Moviemaking in the Classroom

Book excerpt: Written by an award-winning classroom teacher with years of experience integrating moviemaking into curriculum, this book offers quick-start lesson plans for any content area and grade level, helping students amplify their voices and effect change through moviemaking. Our world hinges on storytelling and the ways in which stories can be told are always evolving. For students to become future-ready, confident creators of original content, they need opportunities to share their stories. Moviemaking helps students showcase their learning, process their lives and connect with others in a meaningful way. Moviemaking in the Classroom breaks down the process of digital storytelling to help teachers plan efficient and effective instructional sequences. The book provides guidance on how to purposefully build visual and audio literacy skills to improve student work and increase student efficacy in the creative process. Also included are practical suggestions for removing barriers from the storytelling process, such as how to provide more opportunities for students to tell their stories during a single academic year. This book: • Shows teachers how to create efficient and effective lesson sequences with digital storytelling in mind, particularly in a blended learning environment. • Supports teachers who are new to digital storytelling by showing the impact and importance of providing students with multiple opportunities to tell their stories. • Offers project ideas for teachers already implementing digital storytelling in their classes and shows how to streamline workflow and improve their professional practice. • Supports distance and remote learning through a full chapter on strategies for applying these practices to a distance learning environment. • Fosters diversity, inclusion and student empowerment by showcasing student examples on topics including racism, death and illness, immigration, gun violence and pollution. This book provides insight, inspiration and practical ideas to empower teachers of all content areas to implement moviemaking projects with their students using best practices.