand with his art and DLO's. The first slide will show where Ofa began in his soon to be drawing pathway. It all started with a DLO that Ofa needed some assistance with. So what I did was give Ofa a template where he could add his own details. This included a body, facial details, and the option for me to help him at any point of time. After a little while Ofa became more dependant on his ability to have a bunch of creativity. And managed to create this DLO. In this DLO, he only needed me to see what he could change. The final slide shows a single frame of an entire animation that he created himself. It shows the side view of a body explaining how the human body breathes. He can now create digital art on his own, and rarely needs my assistance.

CARE Awards: Silver Attitude | Created With My Teacher

For the final activity for my Silver Attitude CARE Award, I chose to do the created with my teacher activity. For this activity, what I chose to do was teach my teacher Mrs Anderson. What may that be you may ask? Well I taught Mrs Anderson how to green / blue screen using the iMovie application. This application allows you to as well as green / blue screening different videos and images, create movies. The way I taught her how to edit was by using our class film entry for this year’s Manaiakalani Film Festival. A time to showcase almost every classes learning over the year all throughout Manaiakalani schools. The movie that our class created was a documentary style movie teaching people about the history of the Panmure Bridge. This movie, Alex, Sanujan, Mrs Anderson, Mr Wong and I spent about half of term 3 planning, recording, and editing. It was a lot of fun, and we enjoyed learning about all of the history involved in the Bridge that I cross everyday to get to school. Mrs Anderson had never used iMovie to green / blue screen before, so she wanted to learn how.  Although I did not teach her alone. I had Sanujan by my side making sure that I was directing her correctly. In the end Mrs Anderson was a master at green / blue screening, and added plenty of new touches to make this movie the best it could be. Hopefully next year, we can do an awesome movie like this again.

The Movie Itself

Leadership Week: Pyramid Building

This week the year 7's were learning about leadership. Leadership means working together talking and having a leader because everything would't be fine without a leader to control and help our teams. l was working with Chavda, Avalon and Neveah. We worked together as a group to complete our challenges set. The first activity challenge we had was to write down and answer the questions we were given. l was the leader of my group and l was trying to help others and tell them if they need help. The next thing we did was go inside the hall and do our next leadership challenge as a group for this activity we needed all of our craft stuff in each groups then we sat away from each groups we had to try and create the biggest pyramid out of coloured paper, Scissors, and White paper. Those were the things we needed for our challenge. The last group challenge we did was we played a game that would help us work as a team this challenge was called tunnel crawling we had to go underneath people's legs and stomach to get to the other side of the hall it was hard put we worked as a team to  lost of the first round the next round we won.  

Athletics Day

Today, we had our 2018 School Athletics Day. This ran for most of the day, excluding the first block. Throughout the day, groups of at least 5 or 6 would go through different activity stations every few minutes. There were 9 stations in total, and all of them were fun, and energising. This ran through the second block, and almost everyone had a great time. The way that groups were determined was by the colour that was selected. There were 4 colours, and people were randomly put into those groups. My group was the blue team, and I think that we all did a great job, and tried our very best in each station. Although after the second block was over, and lunchtime had finished we ran the sprints. The way this  was run was each class and their year levels would race against each other on the field which was mown down to have different tracks. The 1st 2nd and 3rd winning racers would be given a small plastic cube, coloured differently to show your placement. You would then give your cube to Mrs Anderson, and she would write your name down and you would continue to watch. When it came to the year 7 boys, I was a bit worried. Although I did my best and made it second. Following Julian in 1st, and Aung Naing in 3rd. Overall, I had a fun day, and hope that everyone else felt the same.

Reading: Read Theory Progress

Today for reading, we did an activity based on the improvement we've had throughout our Read Theory journey. Our challenge was to look back at our progress in Read Theory, and create a chart that showed how our grades differed. Then we would create a DLO that explained our progress properly. This activity was not too challenging, although it was fun to see my improvement over the year.

CARE Awards: Silver Attitude | Why Is It Important To Have A Positive Attitude?

Today, I completed the next activity for my Silver Attitude CARE Award. For this activity, I had to create a video the showed the importance of having a positive attitude. Although rather than creating a video, I instead created a presentation so that anyone could view it at their own pace. In the presentation, I came up with 3 rules that you should follow to have a positive attitude yourself. If you follow these 3 rules as much as possible then you will be a master of having a positive attitude. I had a lot of fun doing this activity, and I hope that the next activity I choose to do will be not too challenging, although i'm always up for new and exciting activities.

