I present to you, my completed scrapbook:)
This semester I chose to do a digital scrapbook containing significant people, places and events from the last year and a half I have lived in Victoria. I created a page each week and chose a different theme based on off what had been happening in my life. These themes consisted of my Christmas break with my family at our local ski hill, a camping trip to Nelson with 3 of my friends last summer, my joy and love for the beauty of BC, a highlight of everyone who has impacted my life, my trip to Toronto over reading break, my cat Meow, and a collection of all my rolls of film from my first 2 years of university.
I created all the original collages on Canva and then transferred them into GoodNotes and used my iPad and apple pencil to create the hand drawn portions of each page. I enjoyed doing each of my pages with this method but as I continue my scrapbook pages on my own I think I will explore the use of other websites and maybe even invest in Procreate (it’s $18 and unfortunately I am a broke university student). I found myself wishing I didn’t have the restraints of GoodNotes as it is a Note taking app and not made for drawing, and I also wish I explored the idea of not using frames for each photo and using a flexible crop tool to add dimension, unique shapes, and layers to each page. More similar to what I created for my friend Ella’s birthday. Before starting this project I looked for a website that created online photo books but I couldn’t find one that met my needs and was free but I would have loved to be able to have it all together from the start (like you would with a real scrapbook) instead of putting the book together at the end. I think that format would be better if you did not have a distinct end date like I did.
I will say I think this would significantly harder without an iPad or some sort of technology that has a pen to draw with. If I was limited to just using my laptop or a desktop computer I would not have been able to do the hand drawn details that I think had a big impact on the pages and was the part of the creation process that I enjoyed the most.
I loved this topic, as soon as an Inquiry assignment was announced I knew I wanted to do something along the lines of an online journal. I want to have my students keep journals and I was interested in the idea of digital journals as a way to explore different aspects of technology – similar to what we did with our weekly blog responses. I chose to do a scrapbook in the end because I liked that it took something artistic and advanced it with technology as a nice cross-curricular moment.
