iMovie Book Trailers

The iPad offers many creative avenues for students to present material to teachers, classmates, and the web. Apple's iMovie App (which is free for any iPad Air owners) is one of the best tools for students to utilize.

Inside of iMovie, there is a feature where students can create Trailers. Several teachers throughout the country love this feature for the purpose of student created Book Trailers. This is an excellent alternative to the old "book report." Students also have several different publishing options for sharing outside of the classroom.

The trailer feature is a great tool for teachers because it can be used teach students several literary elements:

Genre: The student begins the process by choosing a genre to describe their type of book. Now these may not be the exact same as the genre types that you teach in your classroom, but they are closely related and could be used to show genre comparisons.

Setting & Characters: In the layout sections of the Trailer project, students will have to identify the setting of the story as well as the characters. 

This is where students can have some creative freedom. They could simply add images that they find, or create and record scenes using their device.





Story Development/Plot: As they develop their book trailer, students will have to summarize the story development. Of course, you don't want them giving away too much of the story. As stated before though, this can become a much more creative project than the standard book report.

Benefits for ELL Students: Besides the creative avenues and literary components, iMovie Trailers can be a great scaffold for your English Language Learners. The Storyboard layout section gives the students great sentence frames to follow. These can be easily modified by the students by just changing a few words, or they can be completely re-written altogether.

There are multiple benefits to allowing students to use iMovie in the classroom, the best being the student engagement that it will create for both the presenter and the viewer.