The End of a Great Time

Image taken from here and modified here.

   We have came to an end with the posts about my university course assignments. The end of the term is coming soon and this will be my last assignment, to write a final blog.

   I have deeply enjoyed writing these blog posts and doing other tasks with friends. I will still post other things but I feel a weird sadness that I can not really explain. In this post I will reflect upon my experiences with this course and how it helped me get a deeper understanding of technology.

   Before I took this course I did not really think about how I would integrate technology to my future classes. After this course however, I learned of many ways to add technology to my lessons. I have thought about how I can get my students to do a podcast or write a blog like myself. I have done many things, like writing a blog during this course, that I would have never done without any recommendation or obligation and I enjoyed every moment I did them. This fact helped me to see that I can help my students to experience this enjoyment too.

   Of course I liked some assignments more than others. I have done a digital story with a friend which was immensely long and fun. We needed to solve a lot of problems during it and when we managed to solve them it felt like as if we have completed a puzzle. We could also show a lot of creativity because the only limit we had was on the time department. Making a podcast on the other hand was less fun than this. Because we had lots of limitations like time, word and sound effects we could not enjoy it as much.

   Despite its helpfulness this course was pretty frustrating at times. I never liked restrictions on my school life. I would get really angry during exams or projects where we had lots of constraints, especially word limits. I think this course can be more free on a couple of areas. Podcast assignment could be extremely better if we did not have as many limitations as we did. Just a five minute podcast with 2 to 4 people and no topic or content limitations could give way to extremely quality content like it did in former courses of us.

   Apart from these I am very happy to have taken this course and I will keep posting about other things.

   Thanks for reading and walk tall.

 

The Terrifying Assassin and First Digital Storytelling Experience

 

   As another university assignment we were given a task to create a digital story. I have prepared this story with Muhammet Berkay Seçer who have helped me in most of my tasks.

   We were supposed to create a story with images or video footage and with dubbing. Our story was supposed to be longer than two minutes.

   We used Pixton to create images for our story and Vegas Pro to edit it together. We first wrote the script and created the images relevant to it with pixton. Then, we recorded our lines. I recorded my voice through the pre-existing sound recorder of my computer and my friend Berkay recorded his lines through his phone. Then we combined our voices, images and sound effects and edited it accordingly.

   Pixton was very useful for this task. It consisted all the materials we needed for our story. It was a bit complex to use at first but we quickly got used to it. We also did not have any problems in voice recording. Editing the content took longer than any other part but thanks to Berkay's experince with the program, Vegas Pro got all the things we needed done.

   Digital storytelling was the best task we have done in our course. We were able to use our creativity freely because we only had limitations on time and nothing else. I will definitely assign a similar project to my future students. With proper help and guidance I am sure that students will create extremely creative and quality content.

   Overall, I think it is a must to try to create a digital story.

   You can check out my friend Berkay's blog here.

   You can watch our digital story here.

   Thanks for reading and walk tall.

The Poster of My Dreams

 

   Recently I have created a poster as a university course assignment. In this assignment we were supposed to do the assignment alone so I do not have any friends I will mention.

   I used Canva as a tool to prepare my digital poster. Canva was pretty helpful in completing my assignment. It was easy to use and had more than enough features altough some of them required paid subscriptions. The ones that were not free were actually the things I needed but I managed to make do without them. Overall the project did not take long to finish thanks to Canva and my creativity.

   The poster is actually a magazine cover. It is about rock music in Turkey. I have written things that I would want to see in a Turkish Rock magazine. I mentioned some of my favourite musicians such as Hayko Cepkin and Barış Manço. After doing this assignment I wished that somewhere, someone would actually make this magazine real because I want to read something like that so much.

   If we come to the pedagogical side of things, I will probably assign my students a similar task in the future. Maybe with the support of art teachers I could get my students to prepare posters of their own dreams and help them improve their creativity.

   I recommend preparing a digital poster anytime.

   You can check my poster here.

   Thanks for reading and walk tall.