Jedi Writing - Inspiring Writing through Star Wars!

There is a lot of excitement and anticipation about the upcoming Star Wars film. I am sure plenty of your pupils will be desperate to see the latest installment. Knowing I have children hooked on Star Wars, I have used it as a stimulus in class.  I have previously blogged about discussing authorial intent with the teaser trailer.  You can read that blog post here.  I have also blogged about using the BB-8 droid to inspire writing, read that blog post here. 

Today I discovered another little gem that could inspire some fantastic writing linked to Star Wars. Recently, Facebook released different 360 degree videos. Users can explore the videos by dragging their cursors within videos on the desktop or by physically tilting their phones while watching on mobile. Each video is a few minutes long and gives users a completely spherical—that is, 360-degree—way to explore sand dunes, the ocean, or, say, a galaxy far, far away.

I have previously blogged about 360 videos and you can read about them here. 

Here is the Facebook Star Wars post -


Star Wars: The Force Awakens Immersive 360 Experience
Speed across the Jakku desert from Star Wars: The Force Awakens with this immersive 360 experience created exclusively for Facebook.
Posted by Star Wars on Wednesday, September 23, 2015

The problem for most teachers will be having access to this to use in classroom, therefore I have added a YouTube clip below-


How to use the video -

  • Using Airserver, record a video of the children exploring the video - 

If you don't have Airserver, you can download this example that we recorded.

  • Ask the children to explore the video a couple of times and write down what they can see/hear, once they have listed different nouns in one colour, ask them to generate some adjectives and verbs and link these with different colours. Do the same with adverbs to create a spider diagram full of vocabulary linked to what they observed in the video -
  • Encourage the children to start constructing sentences from the vocab spider. This gives you a perfect opportunity to introduce or deepen children's understanding of some Exciting Sentences.
  • Build these sentences into a short narrative. 
  • Put a copy of the video into iMovie and allow the children to record themselves performing their writing over the video. 
  • Use this as a useful editing tool and encourage them to try and make their writing match the video. This keeps the flow to the narrative and can really help children avoid over flowery writing. 
  • Give children plenty of time to record so it is more fluent and expressive. 
  • Add in sound effects or even a soundtrack.
  • Export the video and share on your school blog for the world to see!
Here is Joe's example - 


Here was the text -


Here is another Star Wars related 360 video on YouTube, this time from the point of a droid -


If you are interested in other ways in which technology can inspire and transform writing, please visit this link to see what Mr P can offer your school. 

Comments

  1. CheesyUK14 February 2016 at 00:28

    This is SO cool - even for a non-Star Warsy teacher - am planning this for tomorrow - thanks for all these brilliant ideas

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lisa19 April 2016 at 10:11

    This such a cool idea!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. JoeLeon24 May 2016 at 08:58

    Any chance you could reupload the ready-made one to DropBox? Trying to avoid using AirServer!

    Joe

    ReplyDelete
  4. Unknown28 September 2016 at 21:44

    I'd love to use this but we can't acces Facebook at school. tried to download the clip but Dropbox said the link had been disabled. Is there any other way to get a copy?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Mr P ICT29 September 2016 at 15:23

      Here you go - https://drive.google.com/a/davyhulmeprimary.com/file/d/0B_l7OPyl2iB_QmdCMmlrbl9oSUU/view?usp=sharing

      Delete
  5. Unknown29 September 2016 at 21:14

    Many thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous10 January 2017 at 12:51

    I can't seem to access the Airserver video clip to use in iMovie as it says I don't have permission to access the file in Google. I 'requested access' but it made no difference. Is there another link that doesn't involve accessing your school's Google Drive?

    Thanks

    ReplyDelete

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