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For My digital literacies pathway, I will do the tinkering path, where I mainly chose the visual assignment from Ds106. I did the first part already and you can find it here, so please find the second part below:

1-“My Dream Vacation”

2- “The room of my dream”

3- “Bucketlist”

4-“Googledraw”

5- “Your Love of your pet”

6- “Splash the colors”

This assignment was very interesting to me, because I love anything with pictures and editing. And the topics were very nice because I wrote about Things I already had in mind.

Through out this course, I learned several new things, the main one being the difference between digital literacies and digital skills. I didn’t even know what is digital literacy is and how important it is for everyone to know. This assignment or reading Digital Literacy helped to explain and show how important digital literacy is. Also, something I learned about and I know I will use in my future life is fake news and how to differentiate between fake news and real news , after finding out thatTrump’s video where he was talking about “the kaaba” was actually fake , I began to check everything I see to make sure that it has wasn’t fake. I personally learned a lot from this course, but those were the two main things.

If I were to show someone my learning in this course, i would show them my digital narrative game , because it was my first time to do something like that, and I was so proud of myself. I will also show them my ALTCV , because I found it very interesting to show our interests and our hobbies only using photos.

If I could change 2-3 things about the course to improve it, I would assign less blog posts , because I find it too time consuming to write a blog posr every class.

I think anyone should take this course, because its very interesting and very light not like other courses that makes students stressed.

When I had to make a choice between two readings or something , I always chose what i felt was more interesting. The freedom of choosing between readings was something I valued so much in this course.

Throughout the course we used multiple tools and applications , and most of them were newly introduced to me. In this reflection , I’m going to talk about my favorite tools and how did they affect me.

Slack

Slack was one of the first tools that were introduced to me at the beginning of the semester. Slack is an application we use to communicate with each other, it is similar to whatsapp and other social media applications but without using numbers. It was easier to communicate on slack, because it was divided into different channels for different topics and assignments we do and it was also easier to communicate with our professor .

Zoom

After transitioning online, most of my courses even my training has been on zoom. Zoom is an online platform that acts like facetime and skype but it is easier to use and anyone can use it. It has been very helpful because it makes it easier to discuss and communicate with out classmates but not through chatting , although zoom also has a chatting part. I personally think that I used zoom the most from the tools i use, and it is also my favorite.

WordPress

At the beginning of the course we were asked to create an account on WordPress , to post our weekly blogs on it. I did not know how to use it in the beginning but by time , I got a hold on it and its never been easier to write a blog post.

Soliya Exchange Portal

Soliya is an online platform used for communication between people all around the world , to discuss anything they want. Soliya was divided into four sessions,and every session we discuss a new topic.But,I had a problem with their website because I always had technical difficulties to log in, but overall it was not a bad experience.

Google slides

I always used google slide for presentations but never to create a game. After doing the digital narrative game, I can say that google slides has many more functions than it shows or seems to do, also google forms has the same functions. This made me realize that all the tools I use can be used differently only if I researched and looked into it because I’ll find more functions to it.

At the beginning I thought it will be a boring movie because I was watching for a course, but I actually liked it. I always thought how do the companies know that we talked about them and in a minute i find their ads online, and I also thought about that how does Facebook always know everything about me. After watching the movie I understood how technology actually works and the fact that they also use it for elections, to gather more votes. I personally think that if Cambridge analytica took consent from the companies that they can use their users data ,it wont be Cambridge analytica problem but the applications or companies they use.

Cambridge analytica helped Trump to win the elections by helping his campaign to know more about the personalities of the citizens to know how to make them vote for Trump, using their online persona. I think this movie will make me rethink about what I want to share online and to read the terms and regulations of any software or application I will be using to make sure they do not use the info I post about myself without my consent.

I think the object or thing that helped me through this crisis , would be my dog ,Gucci. Gucci helped me deal with this crisis because i spend more time with her nowadays and she makes it bearable because i was never the type of person to stay at home and not go out.

