Commerical Advertising-Classroom 2.0 Style!

Over the last few weeks, my students and I have been closely examining both television commercials, and print ads. The students have used a form for responding to the commercials they have viewed, and also to print ads. You can find all of the materials for the project (and as fillable/saveable PDFs, no less!)here.
The final project for the unit has the students inventing a product (they can use a basic one already created, a soda perhaps, but there must be something unique about their item) and then using Animoto to create a commercial. Animoto does have educational accounts available so you can use the full site without paying.

We started off with each student individually watching commercials and using the television response sheet. All of the commercials are from YouTube, and I downloaded them ahead of time to avoid school computer issues. I found a variety of old and new commercials. After that, in groups, students used computers to examine print advertisements with a response worksheet. The print ads were mostly from Flickr's Creative Commons.

Students have truly been engaged in the project: the group work has been amazing, and the discussions have ranged from defending a choice of product, and to how things have changed in TV & print ads since the students were children, and since the teachers were children. One group has decided their product is "flavored air"... how often do you get that kind of creativity?