"I Am" Poems Meet iMovie

Typically, the beginning of the school year is peppered with get-to-know you activities and ice breakers educators use to begin to connect with their students. This year, I tried having students create "I Am" poems. I borrowed and tweaked this idea from this website which was suggested in Empowering Global Citizens. I have also seen it mentioned on the 2ndary ELA Facebook group (one of the best communities for ELA teachers middle-12th).

This year is the first year our 7th graders went 1:1 with iPads which is part of our district initiative of One to World. In an effort to get to know my students and how they see themselves in this world and acquaint them with the tools they'll need for various projects within my class, I asked them to turn their "I Am" poems into slideshows or movies in iMovie to share.

To start, I created my own film so they might get to know me...

After viewing my film, students had the opportunity to use this graphic organizer to create their own poem. I was able to read over their poems, offer suggestions, and encourage them to choose images of themselves or images labeled for reuse in Google Image Search to create their films. While I do subscribe to Alice Keeler's #2 suggestion to let the students show me what they can do (and believe me, they really took it and ran after I showed them the app), I took part of a class period to walk my students through iMovie on their iPads, then I let them create! After a five minute walk through, they were showing each other what they could do. Many unique and inspiring video poems were shared with me.

At the surface level, I was able to hear and see my students (which is a great way to study names in the first two weeks), but what made many of these enjoyable and invaluable is that, as an educator, I was able to get better insight into what my students value -more than the poem, alone, could offer.

I had an idea of who my athletes might be and who might be an artist. I was able to identify the innovative and adventurous who tried to include songs the created in Garage Band.

I got at least one entire poem devoted to Fortnite. I had several students bend the assignment to fit them, but still meet the requirements.

Most importantly, I got the chance to see all the personalities that are going to come together in my room this year, and as they watched them in class, they got to know each other a little better. As educators, that is where we want to start our year in knowing one another.