So we got back to school today after a shortened winter break and the first question that I got as I walked through the door to my afternoon writing class was, "Is Gary coming today?" The kids were pretty disappointed when I said that he was not.
Before I move on to what we will be doing next, I guess I should do a better job of explaining what we've done. After Gary shared his memoir about getting stuck in a cave on our second visit and was critiqued by the students, we began "collecting" for our multimedia memoirs.
Step 1 - The Who
In this 2 day activity we focused solely on the characters in the memoir.
The Assignment: Bring in pictures of characters in your memoirs (friends, family members, whoever was a part of the memory). Create a collage showing the characters to help illustrate their personalities and roles in the memoir.
If students did not have access to their own pictures or for whatever reason could not bring them in they looked for images to represent them on the internet. Students had to find one photo of a person and one image to symbolize them or their role in the story.
The APP: Adobe Collage - It was great for editing pictures taken from the web to make them more appropriate and to fit their memoirs more accurately.
Step 2 - The What
This was the the activity in which the students got a chance to put the events of their stories in order, basically show what happened.
Anticipated length: 2 classes Actual length: 3 classes (but some were still not done)
The Assignment : Create a timeline of your story. Use your written memoir as a guide to visually represent the events. Edit your own or images found online to show the action.
The APP: Timelinemaker - a great tool to make a story board. Students could import images and organize them from months down to the hour.
Step 3 - The Where
This single class activity focused on mood and using colors and shadows in images to express the mood.
The Assignment: Bring in or find images to represent the location of your memoir. Edit them to accurately represent the mood of your story. Edit each image at least two different ways to show changing mood over the course of the story.
The APP: Adobe Collage - Beautiful and easy photo editing!
Bonus: Some students used Google Satellite to find and take a screen shot of the facade of their own home and edited those in addition to their own pictures.
Step 4 - Record the What
In this 2 class activity the kids go to do some acting! Voice acting that is.
The Assignment: Record narration or dialogue for each slide on your timelinemaker story board. Use the dialogue already present in your written memoir and write any new narration as needed. Work with your classmates to help each other record your stories.
The APP: Recorder Plus HD - A very easy to use recording device. Gary's great advice was to record each line separately so the editing is much easier later.
And now, we just need to put all of this together.
We've also used PicCollage with our students.
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