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. 

4 Ideas Educators can Learn from Gaming

We can often hear educators discuss how difficult it is to reach students in their classrooms and keep their interest. In fact, a lot of blaming goes towards how much time students spend on video games, as well as the instant gratification of today’s society.

If you step back to think about it, what happens in video games are the very things that we as educators aspire to have in our classrooms. Maybe instead of despising video games, we should in turn learn from them. After all, it is highly unlikely that the video game industry accidentally stumbled upon the ideas of ways to get kids interested. They most likely spent a large amount of time and money in their pursuit, so why not take advantage of that.

Let’s take a look at a few of the aspects of gaming that we should aspire to have in our classrooms.

1. Risk Taking Environment - Failure IS an option -

The video game environment allows students to fail, and then try and try and try again. All of this happens within a safe environment. Teachers understand that the classroom is supposed to be a safe place, but this doesn’t just include a bully free zone. It should include the opportunity to fail, and learn from that failure and try again. The idea that “failing is bad” is what can hinder us from learning. In fact, in video games the failure seems to make the child work harder at achieving the next time around. Failure is only bad when students aren't given the chance to learn from that experience.

2. Connections to their World

Gamers know exactly what needs to be done and WHY it needs to be accomplished. It doesn't have to even be realistic for them (for example: a plumber needs to save the princess from the giant lizard). However, kids are bought in. Why are they bought into this? Because they understand the WHY. We often talk about the real world connections that we should have, but do we really bring it down to a level that they understand. We all know that the day’s of “you need to learn this, because I’m telling you it’s important” are over. What if we placed the standards and skills that the students need to learn in a mission or goal for them? It’s possible that this will make the true connection to THEIR world through THEIR eyes, not ours.

3. Missions & Objectives

Games have a clear overall mission to them. There is an end goal in sight. How do the players get to this goal? They have certain levels or stages that they go through, with checkpoints along the way. We as educators know where we are in the lesson, but do the students understand where they are within your “game”? Do they know when they have reached the checkpoint? Do they understand when they have reached an objective? Do they know how far they are from achieving the overall mission of what is to be learned?

4. Rewards

Think of the reward systems that are created in video games. Kids aren't playing them for a grade, they also aren't playing them to earn money. So why do they continue to play them? Points and Badges. They want to earn points and receive badges. Even older kids and adults want to earn the highest amount of points possible and receive a badge for their collection. Most gamers know their ranking on the Xbox Live or Playstation Network communities. Even Apple has a “Game Center” that users connect their iPhone/iPad to compare their game play against others around the world.

Why not bring this concept into your classroom. Let students earn a badge during a formative assessment, instead of always worrying about their grade. Create an environment of friendly competition and post “gamer” scores. Websites like credly.com and kahoot.it are a great starting points.

Transforming Your Classroom

Of course, totally transforming your classroom in a few days with all of these ideas is most likely not a reality. However, hopefully reflecting on some of these ideas can help make your classroom an even more engaging place to be. Successful change happens over time. Remember if it doesn’t work the first time you try one of these ideas, try it again - that’s what the gamers do.

Sharing Student Work With Parents in a Paperless Classroom

Currently one of the biggest challenges for Google Classroom or any paperless classroom is, how do I "send" the student's work home to parents. Sure you could print out every assignment the student does, but doesn't that negate the purpose of a paperless classroom? I suppose you could have the student give the parent their password to their Google account, but there have to be better options. Here are a couple ideas about keeping parents in the loop with student work.

IMPORTANT! Before any Google Apps work can be seen by parents, you will need to go to the advanced share setting and change them to, "Anyone with the link can view" This will include people outside of your school's domain.

1. Google Shornters: http://goo.gl/

Google's URL Shornter allows people to condense the long URL that a Google App creates into a much smaller version. This would allow a student to simply write down the shortened URL on paper and pass it along to their parents. It's also simple enough for most students to do without much teacher guidance or help. For example this extremly long URL that goes beyond the legnth of the address bar

becomes this in the Google Shortner: http://goo.gl/UjD7bi infact you can even make it even shorter: goo.gl/UjD7bi A student could easily write this down and take it to their parents!

2. QR Codes

QR Codes are constanly appearing more and more. They are a quick and easy way for buisnisses to guide people to their websites for more information on goods and services. They can also easily be applied to your student's work and sent home to parents. 

Similar to Google Shortner, the URL for the Google App is placed in a QR code generator, I personally use the ShortenMe extension for Chrome and a QR code will appear. 

The student would then print out this QR code and bring it home for their parents to scan on their device. This may take a few more steps than the shortner, but it may be an easier way for a younger student to take something home to mom and dad if the teacher prints it out for them.





Of course these are just 2 ideas on how to keep parents in the loop. I'm sure there are many more! If you have an idea worth sharing, please do so below.