Friday, December 08, 2006

Canterbury Tales Campaign Ads

Michele and Lauren's English Literature classes recently completed an assignment where they created campaign ads for characters in the Canterbury Tales.
Their objective was to make a movie featuring three political ads for three separate pilgrims, each representing three different social classes. The pilgrims were to “compete” against one another for the same governmental office. Their movies were to reveal comprehension of Canterbury as well as the social commentary Chaucer represents. Students were also asked to carry that commentary into a 21st century context.
Here are some examples to look at. These are in Windows Media Player format, created in Photo Story so, unfortunately, I believe they only play on Windows machines (requires a codec that is only available for the Windows version of Windows Media Player).

David, Bryon and Zane - Doc, Monk, and Squire
Wes - Yeoman and Monk
Amanda and Jenna - Bob, Chris, and Susan
Courtney, Jordan and Katie
Lauren, Lauren and Sarah
Nikki, Katherine and Lindsay

After viewing these, feel free to leave constructive comments for these students on this post.

5 comments:

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  2. What a great project! Did the kids work on this assignment at school, or on their home computers? I know that neither Michele nor Lauren has access to lap-tops, so I'm curious how the class completed the work.

    Great work, students!!!

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  3. They worked on it at school. Mr. Fisch so kindly provided a tutorial of photostory and I gave them 2 days in class to work on it which, they said, was not nearly enough time. Probably if I were to do it over again, I would give the project when we STARTED Canterbury so the kids could be taking notes and working on it all along, then I would give them more like 3 days in the lab. The other bummer (since I don't have this software at home) is I had to stay after school for many hours to grade these. They were more fun than an essay, but almost as time consuming!!

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  4. For my class the kids had one class day in the computer lab. They brought their pictures on a disk, on a flash drive, on sent on their email, so they had them to start creating their projects. I gave them a brief overview of how to use Windows Movie Maker and PhotoStory. The kids took right to it and then, created their own at home.

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  5. Lauren,

    Just FYI - if you have a Windows machine at home, you could install Photo Story. Also, if the students save their projects as Windows Media Player files (which they should do and is what I posted on the web), you could view those at home also (even if you didn't install Photo Story).

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