Hello again, its me! I don’t know who else it would be, but at least you know now that I have not been replaced by a doppelgänger. Probably. Anyways…

Our latest Maker project was an exploration on podcast creation and storytelling. For our product, we made a short podcast episode about something/s that has happened to us, and in doing so learn about creating a podcast and how to tell a story. It went alright. I made a story about my experiences with a yearly event my school does and it was okay. My story wasn’t the most engaging or fun, but it had some decent plot elements and would probably be bearable if you had to listen to it. If you want to take a listen here it is on Spotify:

It was actually a decent amount of fun creating the podcast and I learned a lot of good techniques that I can use to improve my workflow in the future, using speech to text to write the script being a prime example. It was also useful to review and refine my storytelling skills.

I have some critiques about the project itself, but I’ll start with some more of the good stuff:

  • Fun: This project allowed me to create some fun cover art and make some funky background music.

My cover art for this episode

  • Creativity: It allowed for huge amounts of personalization and choice, which is always nice and it can definitely help me express myself sometimes.
  • Storytelling: Definitely a good focus and a hugely important skill for life, both in school, out, and after.
  • Revision: There was definitely an emphasis placed on revision and improving your own work

But I definitely found somethings in this project didn’t fit right with me:

  • The criteria of this project was very shallow and just felt incomplete in some ways. The main problem was that the assessment section was not completed nor the learning evidence in the project guide
  • It just felt rushed is what I’m trying to say, the final product is kind of odd after just doing a much more sophisticated podcast. It was all just too simple, and felt a little incomplete

I also have a little bit of (hopefully) constructive feedback:

This whole project felt like an introduction to the topic and that what I think it should be. I think having this project as an extended launch into podcasting would work well at the start of the year, before some of the later projects that could build off of what we learnt in this one and save some time doing so. Also there was a lot of emphasis placed on the podcast itself, which is okay, but its the storytelling that really matters I think, and a deeper dive into that at the start of the year would be good. 

Having the stories be from our life is a bit odd too; treating this like a launch activity would allow for potentially having the stories be personal choice, ranging from fiction, to interests, to whatever we can imagine instead of having to think of that one cool thing that happened to us once. (Although that is still a good prompt).

Thanks for reading, I know this was a bit of a change of pace from normal but it’ll be back to normal next time. Bye!