Friday, January 19, 2018

Harry Potter Newspaper, Anyone?

One of the interesting parts of being a librarian/media coordinator is learning new technology so that, as a digital learning guru in my district, I can teach my staff how to incorporate it into their teaching. At NCSLMA17, one session mentioned briefly a way to make Harry Potter styled newspapers for student projects and bulletin boards. This intrigued me, but they didn't really give directions so...

It became an investigative project for Library Science II. (This class has students look at various units from the perspective of a librarian.) The project was to create a newspaper and have two pictures that used the information from the conference to "make the pictures come alive" as they do in The Daily Prophet. How does this work?

First, articles are written on the subject matter. Students in a class could research singly or in groups. Once the articles are written, and placed in Google Docs if making a shared document, they need to attach the pictures.

Using the green screen first, they film the actions for the picture. If it is going to be a"talking" picture, they will need to be sure to have good sound quality. The background of this video will be the still picture in the newspaper. Once this has been filmed and saved, they will move over to the app. (We use iPads which made the entire process very easy.)

The Aurasma app, which is free for Android and iOS, is being used at our school under one school account in the media center for my classes. A teacher could create one account for his/her classes to make this easier and so students do not make individual accounts. The necessary pieces are uploaded to the app and then inserted as a picture in the newspaper.

Now, when looking at the newspaper when printed, all you see is the background of the video. For instance, if the article is a literature piece set in a "fairy tale" you could use Neuschwanstein Castle as the backdrop. Without going any further, the picture connects to the article as a "normal" photograph. The magic occurs when the picture is viewed through the Aurasma app using a camera or iPad....be sure to have the sound on if it has audio! Suddenly the picture changes from black and white to color, people appear and move! Voila! Your own magical newspaper.

If doing this with multiple articles, be sure to have students work in columns to make the entire piece have that effect on the viewer. These can be displayed on a bulletin board with a device nearby for viewing.