Take a 7th grade boy growing up in urban Taipei and ask him to imagine the world of camels in the deserts of Pakistan.

Kinda tricky.

But give him a large library of real photos from the desert, and suddenly, it becomes much easier.

Each year, I face this challenge when I teach the novel, Shabanu, to my students at TAS.

So this year I launched a project I have wanted to do for several years, an audio-visual  photo interpretation of common topics in the novel, to be shared with other students. In this way, I hoped, my students would be given enough raw material to help them form the images that fit the actual setting of the novel. The goal was not simply for each student to learn from their own presentation, but to learn from all of the presentations.

With the advent of Qwiki visual encylopedia last fall, I took this as my model, instructing my students to gather photos from the web, collate them into a presentation, and narrate the presentation while the text rolled across the screen.

Overall, I am pleased with the results. My students were quite engaged in this project. They were motivated to do research. They developed scripts, photo collections, and media projects through a variety of collaboration techniques, including Google docs. Finally, they were able to share their work with each other, contributing to one another’s understanding of the setting of the novel. I allowed each group to choose their final format; some chose powerpoint, while others picked Photostory or Moviemaker.

I will definitely use this type of project next year, although I will make a number of changes to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of this project. I did find it rather difficult and time-consuming to share the projects during class. Next time, I will find a way to post these videos online so that students can access the videos themselves, on their own time, and even at home.

Originally, what I envisioned was a product similar to Qwiki with multiple flashing images on each screen, and narration rolling across the screen. In true fact, my students were not adept enough with the technology to create that effect in the limited time I gave them. However, they were able to create slide shows, more like powerpoint than like Qwikis, and once these slideshows were shared, the students were given a much broader pictorial base from which to imagine the novel.

Take a look, and see what you think.