While revisiting Task 1: What’s in my Bag?, I thought about the purpose of the assignment. My favourite thing about the task was getting to know a little bit more about my classmates, their interests, and their everyday lives by seeing the different items they carry on a regular basis. My goal with the redesign was to stay true to the original task and use a personal object to convey information about myself, but to use a different medium. I decided to change up the assignment by focusing on a single item in my bag and using it to inspire a short audiovisual story about something that is important to me, why it is important, and how it influences my actions. I made the video using the In Shot video editing app on my iPhone, then uploaded it to Tik Tok as a way to share it. I had intended to spend some time learning how to use Tik Tok this summer so I could incorporate it as a teaching tool in my lab this fall, and this task gave me the push I needed to figure it out.
Something I enjoyed about this redesign is how specific I could get. I was able to target a single item in my bag, then a specific feature of that item, and use that feature to tell a story. This could be done for any item in any person’s bag, and I think each of us could come up with dozens of different stories that somehow relate to the physical items we carry with us. I spent quite a long time deciding which item to use and which story I wanted to tell. Perhaps a fun future project would be to make a series of short videos; possibly one video for each item in the bag. One of the best parts of redesigning the task to an audiovisual medium was how easy it was to insert my personal humorous touches. I feel like using my voice instead of text to convey my story made it more personal.
Some of the challenges I encountered with the redesign included learning how to voice-over a video with multiple short clips and making sure that I had the right video clips to fit my narrative. It was very time-consuming and had specific hardware and software requirements (e.g. camera, microphone, editing software, internet access) that would need to be taken into consideration if I were to incorporate this type of activity into my classroom.
Overall, I thought that mode-bending was a very useful exercise. The products of both Task 1 and Task 7 fulfilled the same purpose, but the process of creating them used different skill sets.
@that.biology.teacher What can the itwms in my bag tell you about my interests? This video is part of ETEC 540 Task 7.