Alternative Assessment Options
It’s Opening Night: An Art Gallery Display
Have you ever been to an Art Gallery? Paintings are the most commonly displayed art objects; however, sculpture, decorative arts, furniture, textiles, costume, drawings, pastels, watercolors, collages, prints, artists' books, photographs, and installation art are also regularly shown. Sometimes, too, art galleries house performance art, audio files of music concerts, or live or recorded poetry readings.
Your Art Gallery Display will be dedicated to your protagonist, your text, and the themes that emerge during the 100% section. The series of objects you select will have cultural and thematic significance to the protagonist and text due to the descriptions you attach to them, so each Art Gallery Display item should have a 2-3 sentence caption that describes the thematic significance of the object. Your Art Gallery design will make it unique and captivating! Use the Language of Interpretation to bring it to life!
The Village Voice: Blog Posts
Don’t want to feel restricted? Why not create a blog and a series of blog posts, each of which draws on the protagonist, text, and themes? Blogger and WordPress offer nice blogging templates and style options. Think of the blog posts as a narrative compilation of print, audio, visual, video, and digital elements that builds from a beginning, to the middle, and to the end. Do extend beyond a mere print narrative; print as solo information vehicle isn’t nearly as powerful in our world of media texts where look/ style invites readers to absorb ideas.
These Blog Posts do take vision and a rather global worldview about your protagonist, your text, and its overarching themes. Be enthusiastic, creative, clever, and--- above all--- zoom in on the themes through the Language of Interpretation. You should have at least five Blog Posts for this project, but, as always, concise language and quality of analysis takes precedence over length.
The Real Self Exposed: A Body Biography
This is a digital human outline that you fill with images and words and that represents your understanding of themes through the Language of Interpretation. The Body Biography is a visual and written portrait illustrating several aspects of the character's life journey. To do this project well, you’ll probably have a Google home page and several sub-pages that zoom in on the different parts of the body and the metaphorical significances that emerge thematically through the 100% portion of your text.
Step back and think about each part of the body and decide what symbols the different parts stand for in relation to this character’s life. Heart (love), spine (motivation), hands (touch), feet (the life journey), and other body parts (beliefs and values) have special meanings to your character. Interpret those meanings. Also, include rich descriptive passages of your own writing and voice to support your ideas through thematic presentations of the Language of Interpretation.
Real World Composing: A Graffiti Wall
Think of your website as a long wall--- a panorama --- a canvas on which you provide your own imprint and impressions of themes that emerge in your text. Prominently write the name of your protagonist and text in large and interesting (read: graffiti-like) font. Create a splash of words and images that emerge thematically from your text through the Language of Interpretation. Suggested areas of composition include research (correctly cited), important words and phrases, quotations about the text from experts, and rich descriptive passages of your own writing and voice to support your ideas.
When you're done, it should look like a Graffiti Wall but have a persuasive message that connects the items to the issue at hand. A nice style can be seen at http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/09/14/tribute-to-graffiti-50-beautiful-graffiti-artworks/
--- which, although not originally composed for academic purposes, offers keen samples. Graffiti can be fun when filtered through the Language of Interpretation!
Read All about It! International Newspaper
Create your own International Newspaper by creating a layout that seems like it is a real newspaper. Your composition must have at least two pages: a front page and the articles that continue from the front page onto a second page. Moreover, in this age of digital news, you must hotlink your original International Newspaper to other texts and research you have compiled.
Your newspaper’s style is derived from its banner, headlines, photographs, captions, interviews, advertisements, attributions, contexts, stories, and other typical elements. You might surf newspapers around the world, too, to learn what elements other people in other countries paste up in order to create their newspapers. A good place to start is at the website, Commondreams.org, which has a frame with hotlinks to major international daily newspapers. Remember: your topic is your protagonist, your text, and its overarching themes, so draw upon the Language of Interpretation to bring your International Newspaper to life.