Animation Class: Teaching Tamaki College How To Draw

Today, Alex, Sanujan and I visited Tamaki College to teach a group of students how to draw using Google Drawing, and Slides. There were in the end 5 students in the class, with 3 teachers (Two in the image, and the third taking the picture). We were there for roughly an hour, and had so much fun teaching the students. The first thing that we did was introduce the curve tool to the students. You may ask, "What is the curve tool?" Well, the curve tool is a drawing tool / technique to draw curved lines or shapes. We then went step by step showing a demonstration on how to draw a simple and cute panda. While that was going on, Sanujan would walk around and see if everyone was on track. This continued for the majority of the lesson, and involved a lot of laughs, and enjoyment. There may event be a second session in the future. Although we are sure that that will not be too far away.

                        

Reading: Book Week | Wolf Myths and Facts

This week has been book week. We have had quite a few challenges based on the stories we read as young children. Our teacher Mrs Anderson has also set us a few challenges based on a few books that she read as a child. This one being Wolves. It is written by Emily Gravett, and illustrated by her too. This book explains and gives a few facts about wolves, and includes lovely images to paint a picture into your head. Our challenge, was to come up with around 5 myths about how wolves live, and them research them  and see if they are true or false. This task could be done alone, or with a partner, so I chose to work with Julian.

Reading: Book Week | Meerkat Mail

 

This week is book week, to celebrate book week Mrs Anderson has read three of Emily Gravett's books and has asked us to complete three activities based on the books. The books that we have read are: Wolves, Meerkat Mail, and the Big Book of Fears. All three books were written and illustrated by Emily Gravett. The book we were read too, was Meerkat Mail. It's about a Meerkat who is getting sick of living with his family and throughout the week he went and lived with relatives who live a different lifestyle he is used to. At the end of the book he finally understands why he has to live like he does so he returned home. For this task I worked with Fraidon.

CARE Awards: Silver Attitude | Teaching The Class

For the last two weeks on a Friday, Alex, Miki, Sanujan and I taught our class. What did we teach them you may ask? We taught them how to draw, and will be running classes each Friday afternoon. In these lessons, there will be two session running at once. The expert sessions, and the beginner sessions. Sanujan is teaching the expert group, and giving them a few challenges, while Miki, Alex and I are teaching the beginners, and running them through the basics. We have gone through 2 sessions now, and both of which have gone right on track. The first session went great, we set up our groups, and got right to teaching. We started off by testing their skill. We all asked them to find a cartoon image of a rock on Google, and to trace the outline. Although before we did that, we made sure to teach them one thing. That thing being how to tell which tool to use when tracing. We taught them that you use the curve tool for curved edges, and the polyline tool for straight edges. We then set them off. We gave them around 20 - 30 minutes to complete their drawing, and would then review what they had done. The second session went just as great. We ran through a few reminders, and let everyone draw what they want as practice. Although this has not been it. Not too long ago, Alex, Sanujan, Mrs Anderson and I all visited Tamaki College to teach these same things to older students. This task was just as fun as teaching who we already knew. It was fun hanging out with these students, and getting to know what they liked through what they drew. Hopefully we can continue all of these animation classes, and find new ways and techniques to teach anyone who is willing to learn digital art and animation.

Reading: Book Week | Re-Design Cover

This week is book week for Panmure Bridge School. What we are doing for this week are a few challenges based on the books that we have read in our past, and about reading in general. For this challenge, we were to re-create the cover of a book that we read in our childhood. The book that I did was Noah Dreary, and I worked on this activity with Julian, and Fraidon. We had all read and loved this story, so it was an easy choice between which book we did this on. I had a lot of fun doing this activity, and I believe that Fraidon and Julian had just as much fun.

Our Remake:

Original:

Reading: Book Week | Alphabet Key

Around The World And Eighty Days	New Moon
Butterfly	Over Sea, Under Stone
Catching Fire	Peter Pan
Divergent	Queen Of Spades
Ella Enchanted	Romeo And Juliet
Fangirl	Star Trek
Glitch	Twilight
Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire	Under The Never Sky
I Am Number Four	Vampire Academy
J.K Rowling	Wonder
Kite Runner	Xanadu
Lion King	Yeti And The Bird
Mockingjay	Zoomer

This week is book week for Panmure Bridge School. What we are doing for this week are a few challenges based on the books that we have read in our past. For this challenge we needed to do an alphabet key on book tittles/Authors. I did this task with the help of Fraidon and Julian. I found this task really easy and I will try to do harder challenges next time.  

