iMovie

Every year I read aloud The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo to my class. I love this book because of the emotions it evokes. Edward goes on a journey throughout the book and students were keeping track of his emotional rollercoaster in their reader’s notebooks.

I wanted to incorporate digital storytelling with this read aloud experience, so I posed the question, “What would Edward Tulane’s instagram page look like?” My students became wide-eyed, as instagram tends to be a “hot topic” amongst my 5th graders. I asked students to think of the major events in the book and to illustrate a picture that depicits it. We also used hashtags to evoke the emotion in which Edward was feeling at that time. Students drew their pictures on paper then shared with the class. I had a couple of students take the photos on the iPad and upload to iMovie to showcase this journey. Students used various hashtags to show what Edwards was feeling. #toomuchlove was used to show how annoyed Edward was with Abilene at the beginning of the book, #Iamloved to show his emotions at the end of the book, #nakeddirtylonelysad was used to show Edward at the bottom of the sea. #longgone was used to show the scene where Edward was kicked off the freight train. Other hashtags used were #coughing, #playingtheharmonica, #notagirl, #inthedump. It is below for you to see.

I was quite impressed and found that iMovie is very easy to use with the preloaded trailers and easy to use functions. My students were able to add sound and zoom in and out of their pictures. Some of the pictures go fast and my students found difficulty showing the entire picture, but overall I think it came out great. The biggest problem I had, was transferring it to the computer. If you have a Mac, this is quite easy, if not, good luck. In the end I ended up emailing it to myself, then saving it to my computer. I then had trouble uploading it to my blog because wordpress does not upload the file types. A much easier process is to simply upload the video to YouTube, then embed the video in the blogpost. This is what I did and found it to be very simple and stress free!

Overall, iMovie is easy to use to showcase student work in this way!