Earlier this year, the GMHS English department received two carts of MacBook Airs to use in our classrooms. These have been, overall, a wonderful resource, but integrating them has not come without bumps. One of my most recent bumps was my first attempt to use iMovie for my classes.
I am teaching honors American Lit, and we are studying the authors from the modern era. I decided that perhaps these students could handle one of my favorite modernist poems,
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot. It is a poem with complexity and depth, using beautiful but bleak imagery and representative of the disillusionment that so many of the authors from the early 20th century expressed. It's not a love song in any traditional sense, and Eliot goes to some length to write a poem that is vastly different from what the reader might expect. This seems apropos for my first foray into using iMovie in my classroom.
To my delight, I had discovered an audio file of Eliot himself reading the poem! I had quickly purchased it from iTunes, with a grand plan: we would read the poem, then students would create a movie by using the audio file of Eliot reading the poem and overlaying it with pictures taken from internet searches. The pictures they used would capture not only the actual descriptions from the poem but also its tone and meaning. My students would be able to hear the poet, have to work with the text, and show they understood the overall impact of the poem (not just its individual parts). They would be able to upload their movies to youtube to share with their classmates and compare their interpretations. Having already used the macs in my classroom this year, I expected my students to pick up on this and enjoy working with the poem, turning out some wonderfully illustrated poetic results.
The result was far from what I expected.
In fact, although the lesson was not entirely unsuccessful - my students do know more about Eliot & Prufrock's love song - the movie making was a failure. But it was one of those necessary failures that provided helpful insights for when (and it is my hope!) I try it again. On reflection, here are some of the reasons for my failure.
1. I did not leave enough time. Because my students are good at putting together PowerPoint presentations and finding images for them, I naively thought we could read a poem, find pictures, and create a movie in a 90 minute block. This was definitely not the case. In order for this to be a successful lesson, we would have needed, at the minimum, three full class blocks. Part of this was also because...
2. The poem was too long. Eliot's reading of his love song is over 8 minutes. This meant that students had to find, many MANY images on their own in order to adequately fill the time of the poem.
3. Students are still learning how to use the MacBooks, so they need time to figure out how to edit movies. Even if I do not give them direct instruction on this - and I'm not sure they would have needed me to - they
did need time to play with the program and figure out how to help them complete their task well.
4. I had tried uploading the audio file, but had not experimented with inserting graphics, so I was not entirely prepared for the time it would take students to download pictures to be uploaded to iMovie.
What will I change?
1. Pick a shorter work or divide a longer one up into shorter sections.
2. Make it a group project from the outset. It occurred to me halfway through the students working on finding images that I would end up watching 40 videos, each 8 minutes long. I realized I did not have that kind of time available to me. Nor would my students watch each others' videos at that length of time.
3. I will split the task itself into parts: a) find images first, b) work with the images or sort them before beginning the movie project, c) add audio, d) set timing of pictures and work on transitions.
4. I will provide more time and plan for a way to share and analyze the final products.
Working with technology often brings the unexpected. I know that even if I had tried to create an entire movie myself ahead of time, I would not have caught all the hiccups that would come with the project. That's okay. I'm willing to try to integrate technology, knowing it won't always work perfectly. My students are at differing levels of familiarity with technology and with macs, which means I need to be available to help them try to figure it out. And I am.
But trying new technology also means I need to be willing, occasionally, to admit temporary defeat. One such moment came when a student who had diligently sought for pictures, downloaded and added them to her project, and worked with the audio for an hour had 30 seconds to show for it and finally begged, "Can we just stop?"
Yes. But we'll try again another day.
Have you ever wanted to just write freely about anything in the world? That's what the students in Ms. Barry's Language Arts class have been doing. In the midst of studying poetry, Ms. Barry has empowered her students to write free verse poems on a topic of their choice. Not only did her students get the chance to work collaboratively with other classmates, but they also had the opportunity to use technology to enhance their poems with Google Story Builder.
The students were each tasked with creating a free verse poem with at least one other student. Their criteria was to use at least three different elements of poetry such as a simile, metaphor, alliteration, personification, rhyme, etc. After the students wrote their poem in their groups, they typed their poems onto a designated slide in a Google Presentation to share with the rest of the class. Then, each group was encouraged to build a Google Story poem which allowed them to create a video of their poem, add music, and demonstrate their contribution to the poem. Students claimed that they enjoyed using Google Story Builder because it allowed their poems to come to life. They said that the video made the poem captivating and the music set a meaningful tone for the poem. This ultimately made the poems more powerful and more engaging.
