2nd Grade Book Commercials

Inspired by this great article, I set out with Mrs. Zureick in second grade to make book commercial videos.  We hit some hiccups along the way, but I'm really happy with the final product and how we grew through the process.

Step One:  Selecting a video production tool.
In the article, Mr. Buetow's class used Adobe Spark for their videos. I immediately fell in love with Adobe Spark for its look and ease of use and wanted to run with it.  Sadly, Adobe has a 13 and over policy for its users.  We discussed the possibility of creating a generic school account that students could access. Sadly, that plan was not approved at the district office, so we had to look in other directions.

That search didn't take long at all. With three WeVideo projects under my belt, I felt comfortable using this platform.  While I would have liked the animated look from Adobe Spark, WeVideo is an excellent and easy program to use for 30 second video spots.  (Feel free to click here, here, and here to read about our previous projects.)

Step Two: Read the books and write the scripts.
I didn't help with this part of the project, but Mrs. Zureick's class spent a lot of time in the school library reading books that may interest younger students. Then, each student wrote up commercials for two books. Using markers, they created their own cue cards to read on camera.

Step Three: Getting pictures.
This turned out to be a minor hurdle to jump over. When I started working with the first two kids, I realized they needed to take pictures of illustrations in the books.  I spent a while trying to teach myself how to take a picture using a Chromebook webcam and get that saved into WeVideo on the fly (while wondering how I would teach it to 30 2nd graders) when it hit me that we have a small stack of iPads assigned to each grade level.

In the end, we took pictures with iPads, plugged the iPads into Chromebooks, then loaded them directly into WeVideo.  That added a couple hours to the project, but it worked just fine.

Step Four: Recording and editing the videos. 
When I started working with students on this project, we were in the library.  I loved the bookshelves in the background, so we made sure that all our "production studios" had a set of bookshelves we could use.

WeVideo is literally so easy a second grader can do it. As you'll see in the example videos at the end, we had three elements: a video of students talking, three pictures from the book, and background music.  Once we got cooking we could do multiple videos at one time and crank one out in less than 15 minutes.

As you can see in the picture, we tried to work in small teams.  I never felt that I had to have control of the Chromebook or the cue cards. I was quite fine with kids helping kids. It worked great! When I was being observed by my principal I made sure one of the best helpers was there working alongside me.  That was a positive part of the observation -- I had a protege working with me.

Step Five: Get rid of last names.
Our school policy is to not post student last names online.  Our librarian made the realization that WeVideo automatically displays the video creator's first and last name.  We had to scramble together notes home asking parents for permission to use the videos.  Just before we started deleting videos, WeVideo came through and showed us how to change the names. Whew!

Step Six: Publicize the videos.
The final step was to make these videos available to other students.  We are doing this two ways.  One, the links to all the videos will go into our school-wide computerized library catalog. So, when a student goes on the webpage for that book, she can view a video commercial about that book.  Two, QR Codes will be printed on labels and affixed to the inside cover of these books.  This will give students instant access to our book commercials.

As I wrap up, I'd like to thank a few people:

• Jesse Buetow not only wrote the article that gave this project life but was willing to answer questions for me from the outset. 
• Debbie Schroeder is our school librarian.  She's been on top of this project from the moment I sent the email out to the school. She's excited to get more videos created by more students. 
• Tina Zureick is not afraid to do something new and has invited me into her room on more than one occasion.
• The guys at WeVideo bailed me out of a jam. They were willing to help me with questions -- again -- that I could have probably answered myself if I didn't go into "freak out" mode. 

Here are a couple of videos for you to enjoy.