Video Trailer (Artifact 1)

The Wow Factor

When I heard that our assignment was to create a movie trailer for a book or to introduce a new unit of study, I thought to myself, ‘Is this professor out of his mind! I can’t do that!’ Then looking at some examples helped ease my jitters. Those jitters rose back up when I heard that most people like to use apple apps to do this sort of stuff. I’m not an Apple user but I know a couple of kiddos in my house that are!

I was excited about the topic. Native Americans. My students were about to start reading a nonfiction piece called The Athabascans:  The Old Ways and News Ways. Then they would read a fiction book called The Year of Miss Agnes. We had also read about different Native American tribes in Social Studies so I figured I would do a book trailer for the Athabascans.

I used the iMovie app for Apple. It is a pretty cool and simple app. It comes preloaded with a few movie trailers or you can start from scratch and make your own. I think find the photographs and thinking about how I wanted them put together took longer than actually inserting them and creating the trailer.

My students went wild! They were so excited and couldn’t wait to begin reading! I share the 1 minute clip with them on Classroom Google and every so often throughout the unit I would catch them playing it over and over! It was quite cute to them this excited. I’m going to have a difficult time topping that for the next unit!

Check out my final product: