Learning Diaries

Creating something aesthetic can be really difficult sometimes. Especially if you're indecisive like me. But the taste of accomplishment is priceless once you finish it! :) According to option 1 of our task, I have made a movie poster based on a novel, as if my book is being into a movie and I'm responsible for its advertising. Option 2 was to make a magazine cover. I didn't choose it because it seemed to be more detailed and required more creativity.  The very first thing that I've done was deciding on the book. That was real trouble for me. Whenever I chose a book, others got offended. At last, I chose Landline by Rainbow Orwell. If you ask the reason, first of all, Orwell is an enthusiastic writer and you can clearly see this in her work. She always tries to write differently so her plots are unique. The story begins with Georgia's refusal to visit her family at Christmas with her husband, Neal and two children because of her work. Neal and kids go and she keeps ...

Discovering new programs and their new technological features are priceless. I've tried a few times editing videos and each time I was like: someone, please give me more videos to edit! I was so proud of my work and thirsty for making more. That's why I fell in love with digital storytelling.  But what exactly is digital storytelling? It's the art of combining storytelling with some mixture of digital graphics, text, recorded audio narration, video, and music to communicate information about a specific theme or topic. They are not over 5 minutes most often told in first-person narrative, sometimes recorded with your own voice, illustrated mostly with still images, and with an optional music track to add emotional tone. I wrote a story about a cat saving another cat and being besties.  In the first place, I created an e-book , then made a youtube video .  I also made a storytelling template. Since I used free version of the editting program, a surprise awaited me in the e...

I’ve never heard of Wiki pages until this week. As one of the tasks of our instructional technologies and material design course, this week, we were supposed to watch a film and write a review as if it was for a school magazine. After posting it by creating a new page under the wiki page given by our teacher, we were supposed to visit another page, and ask a question about the reviewed film and answer a question that is asked on our page. Before keeping on talking about the task, I want to clarify what a wiki page is. This term is a derivation of a Hawaiian phrase: wiki-wiki and it means quick. A wiki is a collaborative website whose content can be edited (with permission) by visitors to the site (Chao, 2007). A wiki is like a public website, or public webpage, started by one person, but visitors can add to, delete or change it as they wish. They can be a great source of information especially when the information is intended to be modified and enhanced as part of a collaborative eff...

I’m pretty sure that every second language learner has heard of podcasts. They are digital media files that can be on any topic and can include music and video. They can be authentic or specially made for language learners (Dudeney & Hockly, 2007). What I love about podcasts is they are simple to use. You can easily download on your mobile phone and listen to them anywhere, anytime. This week, I dawned that they are easy to create as well. Thus  I would definitely recommend creating and listening to podcasts to my students.  Our task was to create a podcast and we had three options: Option 1 was about creating a chant of 1 minute.   We would choose a character from a fable, story or a fairytale, create an 8-10-line song and sing it to a podcast. Option 2 was about coming up with a radical, inspiring, controversial idea to make the world a better world to live in and explaining it in exactly 60 seconds which I think is quite difficult to make. You know, not 59 se...