Common Core, Book Trailers, and Three Good Tools for Creating Them

In last month's issue of The Digital Shift I featured the site Book Trailers for Readers. Book Trailers for Readers was developed by teacher-librarian Michelle Harclerode. Over the weekend Michelle sent me a link to a nice infographic that she created about book trailers and Common Core Standards. The infographic provides a great outline for the process of creating book trailers. Click here to see Michelle's helpful infographic.

If you want to have your students create their own book trailers in lieu of a traditional book report, you can find a helpful outline of the process here. I have written about the book trailer idea in the past too. The three video creation tools that I currently recommend for book trailer creation are WeVideo, Animoto, and YouTube's Photo Slideshow tool.

WeVideo is my favorite online video creation tool. In the video editor you can upload your own media clips or use stock media clips to produce your video. The video editor provides tools for trimming the length of display and or sound of each element you add to your video project. A large collection of transitions and special effects are available in WeVideo's media gallery. The WeVideo Google Drive app allows you to save all of your video projects in your Google Drive account.

Animoto is the old-reliable in this list. Animoto makes it possible to quickly create a video using still images, music, video clips, and text. If you can make a slideshow presentation, you can make a video using Animoto. Animoto's free service limits you to 30 second videos. You can create longer videos if you apply for an education account. Animoto offers free iOS and Android apps.

The YouTube photo slideshow creation tools allow you to specify the length of time that each image is displayed for. After uploading your images you can use the annotations tool to add as much text as you like to each frame of your video. Directions for creating a YouTube photo slideshow are available here.