I did something I thought I could never do: I published a podcast! 🥳

 Hello again, my Dear Reader!

    

    It’s been a while. I was busy with my midterms (and essays, presentations, a couple of tasks… 😫), but I am back now with a much-anticipated project: the podcast I was telling you about! 

    My good friend Elena Çetinkaya (Click here to visit her blog. She is so cool, I love her!! 💙) and I wrote, narrated, and edited a short story for our podcast. The Melody of the Forest is a one-episode short story about three friends, a peculiar cat, and a special melody - with sound effects! You can click HERE or scroll down to the end of this post to listen.

    We had so much fun -and a few difficulties- while creating our podcast. For example, did you know the university buildings were locked on Sundays? We didn’t. 🙃 So we met on Göztepe Campus to record our podcast, but every faculty building was locked except the library. After a “What are we supposed to do now?” crisis, we recorded our podcast in the library BATHROOM, haha. 

    Standing in a bathroom with a laptop and a microphone felt so silly, we had to make a few takes until we could narrate the story without laughing. I was extremely anxious about recording myself !!for publication!! but this project turned into a fun activity with a dear friend really fast. Adding the sound effects was slightly harder since we weren’t familiar with editing but we still had so much fun with it, and everything came together beautifully. We felt like producers, haha!

    We used Vocaroo for recording, Pixabay for getting copyright-free sound effects, Audacity for editing, and Podbean for publishing. I can recommend all of these websites and apps if you want to create a podcast yourself.

    As it is the custom with these tasks, I thought about my future students and how a task like this might help them. One major advantage that I came up with is the creativity! This task forced us to be creative in every step (even figuring out we could use the bathroom to record was creative in its own way) and we ended up with a product that is completely ours. 

    Another advantage of a podcast task is, of course, the fact that our students are SPEAKING English! Which is the whole point! 

    I would love to try this task with my students one day. I think high schoolers would have so much fun with it.

with love, Bea x