“With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility” (Spiderman): An Internet Comic Book
Create an Internet Comic Book of words and images of sequential art about your protagonist, your text, and the . Integrate a narrative about different dimensions and controversies of your protagonist and your text into a flexible and powerful printed format. This project selection is not for the art-challenged, like Dr. Carolyn! You must be able to upload your final Comic Book onto your class blog, so be conscious of any technology needs ahead of time if you choose this project. If you’d like to see a variety of web-based comic books (warning: some are not for the faint-of-heart), click here.
Remember to compose your narrative with the themes that emerge in the 100% portion of your book and to draw upon the Language of Interpretation to bring the big issues to life.
“All of Life’s Riddles are Answered in the Movies” (Steve Martin): A Movie Trailer
The goal is to create a movie trailer of a fictitious movie based on your protagonist, your text, and the themes that emerge within the 100% portion of the book. First, design a blueprint/ storyboard that captures all the elements you’re trying to capture in your film. Next, plan out how you will assemble visuals and narration into a cohesive narration. You can film it with your own digital video camera (or Smart Phone) or create a Microsoft Photostory or Microsoft Movie Maker composition. Remember to incorporate the Language of Interpretation!
Length is not as much of a concern in this project as is the quality of the overarching messages that appear by the end of your movie trailer. A lesson plan about creating digital movie trailers can be found at http://www.edgalaxy.com/journal/2010/9/7/digital-literacy-lesson-create-your-own-movie-trailers.html
Blarin’ on my IPod: A Music Montage
This is a compilation of several pieces of music ---songs from CD tracks --- that speak to the various themes that emerge from your protagonist, your text, and the themes that emerge in the 100% section of the text. This should be accompanied with visuals and/ or lyrics to create a multimodal response. Post the lyrics with songwriter credits on your class website, but beware of copyright infringement! An alternative version would be to survey all the different songs that writers have composed as a result of reading your text.
To do this in a more complex way, you could also layer narration and graphics into a streamed series of slides about your protagonist that use music to create meaning about your text. Whichever route you take, don’t forget about incorporating the Language of Interpretation!
Get the Word Out: A Public Service Advertisement (PSA)
What is a public service advertisement? A PSA is intended to benefit the public interest by raising awareness of an issue to the general public. Maybe, with your persuasive abilities, people will change their attitudes or opinions about the themes you identify in your text in its 100% portion.
How can you create a public service advertisement (PSA) that would highlight an issue that emerges from your text? It should highlight visual aspects of the issue for your audience by including a slogan, captions, and prominent and easy-to-comprehend visual icons. It should appear to be a full-page magazine ad. Beware! It's difficult to create a PSA that looks like a professional advertising agency composed it. You'll need to learn about the various elements that contribute to a PSA’s success, and you also need to be able to draw upon the Language of Interpretation to make it as persuasive as possible.
The Globe’s the Limit: Storify
Storify is an online research and story creation tool that focuses on messages disseminated through social media outlets. In this project, you’ll create a Storify composition that gathers together what other people around the world are saying about your protagonist, text, and/or themes through the Storify search engines.
Cite and synthesize each story or article’s main idea in 2-3 sentences in a text box above your story or article, remembering to focus on the thematic significance! Bring in the Language of Interpretation as you create the captions. Make this project as much you as it is the other authors whose stories you build into your own Storify.
‘Zine
A ‘zine is an on-line magazine reflects you’re a personal point of view. A ‘Zine is a hypertext composition, so you need to make design decisions about layout, white space, fonts, color balance, visual proportioning, and headlines. But a ‘zine is full of you: your voice will resonate here in a way that you may find unusual in an academic setting.
Highly stylized, a ‘zine for this project will offer the protagonist’s thematic feelings, opinions, and uncertainties as arise in your text in its 25-75% portion. You can hotlink to other texts such as editorial, newspaper columns, feature articles, blogs, or advertisements to bring your perspective about important themes to life.