I don’t think that I have a social group that helped me through these times but I guess I could say that me and my friends we have a group for skin and hair care and this is the one that helped somehow because I have plenty of time now to take care of my hair

Before attending soliya, I didn’t like the idea of having to talk to people all around the world , that I don’t even know. In my first session, everyone introduced themselves and everyone would give some brief information about themselves,and then Anna and Ahmed, the facilitators, introduced themselves. Then we started discussing the difference between a dialogue, a debate, and a conversation. What surprised me the most, because I thought that a dialogue is the same as a conversation, that how a lot of them knew the difference but some were like me, We were asked by our facilitators , Ahmed and Anna, to describe ourselves in five things that affect who am i today, and when I said that my religion plays a big role in my life, because of what we do and what we can not do, but some of my colleagues were surprised by how my religion affects me and they kept asking me about it, at the end of the session, we chose what topic that we will discuss the next session. I missed my second soliya session, due to a midterm that I had at the same time of the session, but I attended another session , it was a conversation on well-being during Covid-19, it consisted of people all over the world too, we were a lot in the zoom meeting , not like in soliya where we are only 8 people. The session went as how I thought it would, that everyone all around the world is going through the same things and feeling that same thing based on age groups, because all of us are going through the same pandemic. I went an hour late to my third session, because of technical issues, but the facilitators actually were very nice, and they understood and they filled me in on what i have missed. We were supposed to choose a topic too discuss, and I recommended to discuss organ trade, I thought that it was a very interesting topic but one of my colleagues suggested another one that I liked and actually chose. In our fourth and last session we discussed the topic we chose last week, that I don’t actually remember, then at the end we started to reflect on soliya and how we feel about it, and we bid our goodbyes and thank everyone.

Overall I think Soliya was a good experience, but I think it needs more sessions because it was a very short time to get to know others and to feel comfortable to start talking to them, but also I think the 2 hour session is too long , like I would rather have 6 or 8 sessions than 4 , but each one of them would have a length of one hour maximum.

After the feedback I’ve got i tried to add more scenarios , but the problem is that i didn’t know how to connect them all together to form a game, i even asked some of my relatives that are living abroad about scenarios that happened in front of them , but all the scenarios didn’t connect, so I couldn’t add a lot of the scenarios i found. But, the idea of creating a digital narrative game about real life situations , made me like it so much because it made me open my eyes on a lot of things , and I will do more games on it in the future but i will choose a topic that has more scenarios to create a better game.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1i5PziTjQnz_ZA22548FUnpcT9c60naZoEtAleiddqbM/edit?usp=sharing

At first I had something else in mind, I wanted it to be more professional and I had a lot in my mind but it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be , because the scenarios weren’t fitting right. So, I decided to change the game to what type of elderly person would you be , while going through a pandemic

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1i5PziTjQnz_ZA22548FUnpcT9c60naZoEtAleiddqbM/edit?usp=sharing

Going through a pandemic wasn’t something I thought I’d ever go through. I didn’t take covid-19 very serous at the beginning , until the lock-down started and university gave us a holiday. I also used to laugh at the memes made , how my parents took it very serious, and how everyone went to the grocery store and literally bought everything. Until I saw this video , that went viral about a grandparent , i think so, that didn’t find anything in the supermarket . This video made me so sad , because imagine not being able to go out and you don’t have enough necessities to keep living. This made me want to do a game to make people that didn’t go through this pandemic , feel how we felt not being able to go out and having limited food and house supplies.

Its actually my first time to try online teaching / courses , and i don’t personally like it but I have to go through it , i mean that i wouldn’t recommend it. After reading the module , the part about role of the learner , i agree with that I have to get involved with the teachers and tell them if something isn’t explained well , and also i like that after the online courses , i will be more independent in my studies. I also liked the challenges and opportunities game , it showed how we can find an opportunity in something we aren’t familiar with.

Having a section about tips and tricks for people taking online courses during covid-19 , was very informative , because that is the main reason we are taking all our courses online. They also added a resources section , which has resources that will help to go through the online courses if there is any platform we cannot use , such as blackboard for example , they inserted a YouTube video that helps explain how to use it. I think this online module is very informative and i think it should be sent to all students , to help them understand how to cope with the online courses.