Having recently purchased Imovie for our iPads, Mrs. Camarda and myself decided to utilize the pre-made trailers within Imovie as a tool for teaching students to summarize a novel. Mrs. Camarda utilized an audio book version of "The Twits" by Roald Dahl to read the story to students, in class. They then completed several comprehension activities with in the classroom.
Mrs. Camarda and I then sat down to plan how we would introduce the idea of creating a movie trailer to the students. We decided to have the students create a storyboard that showed, in detail each scene they would film. We asked them to think about the important events in the book and how those events would look were you to view them in movie format. Each trailer comes pre-made with background music and captions which students could edit. The students were told to choose a particular style of trailer and then to plan out their scenes using the storyboard we provided to them. Students were given two periods to create their storyboards and to plan out their props, etc.
The filming was completed in the library. The different groups were able to spread out and utilize different areas of the library for their scenes. Many of the students created some pretty impressive props which included wings for the bird and a real pie. Students were then given three class periods to film their scenes, and edit their work. Students were very excited about the project and worked well with each other. They began to get creative with their work. In one instance students made balloons out of construction paper then laid them on the floor and a student pretended to hold on to them to create the appearance that he was flying. Other students utilized the screen shot feature in the iPads to take images from the web, edit them using our photo editing app, then insert these images into their trailers. One group asked to utilize an app that puts beards on people to insert an image of Mr. Twit into their work. There were very few conflicts, etc.
The end result has been extremely positive. The trailers are well done and students have shown a general enjoyment of the project.
We asked several students what they feel they have learned from this project. The following are direct quotations from the students.
"I learned that in a group you can't use all of your own ideas you have to compromise."
"Things have to get cut out sometimes or changed if you want to finish the project."
"There's a lot we can do with an iPad."
"Summarizing is hard you really have to focus on the important parts because not everything can fit in the trailer."
Mrs. Camarda and I talked about these comments after the students had left and we were impressed with their perceptions of the learning. They weren't interested in reciting facts to us rather the students mentioned learning life skills like creativity, flexibility and the ability to cooperate. We feel the project has been very successful and hopefully we will post several of the trailers here for people to view.
