Jamie Clark’s secondary students use Clips to bring text to life.

As a teacher of students preparing for their final English exams, Jamie Clark is always looking for ways to help his senior secondary students’ improve the quality of their work. When he discovered Clips during a professional learning session, he saw potential.

Jamie’s Year 12 class studied dystopian fiction — a genre that explores social and political structures. He challenged them to plan and write the opening to a narrative using conventions and vocabulary of dystopian literature. Their work needed to be moody and had to include a convincing character and a figure or concept revered by the society.

To get his students to reflect on the quality of their writing, Jamie had them use the Clips app on iPad to transform a bit of their narrative into a video.

I challenged students to capture the atmosphere of their creative writing with images and sound. Students used Clips to create videos that mirror the stark, visceral, and lifeless imagery that is characteristic of the dystopian genre. Choosing the right music also helped students feel immersed in the worlds they created in their writing.

Jamie began by creating his own Clips video to demonstrate what he wanted from his students. Through a combination of images, text, and music he brought a passage from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to life with Clips.

To set the mood, Jamie used images of dilapidated buildings, closeups of facial expressions, and other dark images. He chose a soundtrack that enhanced the sinister feel of his video. And he added Live Titles of Cormac McCarthy’s text, then muted his voice recording so viewers would focus on the words.

Clips is so simple to use and quite easy to get to grips with straight away.

As students created their Clips videos, they began to identify ways to improve their narratives. Jamie saw significant improvement in their writing after the activity and now believes that iPad and Clips can help make English literature more accessible and engaging for all of his students.

When students watched back their work, by seeing their language on screen with Live Titles, they could really tell what worked well and what didn’t. Clips encourages students to be concise and really focus on their language, the key aspects of their paragraph, what they wanted to achieve, and what they really wanted the reader to think and feel.

Follow Jamie on TwitterOpens in new window to read about other ways he’s incorporated Clips into his English teaching.

To find other great ideas for using Clips in the classroom, search #EveryoneCanCreateOpens in new window and #ClassroomClipsOpens in new window on Twitter. You can also visit the Clips collection to learn how to use the app, explore more ideas for using it in your classroom, and watch Clips videos made by teachers.

ClipsOpens in new window for iPhone and iPad is available free on the App Store.