Poetry Multimedia Assignment
If you’re teaching students poetry and you want another way for students to react than writing an essay, here’s an activity you might consider:
Materials Needed:
- Windows Movie Maker software (available with Windows XP or as a free download)
- Librivox.org (for public domain recordings of poetry)
- Wikimedia Commons (for public domain images)
Procedure:
- Students find a poem they like on Librivox.org and download the mp3 to their computer. (Or, alternatively, they can record their own version of the poem and save it as an mp3.)
- Using Windows Movie Maker, students import the poetry sound file.
- They then search for images on Wikimedia Commons and import them into Windows Movie Maker using transitions and titles to make the movie more interesting.
Remember to review copyright law and public domain with students.
Make one yourself to see how it’s done, and post a link to it in the comments section. Here’s one I made a while back:
Great assingment! And nice model! I’m doing something similar in the coming weeks, and your simplification of the process bodes much stealing 🙂
Where do you teach? What grade levels? Maybe we can set up a flat classroom poetry movie wiki….
Glad you liked it!
I teach 8th grade at a Catholic school in Spokane, Washington, USA. I’m not very familiar with the flat classroom concept, but I’d be interested in learning more.
“Flat classroom” is a silly Thomas Friedman-inspired buzzword I should strike from my vocabulary. It just means “global classroom collaboration,” web-based.
Check out the 1001 Flat World Tales (http://1001flatworldtales.edublogs.org) for one example of a Hawaii, Seoul, and Denver creative writing project we did on a wiki. It’s ongoing and always open. That blog is the “publication” of student-selected publishable works.
The wiki for the first hs workshop is here (http://burell9english.wikispaces.com), but it’s open for k-12 – self-contained workshops with whatever teachers team up around the world. The wiki might not make sense to you, but there’s a quick Screencast-o-matic overview of the project on the blog (above) on the “FWT history” page.
That’s just one example. I’m open to any ideas you might have – like simply giving a home to student poetry videos from around the world on a wiki or blog. 🙂
Those are some pretty impressive sites. I especially liked “Roots” by Jessica Yun on the 1001 Flat World Tales site. What a great idea, to use a modernized 1001 Arabian Nights as a framework for student writing. I’ll have to blog about it one of these days.
I’d love to be part of something like that with poetry videos.
(Funny to see Jo McLeay and Lynne in your MyBlogLog widget. We’re all loosely networked. They’re both “antipodeans” from Australia and NZ, and excellent bloggers and teachers.)
Well, let’s play with the idea. Too bad we don’t have same-age students. We can still make a k-12 website for worldwide poetry digital stories. Maybe even incorporate it as one more feature of the 1001 Tales – just create a “1001 Poems” page.
I don’t know. Let’s switch to email about it. clayburell[at]gmail[dot]com
Great assignment. Am borrowing the idea for a laptop course/class. Thanks!
Is there an assessment rubric with this assignment?