Literature and Video Technology Come Together in 4th-Grade Book Reviews

For months, 4th graders have been reading books by Indigenous authors that depict contemporary life across their cultures. They have learned about powwows, residential schools, preservation of language, community building, and identity building, and are encouraging others to make similar explorations. Recently, they created video book reviews to engage potential readers.

Using Flipgrid, a student-centered video creation platform, each 4th grader has shared what they learned and what intrigued them about one of thirteen illustrated books. The reviews are now gathered on a Google classroom page. 

Reviewed books included:

Students were challenged to make their own visual choices to best support their reviews while keeping the intended audience in mind. “We wanted them to show a specific page from the book, and some students already knew this tech trick to cast the image into their video,” said teacher Elizabeth. They then taught their peers how to display the beautifully illustrated pages to achieve the same effect. Other students supplemented their videos with backgrounds or gifs that express their personalities. “I’ve been blown away by their tech skills,” she adds.

Academic Technologist Daniel assisted the students, providing his maker space as a studio and reminding them to project and speak engagingly. (Recording themselves also reinforces public speaking and audience engagement skills they have learned in Charmaine’s theatre classes.)

Before recording, the students worked on succinct outlines and prepared a few key talking points. Many identified excerpts from their chosen book that illustrate one or more Indigenous cultural values: preservation of traditions, respect for community, respect for the natural world, and respect for the past. Fourth graders searched the source material for evidence of these values. “They are grounding ideas and claims with evidence they find in the text. At the same time, they can synthesize these communication skills with continued learning about Indigenous culture,” said Elizabeth. The teachers note that it was especially important for the students to seek out common world views between the varied and evolving Indigenous nations. “Rather than us telling them another statement to remember, they can understand the concept by centering and examining the voice of the Indigenous author,” said Emily and Elizabeth.

With each subsequent video project, students learn how to connect with an audience, even if it’s one they can’t see. The teachers noticed that delivering presentations by video rather than in-person provided students with a ‘safe space’ to articulate their thoughts, receiving feedback from classmates later. 

Emily and Elizabeth’s classrooms are further extending the use of Flipgrid to their regular classroom activities. In recent weeks, every student has created a secure “Weekly Wows!” webpage to share their learning highlights with their teachers and families in short video diaries. They are building their ‘brand’ at the same time by making choices for visual style, tone, and content. The variety between the pages represents the student personalities at play. Ranging from understated palettes to vibrant layouts that match the speaker’s energy, all of the pages allow students to share in their own words what parts of the curriculum excite them from week to week. Said Elizabeth, “They really took the opportunity to get creative with these video projects, but at the same time, it’s still grounded in skills of self-reflection that are essential to a responsive classroom.”