Using Animoto for Book Trailers

As the school year comes to a close, my students are preparing for their final project: The Book Trailer! This project was developed by my predecessor, the wonderful Lisa Stringfellow, using reading, writing, and digital literacy skills. This project uses many reading skills including visualizing, summarizing, determining importance, and finding theme, mood, tone, and symbols. Since students are using online resources to find their images, they are also asked to follow all copyright and fair use rules that we discuss throughout the year. On top of that, there is writing involved that assesses the grammar skills that we study. It's a wonderful way to wrap up the year with a technology based project. We end the year with Book Trailer viewings and vote for our favorites in a big celebration. I love classroom celebrations!

I use animoto's free educator account. You can apply for an educator account that will give you access to 50 student accounts. It can be a little complicated to set up (I give students dummy email addresses that I set up so that I can monitor their progress more closely), but the program itself is pretty simple to use. I definitely recommend making your own video first to get a feel for the program and troubleshoot any potential issues.

Check out a great example!

STEM and Reading with the Book Box

I am always looking for ways to collaborate with other teachers and connect student experiences across our curricula. This year, the science teacher at my school and I were able to connect our very different units: circuits and electricity with visualizing and determining importance in a text.

The project, The Book Box, asked students to create a diorama of an important scene from their reading books and use a Christmas light connected to a battery to emphasize an important part of the scene. The projects were amazing! My school also has a Fab Lab maker space, and students worked in the Fab Lab to build their items and even 3-D print props!

This is definitely a project that I look forward to for next year!

An opening scene from The Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen.

An important scene from Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls.

Teaching with the 4 C's

I have made a very conscious effort to increase my thoughtful implementation of the 21st Century Skills into my curriculum. True, every teacher will offer creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication within their curriculum, often without trying, but I wanted to make sure that I am focusing on these skills in purposeful ways.

Anyway, we completed our big reading projects for our Fall Battle of the Books recently. Students must read at least 4 books from a list of 12 within about 2 months. The book list is varied in terms of interest, genre, and ability, so most students find at least one book that they absolutely love. Our final reading projects were very open-ended. The only requirements were that students presented a summary of the most important plot points and a description of the main characters. Students could choose to work individually or with 1 or 2 friends. They could also present the information in any way that they wanted. I was so excited for presentation day!

While there were still a high number of Google slideshows, there were also some extremely creative skits, songs, drawings, and even a video game using Scratch! (We had recently completed our Hour of Code with Code.org and one student definitely found his passion!)

My teacher goal of 2017: more student choice and more open-ended assignments to foster the natural growth of 21st century skills.