Playing with New Media Genres to Reflect on Everywhere Blue- Blog Post 7

View my Book Trailer Here!

 

    For my multimodal response to Everywhere Blue, I chose to create a book trailer. As I mentioned in my last blog post, I wanted to create something with an audio and visual component because the middle grade book really highlighted those aspects. The music in my book trailer is actually a song that is mentioned in Everywhere Blue, which is titled Adagio for Strings. This song is used to describe the "feeling" of part two of the novel, which is right after Strum disappears. I think the tense feeling in this song adds a lot to the book trailer as a whole in order to create suspense. Working with what is outlined in the book in this way has greatly deepened my respect for how the book sets the scene of the eco narrative. Furthermore, my understanding of the novel deepened when I was selecting images for the book trailer. The image that was most hard for me to find was one that demonstrates the conflicts between Aria and Maddie at the beginning of the novel. It was hard to find an image that I felt did a good job demonstrating their relationship, and in choosing the image I was forced to consider their relationship more closely.

    When  I think about how multimodal practices can be used to amplify learning, I definitely think there are benefits to using multimodal formats. My own experience with creating a book trailer definitely amplified my experience with reading Everywhere Blue. However, I cannot ignore the formatting struggles that I encountered in creating this book trailer and I must acknowledge that more can be done in terms of enticing potential readers. There are many different aspects to creating multimodal pieces and it is important for teachers to establish a solid foundation in order to truly amplify learning. First, teachers must ensure students have a good understanding of the topic they will be appropriating into their production in order to truly deepen learning. Also, teachers must ensure students have a good understanding of the format they will be producing and ample time to create the end result. Overall, I think multimodal productions are valuable in amplifying learning for students and they can have many other outlets. When I think about why each multimodal production is so unique, I am reminded of the Jenkin's Whitepages resource, where the appropriation section states art "emerges through the artists' previous engagement with cultural materials." (32) Since each multimodal production is unique to the creator's desires it is easy to see how they can transfer over as a powerful tool for civic engagement in areas where students are passionate. In reflecting on the benefits of book trailers, I was urged to look online in hopes of finding teachers talking about how amazingly the creation of them impacted their students. However, I mostly found articles urging authors to create their own book trailers rather than encouraging students to make trailers of their own about a book they read. I did, however, find this article which gives some other suggestions about using book trailers in the classroom, which I found helpful in a slightly different way.