"Create a Magazine Cover" has been an assignment that has been around a while. Students used markers or colored pencils to enhance and extend ideas cut from real magazines. It is exciting to re-design the lesson using technology and a website called
Big Huge Labs. This idea came from
Denise Burke, a Technology Specialist in Lewisville, Texas. I tried the lesson out last year, with the 5th graders, after listening to her presentation at TCEA in Austin. Her presentation is repeated this year at TCEA and I highly recommend her session if anyone is planning to attend. Her presentation was entitled,
"Exploring the Outer Limits: Web 2.0 Projects for GT Students". One of the highlights of her session was using "Big Huge Labs" to create magazine covers.
Students use
picsforlearning or
edupics to select an image.
Example image selected by one of my students last year:
This one image will be cropped and edited through
Picnik to make 3 different magazine covers for three different audiences. Picnik is free and easy to use. Students can save their cropped images to the desktop to make it easy to transfer to Big Huge Labs to create their covers.
Here is a magazine cover the student created using Big Huge Labs: I have them make a storyboard to organize their thoughts.
His audience was artists and craftsmen. He designed another cover by zooming in to the "black" area and targeting an audience interested in "oil and gas".
I love this project because ... the students are using the computer as a tool to create something new from their own thoughts. There are a million different ways to create their own magazine covers. It also promotes thinking specifically with the student's ability to take on the perspective of another person: the audience of their created magazine. Tomorrow we are making our first magazine cover with this year's students. Mrs. Schoppe has made a rubric to help guide the students in creating an outstanding project. I will share the results in a post later.
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