We Have a Winner! (Book Trailers)

As you know, my Year 9 class recently made book trailers for their personal reading. I set up a survey form in Docs so they could vote for the one they considered had done the best work integrating the three required features: text, image(s), and sound. The winner is...

The winner, Laird, will receive a highly coveted Twinkie from my stash.  What do you think of his work?

Promoting Literacy via Technology

This last term, our school librarian, Stephanie Ellis, and I got together to think about boys and literacy. High school boys don't like to read much, if at all. In fact, it isn't unusual to hear a boy bragging about how he "hasn't read a book all year!" Depressing, eh? So Steph and I put our heads together and came up with a multi-faceted unit to help promote literacy throughout the school. Stephanie offered up the "Read for a Feed" programme, where a class can win morning tea by reading, cumulatively, the most books for the school year (Terms 1-3). My Year 9 class had the option of using one personal reader for their second studied text for final exams. Together, we created a reading, viewing, and speaking unit that culminated in a product the whole school could use.

We (the class and I) created "book trailers" (like film previews) for our chosen books. The task was to combine text, image(s) and sound in a coherent moving image that would produce a sense of excitement in the viewer. The trailers were created in .ppt and then saved as a Windows Video File. As the boys cannot access youtube themselves, I then uploaded all of their videos to my personal account so they could create QR Codes for their books. These codes were then printed out in two sizes: one for the book cover, one for the bookcases/display areas.

Lastly, the boys each created and edited a 30-60 second video on their view of the state of technology in secondary schools (will post some of these as they finish). Some of them have come from very highly resources intermediates, so these were quite interesting! This video will be used in a presentation to the BoT next month, when Steph and I present our literacy initiative. 

 Very lastly, I created a survey in Google Drive so the boys could vote for the best trailer (prize: one of my final Twinkies!). I also surveyed them after the unit to see what they enjoyed the most (or didn't), what skills they had learnt (or taught), and what they would recommend to other students (and the BoT). I highly recommend giving it a go. Although the boys weren't too happy to be limited to creative commons (and a couple tried to get around it!), they came up with some integrated concepts. 

 Of course, the project was not without its pitfalls. The boys couldn't directly download sounds from the soundbanks, so they had to find the ones they wanted, email the links to me, and I would download them and put them into Student Data. They also cannot access youtube, so they emailed me again when their videos were completed, and I uploaded them from their network accounts. I then emailed them back the link to make the QR codes, which they printed and gave to Steph, who printed them on colour paper, laminated them, and posted throughout the library. Now all we need is wireless! Total amount of non-teaching time for me to do things they should have been able to do themselves: 6 hours (there's 30 of them; 1 of me).

Technology in 2012

Summary of technology used this year:

As you can tell from my last 2 posts, it hasn't been a banner year. I have tried, within the limitations I have, to utilise as much tech as I can, but the students themselves have so little access, that of the time they spend trying to create a project, I spend twice as much time having to create/upload/download/convert their work that it's a major turn-off. We have had very little access this year, including a 2 week period where one teacher booked our only resource for four weeks straight for word processing, and another closed their lab for an entire term so the THREE students who put together the yearbook could have the whole lab.

Ok, enough whinging.

This year, my year 13 students have utilised Prezi (for the first time for them - so proud!) to present their oral presentations. they did a great job! what wasn't great: my laptop not connecting to the data projector, the network going down during their presentation time (several days in a row, and several times in a period) and the load-time for any embedded audio/visuals.

My year 12 students have created a film study google doc for the tv mini-series they studied. This involved me having to watch several hours out of class to rip stills for them to use to illustrate their points, which was fine by me as long as they were using them. I found using google docs for collaborative work better than a wiki, because they can all create in one place at the same time.

My year 9 students have created a film wiki. They didn't enjoy this as much because 1) they couldn't access the film shorts on youtube while working on their pages, 2) only one person per group could post at one time, and 3) they couldn't upload anything to the wiki themselves; they had to wait for me to do it. What was really cool was that we were able to ask Simon Pegg questions!

My year 10 students worked with Fakebook again this year. This will be the last time I use Fakebook in class. The site requires a number of steps to be done in a certain order before the page can be saved (and edited), and they struggled greatly with this, constantly losing their pages and having to start from scratch. The student who persevered won a coveted twinkie.

Right now, my Year 9s are working on a project that our Librarian and I collaborated on. They are creating book trailers for their chosen texts. Once completed, I have to upload them to google docs myself, then email them the link so they can create a QR Code. The code is then printed for 1) the cover of the library book and 2) a space in the library that the Librarian has prepared. We decided to do this project to increase literacy, always an issue in a boys' school, and to present to the BoT what students can do when they have access.

I've also had the boys prepare a 30-60 second speeches where they state what they expected to be doing in high school (technology-wise) and how those expections have been met. I'm going to edit these speeches into one video.

When the tasks are complete (had hoped this would be done by the end of the term, but it takes me 15 minutes on our network to upload each trailer to youtube, sigh), the Librarian and I are going to request to be on the agenda at a BoT meeting and have a 2-part presentation: 1) this great project, and 2) what's really going on at our school tech-wise and a plan for what can be done about it.

And that pretty much sums up this year.