Year Nine Book Trailers

Today we wound up our Year 9 Book Trailer unit with our inaugural "Book Trailer Award" showcase in the Lecture Theatre.Our Year 9 cohort enjoyed watching the top trailers from each of the five English classes as did the teachers who were present. At the end of the showcase, Liana announced the overall winner who was David from 9B. His book trailer"Laws of Magic" was deserving  as it demonstrated an excellent combination of understanding,creativity,mood  and engaging elements.
See his trailer below

Laws of Magic Trailer by David Ting is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

For our PLP this year,Year 9 English teachers Will White,Tyler Smith and Joy Reid and myself worked collaborately to introduce this wide reading unit called Book Trailers.The goals of our project were to:

• Introduce Year 9's to wikis as a learning and communication tool.
• Teach year 9's an engaging and useful presentation tool (Animoto) whilst simultaneously encouraging them to read and appreciate literature.
• Help students to understand their legal and ethical responsibilities as users and creators of online content.(Copyright and Creative Commons)
• Increase collaboration between Year 9 teachers and our teacher librarians.

To see this unit  click on Year Nine Book Trailers

Well, we certainly achieved our goals  and  we were all very excited with the learning that occurred for both students and  teachers involved.Yes, we were all on a steep learning curve but an enjoyable and engaging one!Thanks must go to Shane for his invaluable ITsupport and Will and Tyler for their risk taking as technology in the classroom is rarely seamless.It's  now a "thumbs up" for this unit to be embedded into the Year 9 curriculum and we look forward to further developing it in 2013.