Digital Booktalk Reflection

This assignment was a lot of fun. I don’t have much time to explore some of the programs that are on my computer, so using the Movie Maker was fun. I started my booktalk in another program and realized when I was finished with it that I was unable to save the movie file in any format. I think my program was out of date and I could not find any updates for it. Thanks to Marissa, I found the Movie Maker program (which I had on my computer and did not know). It is very easy to use and the help function was useful to me. I spent a long time working on this assignment. Mainly because I had a particular vision that I wanted to portray in my booktalk. I had my kids and one of their friends help with the video. It was more difficult that I thought it would be to get three children to follow my direction on camera without me saying anything that would affect the audio of the video. But, after lots of video I was able to edit it to something that I thought was cute.
The value of this assignment to me was that I feel proud of what I was able to make. I had never tried to make a movie before but it was a lot of fun. Plus my kids learned a little something about it from helping me. My oldest one has tons of video that he has filmed with his camcorder and I am sure he is eager to start creating his own movies as well.
From using children in my booktalk for our class, I feel that students would love creating one of these in my classroom. I can imagine each class creating a digital booktalk and sharing them with the other classes to promote reading in the school. My video is funny to me. Mainly because the two in the movie are going off of what the other one is reading for their direction. And the one reading could not stop laughing at the two acting it out. I had to edit out a lot of chuckles in the recordings. They had fun with the whole process and helped me with create my finished project.
The process started with going to the library and selected a few books to use, then we read the books and created a character list, next we decided who was going to be which character. After that we made the “costumes” and wrote our roles. Before we started the filming, we made a few practice runs of what we were going to do and say. I was a little concerned at the beginning that they would not like it. I was definitely wrong. These digital booktalks are a fun way to get students more interested in reading.