Teacher Story: Bringing Dystopian Fiction to Life with Clips

Last year, I was fortunate to have been featured on the Apple Teacher Learning Centre. My story showcased the video app, Clips and how it was used to bring senior students’ creative writing to life.

My aim was to challenge students to capture the atmosphere of their creative writing with images and sound. Students created videos that mirror the stark, visceral, and lifeless imagery that is characteristic of the dystopian genre. Choosing the right music also helped students feel immersed in the worlds they created in their writing.

To begin with, I provided an example video to demonstrate what I wanted my students to create. Through a combination of images, text, and music I brought a passage from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to life with Clips. Check it out:

As students created their Clips videos, they began to identify ways to improve their narratives. I saw significant improvement in their writing after the activity - in particular, I found the task appealed to reluctant learners and more disengaged students.

When students watched back their work, by seeing their language on screen with Live Titles, they could really tell what worked well and what didn’t. Clips encourages students to be concise and really focus on their language, the key aspects of their paragraph, what they wanted to achieve, and what they really wanted the reader to think and feel.

If you’d like to know more, check out my Teacher Story on the Apple Teacher Learning Centre.