Reading: Book Week | Reading Pathway

This week is book week for Panmure Bridge School. What we are doing for this week are a few challenges based on the books that we have read in our past. For today's challenge, we had to go down memory lane, and create a DLO that showed our favourite books as a kid. Ageing from when we started school, to our favourite book now. This activity was fairly easy, although it got hard from time to time to remember which books we read as a kid. In the end, it was fun to remember what we used to like as a kid, and comparing those stories to what we like now. Out of all of these books, I believe that the Captain Underpants series is my all time favourite, as I have read every book in the series, along with the Dogman series, and the Ook and Gluk story. All stories written by Dav Pilkey.

Armistice Day: Drawing A Picture

For the last 3 days, we have been focusing on armistice day activities. One of the activities was to re-create an image showing the end of the war. This task was to be done either individually, or with a group. I decided to go with the second option, so I worked with Alex, Fraidon, and Ofa. We had a lot of fun doing this activity, and hope to revisit something like it soon. This was not too challenging of an activity, but really got us challenged.

Armistice Day Commemoration

Today, we had our whole school armistice day commemoration. This was not a time to mess around. It was a time to be respectful, and show appreciation. The commemoration started off with the singing of the national anthem, and a karakia to go with it. (A karakia is a Maori prayer). Next, we all faced our school flag, as Last Post, and Reveille played in the background. Once these two songs passed, we had a whole minute of silence. This minute represented the time you had, to remember the lost fighters, in addition, what they fought for. The minute ended, and we all sat back down. A few days earlier, we had all signed our names on a large wooden poppy, which would soon be placed against a fence, by two people from each class. In the end, from LS2 it was Mele and I who were chosen. We then placed the poppy, and sat back down. All together, the whole school and teachers, along with the principle, and three members from the school board of trustees team, and even a Lieutenant from the New Zealand army, who we cannot give the name of for personal reasons. After the commemoration was over, the Lieutenant came to some of our classes to answer any questions we had. We had a few questions to ask, although not a whole heap. The basic, "How long have you been in the army?" "How old are you?" and other questions like that. It was a respectful time, and I am glad that nothing out of the ordinary happened.

Armistice Celebration: Collage

Since it's nearly Armistice day we were asked to make a collage with photos that is based on Armistice day celebrating. Armistice was the end of the war, on the 11th day, of the 11th month, of 1918. So it was a happy time for the world, so in this collage, we were to include the happy images of the past. We were to include photos that has people celebrating Armistice day including soldiers and people from around the country. We put photos of people celebrating from New Zealand, Germany, and Australia. Ofa, Fraidon, and I have made a collage also including newspaper talking about how the war is over. We have worked collaboratively together to finish this off.

Reading: The Battle Of The Somme

This week, we had a small activity to complete. This activity was to be done with a partner, although there was a slight change. Rather than joining up with someone from our group, the whole class had to get together in mixed partners with one person from Mrs Anderson's reading group, and another from Ms Kirkpatrick's reading group. The activity that we did this week was about the Battle Of The Somme. A war that took place in 1916. This task was linked to Mrs Anderson's inquiry sessions, so some groups already had a basic understanding of this. For this task I worked with Jonathan, and we had a lot of fun working together. What we had to do for this task was read through two pages that told the story of the battle through different points, and answer three slides of questions. From time to time, Jonathan and I would get stuck, although we eventually found our way through.

 

Tech: Graphics | Creating Our Designs

Today we had our next session of tech in graphics. In this session we continued to create the design of our phone stands. Although unfortunately, last week I was away sick, so I had quite a bit to catch up on. The design choice of mine was a cat lying down, with a gap in it's back as a slot for a phone, and the tail to support it. To create these phone stands, we used a website called Tinkercad. With this website, you can create a model to 3D print. This involves different colour choices, different design possibilities, and a simple layout. This session of tech was a very fun one. We were roughly never stopped when creating, allowing us to use as much of the time we had to create. We could choose whatever design we wanted, and loved seeing what other people have created.

