Digital Book Trailers

So, for about forever now, I've wanted to work with some 5th graders to make digital book reviews. Problem is I could never find the time. Finally I got tired of not finding the time and made the time. In the 15 minutes of 5th grade lunch recess, I started offering an optional "How to Make Your Own Book Trailer" gathering. We started with about 12 kids but are down to 3 diehards who come everyday, ready to add a bit to their trailer (15 minutes flies by!).

Our first one is totally finished and ready for production...


Siana worked so hard on that. Beaming with pride (both of us).

Now a bit of background logistics in case anyone wants to try it.

We used PhotoPeach because it is pretty intuitive and the kids got it. At first we played around with Animoto, but it was a bit too flashy and the free ones are only 30 seconds. We needed longer for our trailers, but in hindsight it was fun to let the kids fool around with the program and see why it wouldn't work for this project.

Our goal was to be very Presentation Zen about the images we chose and the text we used. Simple, succinct and powerful. It should pack a punch when you read it. We were inspired greatly by this trailer and this one.

For images, the best discovery via Chrissy was Compfight. Just click the 'creative commons' button at the top and it only searches those images that can be used. Cut and paste the URL's as you go along on a word document.

Something the kids learned is that it was pretty hard at first to tease out the essence of a book instead of doing a book review format. Thankfully, the kids were up for the challenge and really helped each other very organically with wording and image choice.

For all those Destiny users out there, you can embed the video right on your home page. I'm going to do this to showcase one student's work each week. One whole class of 5th graders is creating book trailers for their social issues unit, so I've got lots to showcase. And you can now embed digital content right into the catalog so when someone searches the book, a link will appear to the book trailer. So much fun to see the process and the final product.