B7.1 Assignment: Multimedia of Social Issue
After having reviewed the techniques and tools used to create a listening text like Podcasts, your final assignment is to create your own Visual text (video), which will include these similar types of tools to develop.
Sample Viral Videos on Social Change:
You can view/skim some video examples to see what techniques and formatting of their videos they used to best capture their audience’s attention and draw a wide audience to spread their message.
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- Ten Viral Videos for Social Change: link here
- How to Make the World’s Most Viral Video – Kony 2012 Analysis (3.41 long)
- How To Video – How to Make Video Inspiring Social Change: focus on the RESOLVE method: relatable, emotive, simple, original, lasting, visual, and empowering (4 mins long)
- Video Storytelling – How to Drive Connection Through Narrative: website includes suggestions for effective development of videos
- Sample Viral Video with 15 million views – check out its organization and characteristics
Student Examples:
The following videos have been shared by former students who understand seeing a sample of a project helps give you a good idea of how to develop one yourself.
As you view them, consider the following qualities of the constructed videos:
- what their beginnings and endings look like, in particular. These are often the least considered or developed parts of the videos, but leave a significant impact on viewers.
- A beginning might start with a title slide and title or it begins in a more dramatic and unclear manner to catch a viewer’s attention and then narrow into the focus of the video.
- Endings might include a simple message in text letters on final slides or it has music building for an emotionally convincing end and a narrator’s voice to impact readers.
- You can also consider things like the quality of videos used or sound recordings.
- Some student projects have included video that was recorded off an iPad screen, or over-pixelated video, or better quality video that’s screen recorded or downloaded straight from a video source.
- The tools available to use by your video making program:
- transition types
- font styles, sizes, colours
Supports:
- Instructional Video: Overview of the characteristics and techniques to consider using to develop your video
- ELA A10 Blog Post with many links to sound effects or video websites
There are resources at this blog post you may find useful to develop your video project. Sound effect websites, background mood music, images and video portions that are CreativeCommons and useable for your project. - The many elements to consider using in your multimedia video. Click to enlarge and then click again to zoom into it.
Sample Media Projects from this Assignment – developed by former students who’ve given consent for you to view them for ideas.
Protected: ELA: Common Resources/References
Hamlet – Independent Reading/Listening option
If you’re unable to join our class group in reading/acting out the play, you could benefit from a dramatic performance recorded as an audiobook. This version of audio narration of the play is performed by the actors of a famous film version of Hamlet. It includes the dramatic sound effects and music in the background to make it a realistic experience for you in reading through the play on your own.
The audiobook is one single file, but I’ve separated it so you can jump to the different Acts for convenience.
Act 1 (start – 51:23 minutes in)
Act 2 (51:23 – 1:32:24)
Act 3 (1:32:24 – 2:25:51)
Act 4 (2:25:51 – 3:07:38)
Act 5 (3:07:38 – end)
B30 A3 Love and Relationships – supports
This first half of B30 continues to study the Human Experience – one of the most essential parts of that is our interactions with each other in the form of relationships. One of the most obvious reasons why the entertainment industry is so popular and financially successful is because the audience is drawn to unique and complicated relationships between characters.
Resources for this section:
- Pg 1: Big Ideas – choose any 7 to respond to. You can write out responses, type them into a shared document, or audio record them and share them. Alone or with a partner(s).
- Pg 2: Concept Mapping – Collaboration in Microsoft Whiteboard
Using Microsoft Whiteboard on your laptops, you can join in online groups to develop these concept maps together.- The Whiteboard is connected to your Sunwest email account. Login with that info.
- One person in the group can Create a new Whiteboard and Share it directly to a Breakout Room in Teams ELA B30. Then anyone in that Breakout Room can access and contribute to the Whiteboard.
(Post to Teams > Select Team > Select Breakout Room.) - Or you can Share it to someone’s Sunwest Email address.
- pg 3 Self Assessment – approach towards relationships
Using the scales given, identify where on the scale from one extreme to the next, you’d position yourself.
- pg 4 Visualization Pre-View: Porphyria’s Lover
What do you think is happening in this image?
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- Pg 5 “Porphyria’s Lover” Dramatic Monologue:
Audio narration of the poem (if it helps you for comprehension)
- Pg 5 “Porphyria’s Lover” Dramatic Monologue:
- After Reading Questions: Question 5 Writing Body Paragraph (practice)
- pg 10 Compose and Create: Google Doc link
Remember, you must be logged into your Gmail account to leave your comments, so they show up and can be attributed to you.
B30 Script Writing Support
If you’re about to try writing your own stage play, some of the following resources may help you.
Document Templates for Kenaston Student:
- A2.1 Script Writing Template Doc for SS 2019 (You can download this Word doc and upload to Google Docs if you’d rather use that writing format)
- A2.1 Script Writing – three scene template (This could help you outline/plan your beginning, middle, and end of your script writing.)
To see samples of short stage scripts, try these:
- Duck Tale stage play sample pages (you can recognize how the page/parts of it are formatted)
- YPF Sample Script (start reading page 1 for page format)
ELA B30 A1 Self Identity (media resources)
Here are some links to help you explore the texts and themes within this section.
“By Any Other Name” Santha Rau – essay text pdf
- Website: pronunciations of names by country
- Twitter Collection (Waldner assembled): Anglocized Names – personal. current examples
- Article: How Much Racism do you Face Everyday?
Discussion on unintended bias encounters, known as “microaggressions”
Path B: Options for more practice or choice of poem(s)
There are other poems that reveal an author’s search for their self-identity and their place in their society.
Identity Poems in Shared Google Doc – join here to share your comments as you read three of the poems.
- “An Introduction” poem – Kamala Das
- Waldner recorded “An Introduction” audio of poem
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- “I am Alien in Africa and Everywhere” poem – Dennis Brutus
- Brutus was a prisoner alongside Nelson Mandela in South Africa. He lived in the United States for a time, exiled from his home country. In this video, you could hear the voice of the writer for this poem.
- Waldner recorded “I am Alien in Africa and Everywhere” audio of poem
- “Home” poem Fred D’Aguiar – read along with the poem in the article below
- Podcast: “Black Names in White Classrooms: Teacher Behaviours and Student Perceptions”
- This page includes written transcript of the podcast, so you can jump down in the page to some of the research findings.
ELA MLA Citation Guide & Links
If you pursue post-secondary education, the odds are you’ll have to develop a piece of writing that requires in-text citations and a Works Cited page. Here are some resources to use as a guide for that:
- author and page #
- anonymous authors
- text from an anthology or collection
- multiple authors
- internet sources
Citing non-print or sources from the Internet
With more and more scholarly work being posted on the Internet, you may have to cite research you have completed in virtual environments. While many sources on the Internet should not be used for scholarly work (reference the OWL’s Evaluating Sources of Information resource), some Web sources are perfectly acceptable for research. When creating in-text citations for electronic, film, or Internet sources, remember that your citation must reference the source in your Works Cited.
Sometimes writers are confused with how to craft parenthetical citations for electronic sources because of the absence of page numbers, but often, these sorts of entries do not require a page number in the parenthetical citation. For electronic and Internet sources, follow the following guidelines:
- Include in the text the first item that appears in the Work Cited entry that corresponds to the citation (e.g. author name, article name, website name, film name).
- You do not need to give paragraph numbers or page numbers based on your Web browser’s print preview function.
- Unless you must list the Web site name in the signal phrase in order to get the reader to the appropriate entry, do not include URLs in-text. Only provide partial URLs such as when the name of the site includes, for example, a domain name, like CNN.com or Forbes.com as opposed to writing out http://www.cnn.com or http://www.forbes.com.
Works Cited page – basic guidelines
Basic rules
- Begin your Works Cited page on a separate page at the end of your research paper. It should have the same one-inch margins and last name, page number header as the rest of your paper.
- Label the page Works Cited (do not italicize the words Works Cited or put them in quotation marks) and center the words Works Cited at the top of the page.
- Double space all citations, but do not skip spaces between entries.
- Indent the second and subsequent lines of citations by 0.5 inches to create a hanging indent.
- List page numbers of sources efficiently, when needed. If you refer to a journal article that appeared on pages 225 through 250, list the page numbers on your Works Cited page as 225-250. Note that MLA style uses a hyphen in a span of pages.
- If you’re citing an article or a publication that was originally issued in print form but that you retrieved from an online database, you should type the online database name in italics. You do not need to provide subscription information in addition to the database name.
Easybib Citation Maker: this website can be helpful for easily making your Works Cited page.
What’s on my bookshelf? Check online to see!
There are a lot of cool books on the shelves of the bookcase at the back of the room. Most are separated to fit their best course or genre that they relate to, but it can be deceiving, since many overlap and fit a number of high school ELA courses.
To help you see what your options are and decide, I’ve created online shelves in GoodReads. At the link below, you can skim through and read summaries to every book on my shelf and get a sense of its topic, rather than judging by colour.
Curious about a book? Ask me about it!
You’ll see on the left of the page a number of Shelves – click through them to skim books that apply and are potential choices within your class.
ELA B30 Podcast Listening Activity – List of Options
In your current section of ELA work, you will practice some listening skills by selecting a podcast related to a social issue and working through some active listening tasks. The podcast should be at least 25 minutes in length approximately and on a topic that relates to an issue either nationally or globally significant in our time.
Note: Even though this is a World Literature course and shouldn’t have any Canadian content, the topics of these Canadian podcasts are relevant beyond Canada’s borders so they are acceptable topics to focus on.
Double Note: For anything longer than 30 minutes, you can listen to the 1st 25 minutes of your podcast and jump to listen to the last 5. Don’t let length interrupt choosing a topic you’re interested in.
The following have been screened for you and would be acceptable choices.
- Why are so many young Canadians homeless and what should be done about it? 39 mins
- Vice Reporter says RCMP’s demands for his notes puts journalism at risk. 26 mins
- In a safe, subsidized apartment, this 21 year old is beginning to imagine his future. Born to a drug-addicted prostitute in Prince Albert, a 12-year-old lives on the streets and survives. 27 mins
- The elephant in the room: women with medically fragile kids that need daily medical care to stay alive. 26 mins
- Ijeoma Olvo urges us to have better conversations about race. 44 mins
- Why Ing Wong-Ward “won’t” choose medically assisted death. 25 mins
- Why a couple married 73 years chose doctor-assisted death together. 24 mins
- Escaping “the man box” – how parents raising sons are rethinking masculinity. 23 mins
- We can’t cower to intimidation: Jewish community in Germany reacts to growing alt-right party support and rising anti-semitism. 23 mins Podcast playable from Google Drive
- The War at Home: documentary looks at Canada’s failure to help women flee partner violence. 24 mins
- Belle: Counselling sessions with a woman suffering from post-partum depression and a woman struggling with an eating disorder. Samples of improvements because of counselling. 25 mins
- Violent misogyny found in “incel” (involuntary celibacy) is a form of terrorism, says author. (Relates to the man who drove a van over Toronto sidewalks killing several people.) 25 mins
- Is India’s gender imbalance to blame for the rise in violence against women? (There are 37 million more males than females in India) 24 mins
- Humboldt Broncos player’s organ donation prompts call for stronger protocol around consent. 23 mins Podcast Link in Google Drive
How bad is Canada’s food waste problem? Among the world’s worst, report finds. 23 mins
International Podcasts:
- Discussion on what “home” means to homeless people. 44 mins
- Prenatal blood testing changed modern medicine, particularly in diagnosing Down Syndrome babies and possibly deciding to end those pregnancies. 30 mins
- Climate change denial is similar to the controversy that happened decades ago when evolution was first taught as fact in schools. The trend in denying science. 39 mins
- A look into the interesting facts on the development of a teenage brain; it’s like a sports car. 35 mins Juvenile offenders in the US are sentenced to mandatory sentences, like life or even the death penalty. Science proves, though, teenage brains function differently, so this podcast follows the efforts of lawyers to use that science to reduce the sentences for youth found guilty of murder, so they won’t be killed or live their lives in prison.
- Reality tv shows are popular, but fabricated reality. The United Nations attempted to use this type of reality show to influence citizens of Somalia to adapt their views on democracy and freedom. 50 mins
- The Woman Behind a Secret Grey’s Anatomy Experiment. 33 mins In the 80s when HIV was epidemic, people believed it was a disease only homosexuals could be infected with and die, until heterosexual young people, young women included, became infected. They told their stories so people would understand it could infect anyone.
- Living in between gender categories. Meet someone who lives part of their life as a woman and other parts of their life as a man.48 mins
- Flipping the script – police are trying to reduce radicalization of young people in Denmark by showing love and compassion. 60 mins
- Working for Doctors Without Borders at a massive refugee camp in Somolia. What is it really like? 30 mins
- How friendships and quiet conversation transformed a former white nationalist. 52 mins
- Conversation on the soul in depression. 51 mins
- Living in a Syrian refugee camp in Greece – what stories of hope and charity can be found in a place like that? 79 mins (listen to parts)
- Overcoming Childhood Trauma/Addictions to finding peace and thriving in life (71 minutes)
- Conquering PTSD and taking your life back (61 minutes)
- Climbing out of darkness (of depression) to reclaim your life (49 minutes)
- Surviving Pregnancy in America – when pregnancy becomes a physical health risk to mother (41 minutes)
- Sperm Banter – the male perspective of going through infertility issues and treatment (21 minutes)
- Wildfire: Trapped by Fire (experiencing a raging forest fire, broader issue of forest fires) (48 minutes)
- Genderless Voice Assistants – challenging the gender bias created by mostly female voice assistants (27 minutes)
- Is facial recognition violating people’s rights? (bans against it beginning in cities) (26 minutes)
- Chemists’ Dirty Secrets – from the Cold War to today (use of chemical weapons in the world) (26 minutes)
- Chemists’ Dirty Secrets – from the Crimean War to end of WWII (use of chemical weapons) (26 minutes)
- Examination of US Hault to use of Hyman Embryo Tissue for Scientific Research (35 minutes)
- Using AI to Predict Heart Attacks and Cancer (27 minutes)
- #Sharenoevil – a Chrome Browser Extension can block any mention of the Christchurch mosque shooter’s name appearing in searches (blocking terrorist content) (27 minutes)
- The Mother I Never Knew – story of family who gave their child to another family to be raised in another country (Australian) (53 minutes)
Deconstructing a text like a podcast: understanding the elements
- Message of the text:
- What’s the overall theme or focus of the podcast you listened to?
