Enhanced English Teacher

I recently started following author, Patrick Carman, on Twitter.  He wrote a vbook which is a video + book = The Whole Story.  You can view the book trailer at the Scholastic website.

I bought Skeleton Creek, and my 12 year old son immediately took it away from me to read, and he highly recommends it.  The book is written in first person as a journal of events from the perspective of the protagonist Ryan.  The video is a first person account from the perspective of Sarah.  Readers watch the videos online at sarahfincher.com and insert the passwords provided in the book to see videos.  The combination of the video and the journal gives the audience the complete story line.

Watching the video gave me a great idea for teaching character perspective.  My students read To Kill a Mockingbird.  The novel is written in first person from the perspective of Scout.  Readers learn about the town residents and events as presented and colored by Scout.  My idea involves creating small groups of students who will explore the town events and describe Maycomb’s residents from the view point of another character in the novel.  The group will create a video similar to the videos created for the Skeleton Creek vbook.  Not only will this project require that students closely read the novel to thoroughly grasp and understand their character’s point of view, but the project will appeal to kinesthetic learners who learn best while they are creating and doing.  My hope is that assigning a project based character study that incorporates a digital element will engage students who sometimes have trouble maintaining their focus while reading a lengthy novel.

To complete this assignment, I plan to use 5 flip videos to capture the film clips created by students.  We will edit using movie maker because I currently teach in a PC lab.  I own one flip video camera, so I recently applied for a grant at We Are Teachers.  I believe this project has merit, so even if I do not receive the grant, I will find a way to implement this project into my curriculum, and of course, I will share the videos and my reflections regarding the value of teaching character perspective using video.