Multimedia presentations are excellent options for student assessment partially because they allow for such creativity. In a recent Powerpoint assignment I gave my students, they were required to include some sort of visual to show how they analyzed their assigned poem. I loved watching which kind of visual they selected, and then noting how they structured the presentations. One student designed the slides using the Powerpoint templates and played with the power of color symbolism. Another student flashed pictures in between certain lines of the poem so the meaning might be portrayed more powerfully. Through the use of this technology, student’s individual identities were highlighted. They had an element of choice and an artistic quality to their presentation. I love giving them this freedom because so many times they teach me how to interpret and how to feel lines of old text still at work today.
As Turkle (2004) suggests, how can teachers use technology to develop a spirit of “democracy, tolerance, diversity, and complexity of opinion”? I think that the first step is in giving students choice. They are not mere programs to memorize and regurgitate. They are creative beings designed to craft and invent and conceive. What great way to allow them to use these God-given abilities!
The greatest challenge comes then when these acts of creation are a bit strange, or they are unclear, or messy. When choices are given students may make the wrong choice, or at least an undesirable one. Other students may not know how to handle the outlier personality in the room with a bizarre presentation. With diversity and complexity in student production comes equally dense and compound issues in student interaction, in self-esteem questions etc. It is challenging to know how to encourage students to experiment, to try, but also to extend grace to each other in the process.
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