Collaboration
For Collaborator, I wanted to design a new club. The club would’ve been about baseball as I play it and it’s one of my favorite sports. I wasn’t able to finish this task because I was sick.
Creativity
In my creative learner task, Capture, I took portraits of two people with contrasting looks to show different types of people at school. One person looked tired while the other looked energetic. I’m bad at creative tasks but this taught me that simple things like a contrast of happy/tired can work too.
Critical Thinking
For Critical Thinking, I decided to review 15 logical fallacies from Grammarly. This taught me the methods advertisers use to convince people. This helped me realize that even the simplest of things can be a technique they use to trick people.
Communication
For Communication, I taught English in Language Service Club to school staff that only knew Chinese. It was my first time doing anything like that so it really taught me a lot about how to teach. I think it’ll be helpful in the future because being able to teach stuff effectively is a very useful skill to have.
Resilience
For Resilience, I decided to set myself a goal which was to stop procrastinating for a week. I was doing well for the first few days but I got really sick in the middle so was unable to finish. I still think those few days helped me as everything became much easier when I did them as soon as possible instead of waiting.
Eden looks exhausted and represents high schoolers who’ve spent a lot of time studying and are burnt out. Sally is happy and full of energy for a contrast to Eden’s low energy photo.
I interviewed someone on the challenges of high school and they gave some interesting answers.
- How do you manage your time when balancing homework, projects, and studying for exams? I try to do things fast as soon as they are assigned so that my to-do list isn’t cluttered
- How do you handle peer pressure, especially regarding academic performance or social activities? I don’t base my goals around other people’s achievements, but rather I’ll base them around improvements on myself
- How do you deal with stress from schoolwork or extracurricular activities? I don’t really have a lot of stress
- Have you ever faced difficulties in a club or sport? How did you work through them? I’ve never really faced any major life-changing or really hard challenges. I usually just kinda chill.
- How do you feel about the pressure to plan for college or future careers during high school? I know that for my major, I will do whatever I think is interesting but then for graduate school, I’ll take something that’ll be based around my career.
I’m in the Language Service Club’s English committee and we have to create presentations to teach English to Chinese speakers. This helped me learn how to effectively teach something in a short amount of time by putting it on a presentation. (Communicator Task 4, 60 points)
Me and Eden discussed the differences in Three Hours and found some differences. Chris Brain’s guitar was simpler and had a video compared to Nick Drake which was only audio. (Collaboration Task 10, 30 points)
This training will help me navigate the library and its resources better. I learned a lot and hopefully can use this knowledge in the future.
In middle school, I wish I’d known how important time management was. My time management was very bad and as a result, I missed many assignments or did them at the last minute. Another thing I wish I had done was get into more clubs, I had a lot of free time and didn’t do much with it. I think some clubs would’ve been useful to me. I’m excited for high school because it’s more free than middle school, and classes should be more interesting. The quality of teaching and coaching in sports should also be better. I’m excited to travel to other schools and cities to play baseball.
Why have a digital portfolio at SAS?
Creating a portfolio, or blog is a great way to collect all the work you’ve done throughout your academic career. You can include academic, athletic, and personal artifacts or experiences that you want to share with a wider audience. This is a great way to organize all your learning in one place and you can take it with you when you leave SAS. When you make your portfolio, you create posts that are categorized according to your subject. Some categories have already been set up for you, but if you need more categories you can add them as needed. It’s important that your posts have the following:
- An engaging title – this should not include the name of the subject since this is referenced in the category. Think of this as the first opportunity to engage and hook your reader!
- Body – this is where you share your learning. This should include a combination of text and media in the form of images, graphics, and embedded videos. You should always consider how your post looks to your audience. Is it engaging and organized? Do they want to keep reading?
- Category – select one that has been set for you or add a new category. Posts can have more than one category e.g. Humanities and Myself as a Learner
- Tags – create tags that can be used as keywords to describe your post. Tags help organize your post a little more! Aim to have 3-5 tags for each post. For example, if you are posting about a novel you wrote, you might want the following tags: #Fiction, #MurderMystery, #Theme, #PlotDiagram
Click on the images below to find a few helpful tips for creating your posts, adding media, and making categories:
