By using animation, color, font, and music, I was able to add some depth to the poem, "Under a Telephone Pole," which I did with Power Point. Because of this project, I definitely feel like I know the ins and outs of Power Point like nobody's business. Below are some screenshots of different slides from my illuminated text.
When the poem describes the copper wire that hangs from the telephone being wet in the rain, I had the words "drip" and "drop" descending from the "copper wire" and disappearing.
To illustrate how the copper wire dries in the sunlight, I have the "copper wire" change from it's copper color to a bright sunny yellow color.
This was the most complicated slide, and instead of just illustrating what the poem says, I added in some extra features to expose the deeper meaning of the poem. The text from this portion of the poem reads like this:
It is love and war and money; it is the fighting and the
tears, the work and want,
Death and laughter of men and women passing through
me, carrier of your speech,
To "illuminate" this, I had each phrase mentioned move along the "copper wire" and down into its place with the rest of the text on the bottom half of the slide. Once all of the words were in place, I shot the word "LIFE" across the "copper wire" over and over again. The word "life" is never in the poem, but I interpreted the list of "love," "war," "money," etc to represent "life" in general. And isn't it ironic that all our lives can be passed through something as inane and inhuman as a copper wire? It was on this slide that I felt like the strength of the Illuminated Text as a genre really shined through.
Illuminated Text is a great tool, despite its sometimes tedious nature. It takes a lot of time and effort to put all the pieces together, but I think the lesson learned in the process, namely a lesson in the power of the marriage of text and visual, is invaluable. Another important benefit of this tool is the appeal to visual learners. A student who is a visual learner may understand a text, but in order to express his or her ideas about its meaning, he or she may need to do this kind of assignment rather than the traditional writing of an essay.
I think that in my future classroom, I will introduce this idea to students when we do a unit either on using technology to write, or on the value of the visual in our writing (which may end up being one unit). In the State Core, at every grade level, there is a section on how students need to be able to present their ideas using technology, and I think Illuminated Texts are one way that we can help students to reach this objective. More importantly, in today's world, one can rarely find a text online that includes no visuals or other media. I feel that in order to truly prepare our students for the real world, they need to learn that visuals are just as important as the writing itself, and that we can use visuals as a powerful enhancer of our writing if we are able to manipulate meaningfully.
Specifically, I plan to use this assignment during my unit on incorporating visual with text, especially when it comes time to express interpretations using technology. I want to assign a project that asks students to read a piece of literature, and then, using technology, express their interpretations of theme and connection to life today. But, I won't limit students' options to just making an Illuminated Text. As I said before, this project takes a lot of patience, as well as a desire to express ideas in a nontraditional manner. Therefore, I will use this genre as a way to teach my students concepts, and give them the opportunity to use this genre if they wish, but I won't assign all of my students to create using this technology.
Here is a link to my website where the ppsx file is loaded (click on the "complete" version). Download the Power Point, and view the slide show. No need to click: it is timed to run by itself.
https://sites.google.com/site/ghsenglishclasswebsite/home/ipt-286-blog/-ipt-class-materials