- What understanding do they want listeners to walk away with after listening?
- Your bias or personal reactions you have to parts of the discussion
- Did you pick a topic that follows your personal beliefs or is contrary to them? Did you pick a topic that challenges your ideas or will likely support your own views and opinions?
- Were their comments or ideas brought up in the podcast that touched on a viewpoint you are sensitive towards? Did you find yourself being mentally resistant to an idea or discussion in the text?
- We all have biases – we are biased towards a topic or biased against one.
- Main Ideas of the text and their Supporting Ideas (sub-topics)
- Any informational text will be broken down into main ideas and then supported with multiple points. Consider text book chapters you’ve read or teacher’s handouts – you’ll have noticed main headings and indented bullet points of the supporting details.
- Look at your note taking – did you identify some main points of the podcast and supporting details of each? What were those main ideas and sub-topics?
- Explicit Messages
- An explicit message is the one directly expressed to the listener. It is a clearly relayed point the authors want listeners to understand. It includes the obvious message points included. These points are not subtle or easily missed.
- Implied Messages (implicit messages)
- These messages are the more-hidden messages included within a podcast text. They’re not as obvious and, if a listener isn’t thinking critically and carefully while listening, they may miss that they were exposed to or influenced by implicit messages.
- It is a message that is understood and hinted at, but not plainly expressed.
- A listener may have to infer meaning if the message is subtly expressed.
- Values shared through the podcast, of the speaker or other guests
- A good listener will naturally recognize the values hinted at through what someone is saying in a podcast. A speaker may not directly explain their value or moral belief, but through their conversation you should be able to understand what is important to them.
- Examples: Someone who speaks about a lack of funding in the health care system to support sick children will value social supports that protect individuals. Someone who investigates the amount of food that’s wasted in our grocery and food services industry will value conservation or sustainable living. Someone who reports on an American justice system that still uses the death penalty on teenage offenders will be someone who values the idea of right and wrong, justice, restitution, or second chances.
- Tone of the Message
- The same way that you recognize mood or tone in a poem or short story, you should recognize tone in a listening text.
- The speaker may use certain language that makes clear a subtle tone or a stronger tone. It can be the difference between talking about a topic in an informing way compared to a convincing way.
- Editors may also include other elements like sound effects or music in the background to help establish the tone of the overall podcast. Discussing a topic like assisted suicide may be approached in a negative or skeptical tone … or it can be approached in a positive way sharing an opinion of it being the right answer for some people in need.
- Emotional Appeals
- If the host or a guest on a podcast is trying to convince listeners of one side of a topic, they may use comments, anecdotal stories, personal experiences to emotionally compel listeners to support their side of the issue.
- It is a technique of manipulation, though a subtle one. Critical thinkers need to stay alert/aware to understand if they are being slightly manipulated or not.
- Reasoned Arguments
- Other hosts or guests on a podcast may come prepared to convince listeners of a topic (the importance of it or to side with one perspective of that topic) not through emotional manipulation, but instead through a rational argument that’s well-organized and shared with the listener.
- It may include using logical, rational points set up almost like a debate structure. Listeners may find themselves believing that speaker because of how informed they are/seem on the topic.
- Still, in recognizing a speaker with Reasoned Argument, a critical thinking listener must consider whether they believe everything that speaker is sharing. Do they trust their information?
- Use of Allusion
- This is a poetic device some hosts or guests may use to develop the entertaining factor of their topic. By making references to popular characters in other texts, it helps listeners make personal connections to a topic or speaker. If they refer to some type of rescue as “Noah’s arc” that protected everyone, that’s an Allusion reference from the Bible. If they refer to some heroic person as a type of “John Wayne” or “Moses”, they’re referring to other characters seen as being heroic.
- Artistic creative efforts
- What was unique about the techniques used in your podcast choice that may have been added for style specifically to help keep the podcast interesting for a listener?
- It may include their use of sound effects to help the reader visualize a scene as someone narrates their personal experience. It may include the use of the host’s voice – using a lot of inflection, laughter, and comical jokes. Was there anything specifically unique and creative about how your podcast was constructed? If so, describe how they developed that.