The CD/DVD Cover Creator allows users to type and illustrate CD and DVD covers and related booklets for liner notes and other information. Students can use the tool to create covers for books, music, and films that they explored as well as to create covers for media they compose individually or as a class. Students can use text tools to add formatting to their titles and notes, add shading to background areas of the covers and booklets, and draw original images to illustrate their covers and booklets. For additional ideas on how to use this tool, see Tips for Using CD/DVD Cover Creator.

Visit this interactive tool at: http://www.readwritethink.org/materials/cd-dvd/.

ReadWriteThink Lessons That Use This Tool

A “Brief, Urgent Message”: Theme in Slaughterhouse-Five (9-12)
As a culminating activity for Slaughterhouse-Five, students make a compilation album (a CD with 6–8 tracks) that reflects their analysis, understanding, and reaction to the ideas in Slaughterhouse-Five. Based on discussions of the “Tralfamadorian” view of literature, each song on the compilation is approached as a “brief, urgent message” about the work.

Audio Broadcasts and Podcasts: Oral Storytelling and Dramatization (9-12)
Audio broadcasts provide an individualized experience for listeners, who create mental images to accompany the words and sounds they hear. Orson Welles’ broadcast of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds in October 1938 provides perhaps the most well-known example of listeners’ imaginations leading to a very vivid experience. After exploring Welles’ broadcast, students create criteria for effective audio dramatizations and then compose their own dramatization of a scene from a recent reading.

Cover to Cover: Comparing Books to Movies (6-8)
Students explore matching texts—novels and the movies adapted from them—to develop their analytical strategies, drawing comparisons between the two texts and hypothesizing about the effect of adaptation. Students design new DVD covers for the movies, reflecting their response to the movie version.

Exploring Irony in the Conclusion of All Quiet on the Western Front (9-12)
After reading All Quiet on the Western Front, students discuss the novel’s two-paragraph, ironic ending, which repeats the book’s title. They will then compose alternate titles and endings for the book, modeled on the original, and design new book covers that features their new titles.

I've Got It Covered! Creating Magazine Covers to Summarize Texts (6-8)
In this lesson, students identify main ideas in textbook chapters and create magazine covers that express those ideas in words and pictures.

It’s My Life: Multimodal Autobiography Project (9-12)
This lesson allows students to express themselves verbally, visually, and musically by creating multimodal autobiographies. Students benefit from the open exchange of ideas with other students and share important events in their lives through a PowerPoint presentation.

On a Musical Note: Exploring Reading Strategies by Creating a Soundtrack (6-8)
Take advantage of students’ interest in music and movies with this lesson that asks students to create a soundtrack for a novel that they have read. As students search for songs and explain their choices, they engage in such traditional reading strategies as predicting, visualizing, and questioning. The activity can be completed as a response to a class-read novel or as a book report alternative.

Stairway to Heaven: Examining Metaphor in Popular Music (9-12)
In this lesson students examine metaphors they find in the lyrics of popular music. Using an interactive graffiti tool, students illustrate and explain the metaphor. The lesson has students make connections between the literary texts they read in the classroom and popular culture texts with which they are already familiar.

You Know the Movie Is Coming—Now What? (6-8)
Students and teachers often get excited when they hear that a movie version of a favorite book will soon be coming to theaters. What can be done in the classroom to prepare for a viewing of that film? In this lesson, students read a literary text with the eye of a director, selecting scenes from the text and putting a cinematic spin on them.