I created this movie poster using BigHugeLabs!
This website offers users so many fun and easy-to-use "toys" that allow you to play around with your digital photos or ones you find online!
Some of my favorite toys on this website included the movie poster maker, the magazine cover maker, the motivator, the badge maker, and the captioner. The reason I liked all of these tools so much is because I immediately saw how useful they could be in an English classroom!
The movie poster maker: This would be a great tool to use to help students remember the important elements of a piece of literature or even a poem. Students can choose a picture to represent an important aspect of the story or message (can be anything! even a simple symbol that is important to them), list all of the characters, the author, an important date to the text (above I used the est. year of publication, but students could also include the season or time period that the story takes place), and in the directors section, they could write a brief summary of the story, or include a favorite quote or - something I've also seen done - list some important literary elements. My favorite aspect of the movie poster is the tagline. Creating a tagline for a novel, play, story or poem forces the student to think critically about the text and put the message, theme or significance of the piece into one concise line. Instead of a Rating (such as G or R), I might have students rate the story (two thumbs up, one thumb up) and share their reaction - why they liked it, or why they didn't. These could be hung up around the classroom, or, put into a collection in the student's portfolio so that they always have an easy reference to look back on and remember the story!
The magazine cover maker: This could be used very similarly to the movie poster, but I see this toy being more useful for students to more closely examine a character, theme, or conflict in a text. For example, students could create a scandalous magazine cover for The Crucible that talks about the effects of John & Abigail's affair (similar to many of the covers we've seen in the past year!), choosing or creating a picture to represent the topic, and coming up with many headlines that relate to the affair and the aftermath, such as Elizabeth Proctor: Stand by Your Man, or a title for an interview that might have been included. Or, students could do a cover on just one character from a story, creating headlines for articles that one might read about that person. This would be another creative way for students to represent a piece of literature that they could reference later on, or that I could hang up around the room. What might be even more creative would be to make this a class project, and have students create covers for all of the characters, themes, and conflicts, and then also do covers like Sports Illustrated and Martha Stewart Living to capture details like what the people in the story did for fun and what they ate or did with their homes. We could also create titles for magazines that would cover obituaries in a piece that involves a lot of death, and maybe even an Entertainment Weekly cover so that students could collaborate to create a collection of other titles or links that they think relate to the text (they could list movies, books, poems, songs, online videos, and things of that nature).
The motivator: I really liked this toy for its ability to have students choose one word to represent a character or a story. I would have students ask themselves questions such as: If this character stood for one thing, or inspired the reader in one area, what would it be? If this book taught the reader one lesson, what one word could that be summed up in? I would again, have students create or choose an image to represent that text, character, or a particular event or scene that illustrates the word they've chosen (for example, the Younger family from A Raisin in the Sun could represent pride). They could even do this sarcastically, and represent exactly what a character resists or totally does not represent (for example, Macbeth could sarcastically represent nobility or Abigail Williams could represent Puritans). Then, students could create a clever or witty line to go below the word that tells us why it's untrue (ex Abigail: Puritans: because lying, dancing, laughing in church, and drinking charms to kill Goody Proctor is the Puritan way). The non-sarcastic motivator lines would serve the same purpose: to challenge students to detail why the character or text represents that word. These could be hung up around the room as well as mini-works of art that send powerful messages for the students and stick with them as lessons that they learned (or didn't learn, for the sarcastic ones!)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License.
created by: Flickr user Louisville Joe
The badge maker: This could be a fun way for students to represent a character in a story. They could choose a photo or draw one to represent a character, create a job title (either their real occupation in the story or give a label for their personality/habits - ex. Romeo: Lover at First Sight), name, possibly with a nickname, what company or group they might represent, and maybe a character bio in the text box. Or, for a historical text like The Crucible, I might stage a village discussion where each student is a character, and after making their badges, they could go around the "village" within our classroom and discuss with other characters whether or not they like them, what their relationship is like, what sort of issues they need to address, and things of that nature.
The captioner: This tool would be great to use for writing prompts. Students could choose an image that they like or react to in any way, and put a caption of what they think the person, animal, or object might be thinking or saying. I would ask students to bring these in and trade them, and have one of their classmates write a short story based off of the picture, incorporating in some way the caption on the picture. Students could also do this to compile comic books either based on their own writing, or they could choose images and create captions to make a comic book version of a story, novel or play that we read in class. So these would be great for creative writing and creative activities to do with literature.
One idea I have for The Crucible (I'm stuck on this since I'm currently observing a class that is reading the play) would be to frontload the unit with a picture of the Salem Witch Trials, one in which everyone is staged in very particular ways:
from: mtsu.com, History 3020 course page
I could put this picture up on our blog and ask each student to write a caption for what they think one of the characters might be saying or thinking. This would be a great "hook" to help students enter the play, and start to get inside the heads of the characters and exploring the issues we would soon encounter! Plus, it could be a really fun and creative activity for students!
I LOVE BigHugeLab.com and am so excited to use it!
