Animoto



**Creating book trailers using Animoto.** When teaching Language Arts, I always found at least one student who was a reluctant reader. There's no silver bullet for getting kids to read, but I often found that these kids had trouble finding books that interested them and to become a better reader, these students need to read and often. Reluctant readers visit the library and are faced with shelves and shelves of books. Much of the time, these students would grab a book that was on display, check to see if it was a "boy" book or a "girl" book and then go to the circulation desk to check out. This is unfortunate because chances are, they won't like the book because it doesn't interest them. It was a quick grab and no thought went into selecting the book. The book may not be at their reading level and selecting it was just an opportunity to get the book choice over with quickly. After all, these kids don't like to read so choosing books doesn't bring them much joy. One way I have found to help students find books that interest them is to give book talks. A book talk is a way of presenting a book, telling the setting, main characters, and the conflict or problem, but not it's solution. You don't want to give away the ending because your main purpose for giving the book talk is to entice others to read the book. A traditional book talk is usually about five minutes long.

Book talks are usually presented in front of an audience. You can take this a step forward and make it digital. Making a book talk digital eliminates forcing students to stand in front of the class to present because the presentation is made in advance and can be shown on an interactive white board screen, posted to a blog, or a webpage. Having students create their own digital book talks allows them to show their knowledge and understanding of a book and also taps into their creativity. There are lots of mediums you can use for this: iMovie, movie maker, and Photo Story are just a few. In this article, I am going to discuss creating book trailers using Animoto.

Book trailers are another form of a book talk. Book trailers are similar to the movie trailers we see at the beginning of a movie. Animoto is perfect for this. Animoto is user friendly free technology that allows students to combine images, words, photographs, and music to share what they have learned and understand. Animoto has a rotate, spotlight, and duplicate tools to enhance images and you can add two lines of text to each slide. Animoto also has a large library of Creative Commons (copyright free) music you can add to your presentation. Finishing your video is called rendering. To do this you can choose three resolutions for faster or slower paced presentations. Mistakes can be fixed by using the editing tool to generate a new video. When the presentation is finally finished, you will get a link to the video emailed to you so you can share with others. This is how students may share their book talk with their class. No more standing in front of the room, no more shy kids hating presentations, no, you are giving your students the gift of creativity and the flexibility to use their strengths to show what they know. Ideally, you would create a rubric to evaluate these book trailers and share the rubric with your students prior to beginning the project. Here's how to use Animoto to create a book trailer.

= Ideas for Use:  = = Making a Book Trailer Using animoto =

** 1. Set the tone ** - select a theme and your music.
Next, use a story board to plan out your book trailer and plan out your script. Digital book trailers are much shorter in length than a traditional book talk so you will probably only need one minute's worth of material. That doesn't sound like a lot, but it is.

**2. Collect images and/or videos** - Collect images that will show what you want to share about your book. You will get these from the internet so save the URLs so that you can put them in your credits. Students probably won't be able to find the actual images from their book so they have to be creative. Have them look for images that show a concept or a theme from the book. Make sure the images and/or video used compliment the theme and are appropriate.

**3. Plan your structure** - Make sure your book trailers have a **beginning, middle,** and an **end.** Students are telling a story, they are just leading the reader up to a point, and then dropping them to entice them to read the book.

**4. Use a concise script** - Interactive book trailers are not long so the wording will be in bits, probably not complete sentences. Students will need to be to the point, not wordy.

**5. Review and edit** - Once students have created their video, they can peer edit with another student or conference with you to make sure their video meets the requirements of the rubric.

Finally present the interactive book trailers in class and post to your blog or class web page. Another great idea is to make QR codes for each Interactive Book Trailer. You can also make photo copies of the book covers for each Interactive Book trailer and paste the QR code to it. Then have students use iPads and QR codes to view the trailers. Have a Gallery Walk so that other classroom can use the QR codes to view the book trailers.

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