'Books behind the bed' photo (c) 2006, rjp - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

I’ve written a lot in the past, and shared student work, about using Instagram and Vine videos with English Language Learners to learn academic vocabulary.

Last week, I shared how I was going to try to do a similar project with my English Language Learners — this time, having them create fifteen second video “book trailers” — in other words, mini-book reviews. In that same post, I shared a number of resources about this idea of “book trailers.”

We tried it out today, and it went very well. In fact, our class is teaching other classes how to create them on Friday. I showed my model video (the one at the bottom of this post), and asked students to create a storyboard with five components:

1. The book itself, with students saying the title and the author

2. A drawing of an illustration representing what the book is about, along with one sentence that they would say as a summary

3. Their favorite quote from the book

4. How many “stars” they would give it, with three as the highest rating.

5. Some kind of “action”

You can see them all at our class blog. Here are three student examples, plus my model: