HapYak + YouTube = Creative Writing Task

HapYak allows you to add text blurbs and doodles on top of a YouTube or Vimeo video.

As a writing task for students, I created a Play List of YouTube videos that do not include any spoken dialogue. One of my favorite places to search for videos for writing tasks is the Vancouver Film School.

The writing task was to provide narrated blurbs for the videos. Since present progressive is one of the current themes, some of the sentences needed to be written in present progressive. I created an example of what I expect from the students. Even though the videos are short (they have a minute and a half to three minutes) – I am still going to have them work in a small group to achieve higher quality finished products.

The pre-writing task will be watching the video and writing down potentially important words they need to define. One of the videos is about an opposum – and that is not a word I actually expect my students to know in Spanish. Verbs have to be defined in the infinitive. After the pre-writing phase, students will collaborate on a GoogleDoc to narrate the story. The story should be a mix of present and present progressive. They should include time stamps in with the sentences they write, which will make the next portion easier.

On HapYak you click add video and you only have to copy the video URL. The finished sentences will be copy and pasted from the GoogleDoc to the appropriate time in the video. Once they are finished, they should submit the HapYak video URL on Edmodo so everyone in the class can view the finished product.