Category Archives: technology

My Capstone Experience

Posted on by
Reply

Have you ever heard of Capstone? Well it’s a big project based on research that’s at the end of fifth grade! My grade had to pick between a TED Talk or a movie. I picked the movie. We had a couple of weeks to do research on our topics. My topic was the history of volleyball. Then, we had about a week to do an essay! That essay was basically our script. After I finished my essay I had to narrow it all down and then put it in my script. I took time to time myself to see how long my video was gonna be. And finally, I started doing my actual video.

In order to research my main inquiry question, which was How has volleyball evolved over time? I looked into the following topics: How have the rules of volleyball changed? How accessible is volleyball to different age groups? How has the equipment and volleyball clothing used changed? How did volleyball integrate into the school curriculum? And how has the popularity of volleyball changed? I found a lot of information for most of my sub questions. But I did have trouble finding an answer to how volleyball got into the school’s curriculum. The most interesting facts that I learned while researching were that volleyball was originally played using a basketball and that volleyball was invented so that older, less athletic people would have a sport to play instead of basketball.

After our research we wrote an essay which was basically what we would say in our script. I answered all of my sub-questions which lead me to an answer to my main inquiry question! I realized that volleyball did change in many kinds of ways. At first I was just thinking what to write but when I started typing it all just popped into my mind and it was almost like my hands wouldn’t stop typing. I was very excited when I finished my essay because I knew that next would be the script. If you want to check out my essay click here.

When I was picking if I wanted to do a TED Talk or a movie I had to think wisely because I knew that they are very different. I did end up picking a WeVideo project because recently I had finished a documentary and it was also on WeVideo so I knew that a movie would be the best choice for me. I also thought what would be the hard parts in both? In TED Talk the hard part was memorizing your whole script and in the movie that hard part would definitely be making the actual video. So when I finished my essay I had to cut it down so it would be at the limit of 5-6 minutes. After that I put it all in the script template. You can click here to see my script.

After I was all done with my script I began making the video. I had to time myself to make the pictures go at the same time as my voice. I also was adding some text into my video. One of the most challenging things I had to do was to find good pictures for my topic, volleyball. However, I still think that trying to match my voice with the pictures would be the hardest part of all. But one thing that I enjoyed is the whole process of my Capstone project and getting to do something like Capstone.

In conclusion, Capstone was so much fun and I really enjoyed doing this and having to do this with my classmates. So next time if you want to watch something to learn new things go on Heathcote Tech on Youtube to check out our Capstone projects!!

Feature Article Reflection

Posted on by
Reply

Do you know who Taylor Swift is? Well I wrote my feature article about her! Now you’re probably wondering what that is… It’s almost like a newspaper but about something or someone you know very well about. So in fifth grade me and my classmates got to do these. As you can see, mine is about Taylor Swift. It was a long way but it was so much fun! I got to learn even more stuff about Taylor but I also learnt a ton of other things because I got to help my classmates with their feature articles.

We had to come up with something we know a lot about and a message. I picked Taylor Swift because I have been researching her and listening to her music since 2021. First, I came up with the title and subtitles. Then, I came up with three categories I was gonna write about. So then I started drafting all of my writing. When I was done with the drafting I started to plan how my formatting will look. After all that we finally got to the fun part. The photos. My class and I were in the lab and we were looking for pictures to put on our feature articles. Then we did the formatting. For me the formatting was kind of hard but at some point fun. I enjoyed picking a fun color and fonts for our articles!

Writing the feature articles was really fun but not only because of the pictures or the coloring. There was also a ton of teamwork and partnership. We got partnered a couple of times to comment on each other’s feature articles. It was so interesting to read everyone’s feature article and learn from the information that they wrote. If i would be very honest i thought doing Taylor Swift was a bad idea because no one really did their feature article on a specific person but once my classmates got to read my article before printing it out they made me feel much better about my feature article. Now, i didn’t have ALL of my classmates to read my article before printing but most of them read it and they all said that they loved it so much and didn’t know most of the stuff that i wrote. I was so happy and proud of myself when my classmates started telling me how well I wrote on the feature article. 

After a while when my whole class was done with our feature articles we printed them out, did a little last minute editing and then the next day we had something called a publishing party. It wasn’t an actual party but we printed the articles and had a commenting sheet on our desks and then we had to walk around the classroom and read a couple of our friend’s articles and then comment on them. We had to do it with about five people. It was super fun because I mostly got the people I haven’t read before and I found out so many cool things about dance, dogs, rubik’s cubes, and Jewish culture. All of those feature articles were so interesting and I found out so many fun facts!

Overall, the feature articles were so much fun and I really enjoyed the process of the writing, formatting, adding pictures, and publishing. I’m so glad that I got to write about Taylor Swift and so thankful for the support that I got from my classmates.