Promoting Teen Reading with Web 2.0 Tools - Part IVA: Book Trailers

I know, I know.  How long was this *&%@! YALSA preconference, you ask?  Don't you remember me saying it should have been a whole day and not an afternoon?  If not, you aren't paying attention.  And I think you'll enjoy this post and the next couple ones rounding out the preconference series.  The last part of the preconference was a "speed dating" segment in which librarian experts went around to different tables and spoke about their work with various strategies using tools that promoted teen reading.  First up for me was Tiffany (who likes to be called "Tiff") Emerick, librarian at Lansdale Catholic High School, who decided to make book trailers a collaborative project (the link is to her Glog which collated all the support materials) with a receptive English teacher. Tiff has a wonderful Google Doc of the project and tips for librarians or English teachers who might want to emulate it.

Her goals were to have the kids get excited and to feel that they had choices in the way they choice to create their trailer.  They watched both publisher and amateur videos, talking about the pros and cons of them, and reviewed Tiff's rubric.  The students received two grades, one from her and one from the English teacher.  In her explanation to us, she said one of the best parts was the opportunity to explain copyright since the students would be using photos and links, and this enabled her to really go to town explaining and promoting Creative Commons, which many students had never heard of.  She used Photostory (a Windows product) with the 11th graders and also taught them folksonomy tagging concepts with the Creative Commons material search.  Obviously you could also use iMovie or even Animoto, since it added the new feature of being able to keep the order of your images under control.

The book trailers that passed muster with her (and she said that was most of them) she embedded into the library catalog, so if a student searching for reading brought up a specific record, the book trailer would be a link that could be clicked on and played.  Great idea, right?  I was floored by the quality of the trailers (do yourself a favor and check out the Beautiful Creatures trailer, it's amazing) and Tiff had a great energy and enthusiasm so it's easy to see how she brings out the best in her students.





I'm really impressed with many of the sources Tiff found to promote this idea (book trailers are something I've toyed with for a long time).  This one above for Give Up the Ghost by Megan Crewe came from bookscreening.com, which bills itself a clearinghouse for publishers and authors to put up their booktrailers and promote their latest publication.  You get the sense that they used to accept amateur video, but now are sticking to the slicker stuff from publishing houses.  Which is fine, since the quality seems to be quite good, and a good trailer means more people are going to read it, right?