Multiliteracies in ELA Classrooms

I’ll be teaching three different Shakespeare plays during my long practicum, and I thought of different ways I could start off each unit. I thought I’d try my hand at Animoto, and initially, the plan was to do a fun, short video about strange biographical facts about Shakespeare. Unfortunately, the free version of Animoto really limits the amount of text per slide, so then I had to scrap that idea. Then, I recalled that Shakespeare invented a large number of words, and so I thought I’d do a short video of twenty words invented by Shakespeare. Turns out there’s a limit to ten slides in total. So with very few options left, I created a short video with four words invented by him. It’s a little underwhelming, but it did give me an opportunity to play around with an alternative mode of representation. I think perhaps I’d use this tool with students instead, to come up with a short presentation about an act they read, or perhaps have them take pictures of things they think represent a specific play and use Animoto to create a small presentation about those images to promote visual literacy.

Try our slideshow maker at Animoto.

– Kiran A.