Pitching Our Favorite Books

An essential Media Literacy skill involves recognizing a "sales pitch." Today, our culture is immersed in biased messages that seek to shape our mindsets. They come in the form of commercials, political ads, and unsubstantiated news reports that show up in our social media feeds.  But when these skills are used effectively, we can also share information and ideas that are educational and possibly enlightening. Take for instance, our fourth grade book trailer videos.

It began as a persuasive writing project. Mrs. Aberman, Mrs. Blackley, and Mrs. Mraz taught their students the genre of opinion writing. For this assignment, students supported their writing with compelling elements of the story. In other words, no claims without evidence. But this writing assignment required only text. And a story told with only text will be written differently, than when it is told as a video. So the next phase of this writing project involved writing for a visual medium.

Students use storyboards as a guide
during the video production.

That's no small task because it requires students to rethink and rewrite their "finished" writing. So each class did a quick study of the genre of video book trailers. There are several online. Here's one example. We learned that in a visual medium, words are used efficiently. They are spoken and shown on-screen, but they are always supportive of the story that's told by each image.

Students then formed book trailer production groups, although some students worked alone, if they were the only ones to read a particular title. We created storyboards to remind us of the important story elements from our books -- character, plot, situations, etc -- that would provide a compelling hook for our teaser videos. You can read more about the storyboarding process here.

Once the storyboards were teacher-approved, students recreated the storyboard sketches with hand drawn scenes on card stock. These drawings were scanned as digital images and then brought into WeVideo, a cloud-based video editing program.

It was important for students to draw the images rather than download pictures from the Internet for two main reasons. First, it allowed for each image to match what they visualized for their production. The images were a product of their own imagination, not a result of what was made available to them via the Internet or the book's illustrator. So it helped personalize their experience with the story. Second, as creators, they owned these illustrations. Like all media content on the Internet, someone owns them. And nothing can be taken from them without their permission. It's a good lesson in digital citizenship.

As I tell all my students before we begin a video production: "When it comes to making videos, the easiest thing to do is to make a bad one." These days the tools for video production are inexpensive, accessible, and easy to use. Anyone can produce a video and share it with an audience. But it takes time and a desire to use this storytelling medium to effectively reach an audience and to get them to want to watch your video over and over again. I have watched and shared so many of these fourth grade video book trailers, over and over again. They're that good.