 

Maths: Learning About The Circumference, Radius, Diameter, and Pi Of a Circle

Today for maths, we were learning to find the Radius, Diameter, Circumference and Pi of a Circle. To start of our maths session, Ms Kirkpatrick's maths group, watch a short clip about our topic. Once we've finished watching the clip, we were to completed a series of equations. After that we were to create a DLO, which explains how we solved, three questions, we got in the series. For this task I work collaboratively with Sanujan and Julian.

Writing: 5 - 7 - 10 Animation

For the last two weeks in writing, we have been granted a challenge by our teacher Miss Kirkpatrick. The challenge was straight forward, and everyone knew how they would execute the outcome. Our challenge was to use one of the stories that we had written for our 5 - 7 - 10 tasks, and animate it. If you have not seen one of our 5 - 7 - 10's, then allow me to explain how they work. Once everyone has completed the task for the week, we are shown an image with a heading based on our image. Next we would time 5 minutes to write as much as we could for this story. Once time ran out, we would then spend 7 minutes reading and explaining our stories to a partner. Now the 10 minutes would begin, and we would have to continue of from where we left the story off, and have it completed in time. That is basically it. It was the animation side of it that made this a big challenge. So we all got working. The 5 - 7 - 10 story that I had chosen to re-create with pictures was The Eye. The image was a snakes eye, and a short description including a story starter that we would later use. I chose this story, as I immediately came up with an idea to display through animation. I started with a dark swamp, along with an eerie vibe to it. Later, making my description more lively. I had a lot of fun doing this activity, and I hope that we can do it again at some point of time.

Film Study: Willow | Shot Types

On Wednesday this week, we had a film study day. If you do not know what a film study is, then allow me to explain. A film study is where you watch through a film, and take notes of what is happening, along with analysing everything involved. You focus on the different shot types, the different angles, and understand exactly what is happening in the film. The film that our teacher Miss Kirkpatrick selected was an old movie titled Willow. A movie from 1988 that sets up a whole story about saving a princess that is bound to become the new queen. Throughout the study, we ended up with 5 different tasks to complete based on the movie itself, and movies in general. In this activity, our task was to find out what different shot types can be involved with movies. Our challenge was to find an image that showed what the shot type may look like in a film, along with an example from our Willow movie. This was a fun and simple challenge, that taught us all a little something.

Willow

Opening Sequence -

Shot types

L. I. - To know some film terminology (shot types etc.)

This is a close viewing of the opening sequence

Look at this list of shot types:

http://www.mediacollege.com/video/shots/

At the bottom are the camera movements.  

Look at the following:

Zoom, Pan, Tilt, Tracking

Look for examples in the movie -

SHOT / MOVEMENT	EXAMPLE	Example from Willow
Long shot
Close Up
Medium shot
High angle
Low angle
Eye level
Reverse angle
ZOOM	A zoom is technically not a camera move as it does not require the camera itself to move at all. Zooming means altering the focal length of the lens to give the illusion of moving closer to or further away from the action. The effect is not quite the same though. Zooming is effectively magnifying a part of the image, while moving the camera creates a difference in perspective — background objects appear to change in relation to foreground objects. This is sometimes used for creative effect in the dolly zoom.
PANNING	A pan is a horizontal camera movement in which the camera moves left and right about a central axis. This is a swiveling movement, i.e. mounted in a fixed location on a tripod or shoulder, rather than a dolly-like movement in which the entire mounting system moves.	In this shot, the dogs are seen running while the camera is following.
TILTING	A tilt is a vertical camera movement in which the camera points up or down from a stationary location. For example, if you mount a camera on your shoulder and nod it up and down, you are tilting the camera. Tilting is less common than panning because that's the way humans work — we look left and right more often than we look up and down. The tilt should not be confused with the Dutch Tilt which means a deliberately slanted camera angle. A variation of the tilt is the pedestal shot, in which the whole camera moves up or down.	No images available.
TRACKING	The term tracking shot is widely considered to be synonymous with dolly shot; that is, a shot in which the camera is mounted on a cart which travels along tracks. However there are a few variations of both definitions. Tracking is often more narrowly defined as movement parallel to the action, or at least at a constant distance (e.g. the camera which travels alongside the race track in track & field events). Dollying is often defined as moving closer to or further away from the action. Some definitions specify that tracking shots use physical tracks, others consider tracking to include hand-held walking shots, Steadicam shots, etc.	No image available.