Short videos, often closed-captioned, are widely shared on social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, have high potential to go viral, and are increasingly being adopted by news media as an important communicative medium in the digital age.
In this assignment, students create a video to tell a story. Options are wide-ranging, but include:
- News or documentary report, where students are the “announcer” and use still images and/or compiled sections of video from other sources to provide a cohesive report on a topic.
- Video version of RESEARCHED PERSONAL ESSAYS.
- Freestyle video assignment accompanying any essay, where students use video in whatever way they choose to illustrate their essay. This often spurs remarkable creativity.
- Digital narratives (see Examples, below)
- Peter Sapira’s video analysis of a student’s humor blog.
Methods
The following tutorial provides an introduction to creating video essays:
Students may be trained with iMovie to perform this assignment. CMP provides drop-in help for iMovie, and ETS can be contacted for classroom help and training with technology. For some groups of students, it may be appropriate to simply turn them loose to figure out the technical details on their own.
The videos may rely on narration recorded on top of a sequence of still images, such as the students’ own photographs or drawings, or publicly available photos, artwork, clipart, or drawings. Video clips may also be used, either recorded by the student or compiled from other sources such as youtube, making sure to attribute any video clips and ensure they are publicly available.
Videos can be posted on YouTube in a non-searchable format for privacy reasons.
Examples
At Smith, The Narratives Project’s student essays on their own life experience
News reports and researched personal narratives by students in Naila Moreira’s ENG 119: This Overheating World:
Olivia Cooper on the merits of gas, hybrid, and electric cars
Rachel Estrera on climate-friendly diets (her related essay is here)
Chunying Huangdai on overdevelopment in Shenzhen, China:
A creative take on a digital narrative by CEEDS that went modestly viral and racked up over 5,500 views
Sample narratives from StoryCenter, an organization that runs digital narratives workshops:
