Every year I have the students draw a self-portrait using Microsoft’s Paint program. These have a variety of uses: avatars for blogs, printed for bulletin boards, “All About the Author” pages, and so on.
Mrs. Weth, one of our third grade teachers, likes to have her students use the portraits to create a video for our Grandparents’ Day. Her students write an “I Am” poem then record it with their portrait as the backdrop.
Last year she used Explain Everything for the project. This year, we chose Book Creator due to their new feature allowing users to export the book as a video. By going with this app, we were able to save the book in two formats: ePub book and video. This gives our families options on how they want to view the students’ work.
For the ePub book, choose download while on an iOS device and open in iBooks (make sure that app is installed on your device).
Mrs. Weth’s ePub book link
I believe it’s important for students to be able to share their writing with others; not just their teachers and parents. Over the years we’ve done this in a variety of ways but when the 4th graders saw a “gami” I’d made with the Tellagami app, they could not wait to give it a try! I knew we needed to come up with something that was worth sharing using this app.
Since the students had drawn self-portraits earlier in the year using Microsoft’s Paint program, we decided to use these for the background for a bio-poem. There are several variations of this type of poem but here’s the format we used (not sure where I got this but have used it for over 20 years):
Name
4 describing words
Related to ____________
Who cares deeply about __________
Who feels ___________
Who needs ___________
Who gives ____________
Who fears ___________
Who would like to see ___________
Resident of ______________.
Since the self-portraits were drawn on the computer, we had to get them to the iPad and into the Tellagami app. What worked for us was for me to upload the illustrations to my Picasa photo album, have the students go to Picasa on the iPad, and then save to photos.
During our first 40 minute session in the computer lab, I had the students get the self-portrait into Tellagami and then create their avatar. Wow, did they enjoy that! We had avatars beside the faces, sitting on shoulders, . . . Next step was to write the bio-poem.
The next day, I demonstrated how to record (super easy; they didn’t really need instructions). I had the students send their finished “gami” in two different ways. One was to email to me from the app. This leads to a link on the Tellagami website. Here is Ava’s gami.
However, I wanted to combine all of the gamis to make a class video. So I also asked the students to save their gami to the camera roll and then email the video to me. I then pulled the videos into the iMovie app. Each video ends with a shot saying, “Created with the Tellagami app” – I didn’t want that after each bio-poem so I deleted that segment on all but the last one. For an intro, I created a slide using Haiku Deck, a presentation app. Next step was to upload to our Vimeo account.
It sounds like a lot of work but it really wasn’t. Once the students had emailed their gami to me, it didn’t take long at all to pull them together in iMovie.
Malone’s BioPoems from Trinity Valley School on Vimeo.
This was a fun way to share writing with others. Not one student complained about writing a poem; that sometimes happens since I’m not their “writing” teacher! By sharing with our teachers authentic ways to use technology, my hope is that they’ll find ways to use it to modify and redefine learning in their classrooms. (Can you tell we’ve been discussing the SAMR model in Lower School?)
