Multimedia Authoring, with Shakespeare…

Year 5  were studying Romeo and Juliet.  There was a small group of children in the class who were really struggling to get  their ideas, responses and their words onto paper alongside the rest of the class. The class teacher thought we might make podcasts with this group eg: interviews with characters, “What is the most tragic thing about this story?”  or video diary entries from the Montagues and Capulet families; but in the end we thought it would work better with multimedia authoring using either Book Creator or Glogster.We decided to use Book Creator.

Book Creator is an app on Windows and iPads which allows the user to include sound files, videos, images, drawings and text  as well as shapes and speech bubbles in their work and is excellent for using across the curriculum. It is  also great for science reports, research journals and comic adventures.

The children enacted and filmed the scenes, and then we interviewed the characters themselves, and interviewed onlookers who “witnessed” the fight between Benvolio and Mercutio. We gave our opinions about why this was almost inevitable, how this could have been avoided, and what the repercussions of the family feud might be.

We edited sound files (voice recordings of the interviews) using Audacity to create news reports of the events in Verona.

Our completed book included the “mobile ‘phone camera footage” of the deadly sword fight, the empassioned appeals for calm from innocent bystanders, interviews with people who knew both families and an official announcment from the Duke of Verona.

If you are doing something like this, also have a look at Glogster which is a cloud-based platform (app and website) for creating presentations and interactive learning. Glogster also allows users to combine text, images, video, and audio to create an interactive, Web-based poster called glogs on a virtual canvas.

            

Workshop on publishing stories with ICT

 One of the great things about technology is not only that it can support the writing process, but it can also motivate children and young people to write who might otherwise be reluctant. Given the opportunity to create a book that they can not only print out in colour, but also add sounds and animations to on-screen, a lot of learners will engage when getting them to complete the same task with pen and paper would prove tortuous.

For this workshop we had primary and secondary pupils, all of whom could find writing an onerous event, either because of their literacy levels or their behaviour, but all of them created a story of at least four pages, with illustrations. (You can see some of them on our pupils’ work pages, here https://ictandinclusion.edublogs.org/pupils-work/ )

We started by using the Scholastics Story Starters website to generate some initial, original, even rather wacky, ideas. http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/story-starters/

Then we moved on to 2Simple’s 2Createastory to develop these ideas. This provides a simple publishing template, a page with room for an illustration and some text. On printing, four  pages will fold into a book. More than four and the software spreads the pages out so they can be folded and interleaved.

What many of the learners enjoyed was adding sound, particularly their own voices. More than one, who might otherwise be termed a ‘reluctant reader,’ recorded themselves reading their own words on each page.  There was a palable sense of excitement, pride and achievement at the end of the session when they not only had a printed book in their hands, but could also see their work on-screen.

As they finished they were directed onto a second activity using the Mashcams on Purplemash (2Simple’s online service). This, too, is very simple but effective. It provides a number of masks for the pupils to select – astronaut, police officer, Queen Elizabeth, newsreaders and many more –  into which the user inserts their own face using the webcam built in to the machine. Then they can add text and, or, record themselves. It is  a great way for getting imaginations fired up, or for practising empathy. A simple idea, but one that can be implemented quickly, easily, and engagingly because of technology.