It has so many other great tools that inspired new ideas for me as well - it is a must use for teachers, especially in English! It offers so many creative ideas to mix up what we can do with characters and the texts that we read!
This website offers users so many fun and easy-to-use "toys" that allow you to play around with your digital photos or ones you find online!
Some of my favorite toys on this website included the movie poster maker, the magazine cover maker, the motivator, the badge maker, and the captioner. The reason I liked all of these tools so much is because I immediately saw how useful they could be in an English classroom!
The movie poster maker: This would be a great tool to use to help students remember the important elements of a piece of literature or even a poem. Students can choose a picture to represent an important aspect of the story or message (can be anything! even a simple symbol that is important to them), list all of the characters, the author, an important date to the text (above I used the est. year of publication, but students could also include the season or time period that the story takes place), and in the directors section, they could write a brief summary of the story, or include a favorite quote or - something I've also seen done - list some important literary elements. My favorite aspect of the movie poster is the tagline. Creating a tagline for a novel, play, story or poem forces the student to think critically about the text and put the message, theme or significance of the piece into one concise line. Instead of a Rating (such as G or R), I might have students rate the story (two thumbs up, one thumb up) and share their reaction - why they liked it, or why they didn't. These could be hung up around the classroom, or, put into a collection in the student's portfolio so that they always have an easy reference to look back on and remember the story!
The magazine cover maker: This could be used very similarly to the movie poster, but I see this toy being more useful for students to more closely examine a character, theme, or conflict in a text. For example, students could create a scandalous magazine cover for The Crucible that talks about the effects of John & Abigail's affair (similar to many of the covers we've seen in the past year!), choosing or creating a picture to represent the topic, and coming up with many headlines that relate to the affair and the aftermath, such as Elizabeth Proctor: Stand by Your Man, or a title for an interview that might have been included. Or, students could do a cover on just one character from a story, creating headlines for articles that one might read about that person. This would be another creative way for students to represent a piece of literature that they could reference later on, or that I could hang up around the room. What might be even more creative would be to make this a class project, and have students create covers for all of the characters, themes, and conflicts, and then also do covers like Sports Illustrated and Martha Stewart Living to capture details like what the people in the story did for fun and what they ate or did with their homes. We could also create titles for magazines that would cover obituaries in a piece that involves a lot of death, and maybe even an Entertainment Weekly cover so that students could collaborate to create a collection of other titles or links that they think relate to the text (they could list movies, books, poems, songs, online videos, and things of that nature).
The motivator: I really liked this toy for its ability to have students choose one word to represent a character or a story. I would have students ask themselves questions such as: If this character stood for one thing, or inspired the reader in one area, what would it be? If this book taught the reader one lesson, what one word could that be summed up in? I would again, have students create or choose an image to represent that text, character, or a particular event or scene that illustrates the word they've chosen (for example, the Younger family from A Raisin in the Sun could represent pride). They could even do this sarcastically, and represent exactly what a character resists or totally does not represent (for example, Macbeth could sarcastically represent nobility or Abigail Williams could represent Puritans). Then, students could create a clever or witty line to go below the word that tells us why it's untrue (ex Abigail: Puritans: because lying, dancing, laughing in church, and drinking charms to kill Goody Proctor is the Puritan way). The non-sarcastic motivator lines would serve the same purpose: to challenge students to detail why the character or text represents that word. These could be hung up around the room as well as mini-works of art that send powerful messages for the students and stick with them as lessons that they learned (or didn't learn, for the sarcastic ones!)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License.
created by: Flickr user Louisville Joe
The badge maker: This could be a fun way for students to represent a character in a story. They could choose a photo or draw one to represent a character, create a job title (either their real occupation in the story or give a label for their personality/habits - ex. Romeo: Lover at First Sight), name, possibly with a nickname, what company or group they might represent, and maybe a character bio in the text box. Or, for a historical text like The Crucible, I might stage a village discussion where each student is a character, and after making their badges, they could go around the "village" within our classroom and discuss with other characters whether or not they like them, what their relationship is like, what sort of issues they need to address, and things of that nature.
The captioner: This tool would be great to use for writing prompts. Students could choose an image that they like or react to in any way, and put a caption of what they think the person, animal, or object might be thinking or saying. I would ask students to bring these in and trade them, and have one of their classmates write a short story based off of the picture, incorporating in some way the caption on the picture. Students could also do this to compile comic books either based on their own writing, or they could choose images and create captions to make a comic book version of a story, novel or play that we read in class. So these would be great for creative writing and creative activities to do with literature.
One idea I have for The Crucible (I'm stuck on this since I'm currently observing a class that is reading the play) would be to frontload the unit with a picture of the Salem Witch Trials, one in which everyone is staged in very particular ways:
from: mtsu.com, History 3020 course pageI LOVE BigHugeLab.com and am so excited to use it!
It has so many other great tools that inspired new ideas for me as well - it is a must use for teachers, especially in English! It offers so many creative ideas to mix up what we can do with characters and the texts that we read!
Wow! You have detailed some great ideas. I hope that others will check out your post so they can build on them.
ReplyDeleteDr. Burgos