The Plastıc Crısıs ıs a Human Crısıs

 Recently, my friend Zeynep Naz İnalkaç and I prepared an exciting assignment: creating a digital story. Our content type had to be a public service announcement, and we chose sustainability, specifically plastic pollution and its environmental impact, as our main video theme. To be honest, we struggled a bit while creating our content because we needed to summarize such a detailed topic. We used Canva to edit our visual and video content. We found royalty-free images and background music. We experimented a lot to accurately capture the video flow and integrate our audio recordings into the video. But despite these challenges, we really enjoyed it because we were confident we were creating a high-quality video. Laughing at our design experiments and technical mistakes at the end of the day made the assignment a truly enjoyable and memorable experience.

The biggest advantage of this assignment for us was that it significantly enhanced our digital creativity, visual literacy, and problem-solving skills in a highly engaging format. This also takes real-world problems out of the realm of theoretical knowledge. The challenging part of the assignment was the technical aspects of video editing and integrating audio recordings with visuals. And besides the technical challenges, the topic we chose needed to be conveyed concisely so as not to give a complex message.

I will definitely give this assignment to my future students as well. Despite the technical problems we encountered, this assignment greatly improved our Canva and editing skills, and brought us to the level of real-world learning we aimed for.

You can check out our final video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jUS-kn_Lgg