Back in October I shared a few of my favorite videos from Vimeo, and mused about allowing your students to use them as visual writing prompts. The idea was simple. Rather than just give students a piece of text, or some script with which to base their creative writing, why not pull inspiration from another form of creative expression; digital media.
To my delight, I actually got a few people that tried it! Daniela left a comment on the original post shortly after I shared the idea:
I tried this with my students last week. I pulled the 1st, 2rd, and 5th video on our nine computers (three computers per video) and asked them to choose one of the three. After they choosing their topic of interest, we went to our school garden and, in between the trees and all the nature, my 6th graders began to write a short entry describing what they say and what they felt while the video was playing. I don’t know if it was the video, the outdoors or the combination of both, but students were still talking about this lesson during the week and asked me to prepare future activities with this rubric. I want to try it with a Science lesson and find ways to use it during Math as well… Thank you for this great idea!
With that success story as ammunition, I hunted down a few more videos (one of which is one that I created), to try and help “push” the idea a bit more. If you end up using any of these videos as visual writing prompts in your classroom, let me know, I’d love to hear how it went, especially after the success that Daniela had with her students. Incorporating writing into Science, Social Studies, and other areas will quickly become mandatory for all teachers in Common Core states, so there’s no time like the present to start experimenting!
The “how to lose $2400 in 24 seconds” is my favorite of this bunch 🙂
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