House On Mango Street book trailer

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=2001877134014909447&hl=en

I had no idea that making a book trailer with MovieMaker would be so easy! I think this is a great replacement for the more traditional book report. The students would enjoy it more and I think they would get just as much out of a book trailer as a book report. Although, there would have to be more structure as to what to include in the trailer. For a foreign language classroom, this would be an interesting way to do a report on a country. It could be used for a video tour of the country or a city, instead of a more traditional brochure. Additionally, I think that by posting work on the Internet, the quality of work is increased. Students who know that others may see and comment on their work may be more enthusiastic about a project and do their best work if they know it may be viewed by anyone on the planet!
The most challenging part of the whole experience was downloading the video to the Internet and subsequently creating the link in my blog. I thought that the book trailer could be copied and pasted into the blog; evidently, this is not how it works. I did not realize how many movies were on sites such as video.google.com or youtube.com. What an interesting resource to use. There is plenty of educational material that can be found on both of those sites and many students are probably already familiar with those sites and the video making and downloading process.