Sunday, January 13, 2013

Tech Challenge #9: Animoto Book Trailers

Are you looking for a way to put a new spin on the book report assignment? Why not combine your persuasive writing unit with a reading unit and ask your students to make book trailers for their library books?

Today's Tech Tool: The Computer Lab and Animoto.com




The Goal: Students will make a persuasive book trailer to tease key themes and events of their book to an audience.


The Preparation:
1. Sign up for www.animoto.com and apply for the educator license.
2. Sign up for an extra gmail account. Trust me, this is necessary!
3.  Animoto will give you an access code once they approve you for an educator license. Now you can sign up for up to 50 student accounts with that access code. What I did was to create an account for each computer in our lab. Each students using that computer each class period used a particular log in associated with my original gmail address. This way when a student finished and produced a video, it emailed me to let me know I had a video ready for me to grade.
4. Students will need to go to the library to check out books they have not read before. They loving getting to choose their own library book, and I give them 2 weeks to read their books outside of class.


The Lesson:
Day 1
1. Students fill out a braintorming page  summarizing their book, explaining the tone of their book, and creating a story board of their book trailer utilizing sketches of images they think they will need to search for that portray their stories.
Day 2
1. Students are given 1 day to search for images and save these to their folders. I encourage students to only use copyright friendly and royalty free images. Some completely ignored this request, but I tried.

Day 3-5
1. Show students how to log onto www.animoto.com
2. Have students pick out a theme that matches the tone of their book.
3. Have students change their titles from "My Animoto Video" to their first and last names. This way when the video is produced, the student name appears in the subject line of the email.
4. Show students the basic features of animot and then let them get to work!
5. Ask students to take their scripts and stagger short pieces of the script between images and video clips. The text portions of their videos should be grammatically correct and complete sentences.
6. Ask students to have their neighbor proofread their trailer for grammatical errors.

Extender
1. Hold a viewing party during 1 entire class period OR watch 2-3 trailers at the beginning of each class day for the next 2 weeks.
2. Highlight certain book trailers that utilize specific persuasive techniques and use them for class discussion.

Pros:
1. Students gets hands on technology practice.
2. Students combine several reading and writing skills into one project.
Cons:
1. Students will finish projects at different rates.
2. There may be some troubleshooting involved! So you have to be prepared for anything.

Here is a youtube playlist I created from one of my English 2 classes book trailers.



What other programs do you use to make book trailers in your classroom?

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