Final Capstone Project Reflection Questions

Engelie Lara-Faure

My Inquiry Question:
What information could I share with teens and their families, who have been affected by a diagnosis of Dyslexia
or who are looking for more information on the subject, to provide broader understanding, information,
resources and strategies from my point of view as a student who has first-hand experience navigating the
Dyslexic journey.

My Product: Website – A Teens Point of View www.dyslexiateenspov.ca

1. In the process of completing your Capstone Project, what did you learn about your subject? What did you
learn about your skill set? What did you learn about yourself?
During the process of completing my Capstone Project, I was surprised to learn that there are 7.753 billion
people on earth, and 1 in 5 of them are dyslexic. There are a number of subcategories that fall under the
umbrella of Dyslexia which are based on how dyslexia is experienced. These subcategories are: phonological,
surface, rapid naming, double deficit, visual, and deep. Each of these subcategories is associated with a specific
cluster of dyslexia symptoms. I learned that I am double deficit. I was disappointed that Canada is definitely not
a leader in understanding and supporting individuals with Dyslexia both in the school system and in the
workplace. There is very little information that I found helpful on the Dyslexia Canada website and I couldn’t
find any other Canadian site that had any value expect for the website for a school in the Fraser Valley called,
Fraser Academy which specializes in dyslexia and language-based learning differences. I found the British
Dyslexia Association’s website to be extremely helpful and informative and I used it as the basis for the fact-
based information on my website. I also used a website called Made By Dyslexia for a number of the videos that
I used for my website.

I learned through this project that I have a lot of transferable skills that can be used for jobs in the future. I have
a tendency to go all out. I’m a perfectionist and have big ideas. I like things to be exactly the way I want them to
be but I’ve learned that I need to compromise at times. Big ideas take time, time that I don’t always have. I’m
not afraid of the challenge but I struggle with the timing of meeting all the expectations that I set out for myself
so I’ve needed to learn to adjust. I’ve had to learn to breakdown big projects so that I can meet smaller
timelines and let go of some of the smaller less important details.

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 I have many great skills but for this project, my problem-solving abilities really came in handy as I had to
overcome a number of challenges at different stages of building my website. I found that this skillset served me
well in that I was able to overcome some of these challenges fairly quickly by finding a way around issues and
working through them by looking for alternative options to get me the outcome I needed. When one thing
didn’t work, I would try something else until I achieved what I wanted. The most challenging difficulty I
experienced and had to work through was in trying to put my interview video into my website. I attempted to
export my interview video through Adobe’s Creative Cloud and I ran into trouble as my account wasn’t
connecting properly so I couldn’t download it to my computer to put it directly into my Go Daddy website. This
was the method I was using up until this point. I had to find another video platform that I could upload my video
to, so that I could save it as a Vimeo video as that is the only type my website platform will accept. It required
me to setup an account, upload my video and save it to my computer as a Vimeo file. Basically, I needed to
work around the issue instead of banging my head trying to fight against my Creative Cloud account that wasn’t
cooperating.

2. How is your project relevant to you? How is it relevant to the school? How is it relevant to the community?
This project is relevant to me as I’m a student with dyslexia and I have experience navigating the challenges as
well as utilizing the rewards of Dyslexic Thinking.
I think my project can be very relevant to the school as they can learn more about Dyslexia and hopefully be able
to take some of that information and support students who have dyslexia in the classroom. I learned that there
is a British based charity called Made By Dyslexia whose mission is “…to train every school and workplace in the
world to empower Dyslexic Thinking with free training.” As identified on their website, they have “…award-
winning campaigns, inspirational events, and game-changing partnerships that have redefined Dyslexia.”
Partners like Richard Branson, Orlando Bloom, Kiera Knightly amongst others, have all participated in these
campaigns for which you will find links to some of them in my website. I was pleased to learn that through these
campaigns the words “Dyslexic Thinking” was added as a skill on LinkedIn and as a noun in the dictionary in
2022. Made By Dyslexia is “calling for every school across the world to take a day for Dyslexia and skill up using
their free online training.” I would encourage schools, like R.E. Mountain, to check out Made By Dyslexia’s
website and their campaigns to help teachers spot, support and empower every dyslexic learner in their
classroom.
My hope is that my website can be relevant to the community by providing resources and a better
understanding of what Dyslexia is.

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3. What impact did your Capstone have on you?
I already know that I am a creative person, but this project helped me to realize how I can utilize my creative
skillset as a potential job option. I took the project further than I originally planned and created not only a
website, but a personalized logo and a video to accompany my interview questions and feedback from my
interviews with my case worker and a previous teacher. This was mostly because I enjoyed what I was doing
and wanted the end product to be my vision and to the best of my ability. I now know more about myself and
my learning difficulty and know that where there are challenges there are also great strengths.

4. What aspects of your project are you most proud of?

I’m proud of my entire project from start to finish including my website, my logo and the video that I created
specifically for my website. I worked really, really, hard on this project and I think that I learned a lot about
myself, about my specific challenges in living with Dyslexia and also about different aspects of graphic arts. I set
out a goal to be finished my project before Winter break and I have accomplished my goal. I think this is what
I’m most proud of as this was one of the core competencies that I was working on.

5. What was a difficulty you encountered while researching your Capstone project? How were you able to
overcome those obstacles?
Reviewing lots of different websites and materials to gather information about Dyslexia was by far the bigger
challenge that I ran into during this project. To do this completely on my own would have been very difficult as
I’m a slow reader and this would have taken me a very, very, long time. I would have never had the time to
complete the website which was the main focus of my Capstone project. To overcome this obstacle, my mentor
and I decided at the beginning of this project that they would seek out a number of good websites and materials
on my behalf while I searched for videos. Once we had the various websites, articles and videos, I was then able
to go through them and pick out the information that I found to be most beneficial to my website to create my
content.

6. What is the one thing you would have changed about your project if you could?
I accomplished all of what I wanted and more for my project but if I had to change one thing, I may now looking
back change the website platform that I used. I used Go Daddy but I now know that there are others out there
that may have provided me with more editing options where I didn’t have to work around the restrictions of the
platform as much to get the look and feel I wanted.

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7. What advice would you offer to future Capstone students to help them with their Capstone journey?
I would suggest that student a) choose a subject that they have a connection to and not something that is
completely new and b) I would highly suggest that students create a time schedule using software such as Excel
to track the individual pieces of work (in detail) and list the deadlines for each of those pieces of work. This will
help them stay on track and meet the overall deadline for the project.

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