Over the years I’ve written plenty about book trailer videos and the tools that students need for making book trailer videos. For the most part, the book trailers that I’ve made and those that I’ve seen have been designed to entice the viewer to read the book featured in the video. This week I read Scott McLeod’s and Julie Graber’s book Harnessing Technology for Deeper Learning which changed some of my thinking about book trailer projects.

In Harnessing Technology for Deeper Learning McLeod and Graber share protocols and ideas for reframing some common classroom activities. One of the activities they mention is the “Pumpkin Book Report” in which students decorate pumpkins to look like characters from books they’ve read. Students then record videos of their pumpkins and those videos are combined by the teacher in Flipsnack. McLeod and Graber suggest that this project can be improved if teachers ask students to articulate why they chose the character, share passages from the book that represent the character’s traits, and share the theme of the story.

The modification that McLeod and Graber suggest for the Pumpkin Book Report could easily be applied to book trailer videos. Rather than just highlighting key points in their chosen books, students could focus on a theme of their chosen books or on the traits of a central character.