CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

What determines our choice of film? Yes, we usually read reviews and we follow recommendations of people whose judgement we trust, but often the clincher is the trailer we see when we are already captive in the cinema. The same principle applies to students ‘captive’ in the library or the classroom - when they are selecting something to read we can point them to reviews, they can listen to the thoughts of others, but this visual generation will also appreciate a book trailer, and there are now plenty of great examples out there in Web 2.0 land.

Last year Arizona’s Pima County Public Library ran a competition with its teens to suggest suitable titles. The winners then worked with a professional production team to create short trailers to be voted on by other teens. The shortlist included:

• The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger (an oldie but a goodie, except for Tom Henderson, the protagonist of King Dork)
• Lois Lowry’s The Giver ( sure-fire literature circle winner)
• Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (teen romance novel of the year in many schools)

And simple but really effective examples are on the Blue Valley North Library Media Center (Kansas) site. The witty promos for Dairy Queen and Kiki Strike : Inside the Shadow City demonstrate what can be achieved with few resources. Note the best practice in the citation of sources.

That vast repository of online videos, YouTube, has plenty of examples if you are specific in your search. The 2006 and 2007 US Teen Book Video Award winners are there, including How I Live Now, The Book Thief, The Invention of Hugo Cabret and A Great and Terrible Beauty. These (and other) titles can also be found on the Expanded Books site, although it must be said that a teacher-librarian’s input to the developers on how to search effectively would have made this site more user friendly. Best to search on author or title rather than genre. And if you can’t find Markus Zusak under Z, it’s because he has been indexed as Zusak Markus. It’s a pity, as this site has real possibilities and looks like it will become the official repository for these awards. (And wouldn’t it be great to have an Australian Teen Book Video Award!)

So why not use technology to introduce some of these titles in your classroom or library? Better still, why not collaborate with others at your school and run a book trailer competition of your own. Don’t forget to post the results and tell us all about them. What exciting times we live in.