Creating multimodal texts is an increasingly common practice in contemporary classrooms. Easy to produce multimodal texts include posters, storyboards, oral presentations, picture books, brochures, slide shows (PowerPoint), blogs, and podcasts. More complex digital multimodal text productions include web pages, digital stories, interactive stories, animation, and film.
Student authors need to be able to effectively create multimodal texts for different purposes and audiences, with accuracy, fluency, and imagination. To do this, students need to know how meaning is conveyed through the various modes used in the text, as well as how multiple modes work together in different ways to convey the story or the information to be communicated.
Students need to know how to creatively and purposefully choose how different modes might convey particular meaning at different times in their texts, and how to manipulate the various combinations of different modes across the whole text to best tell their story (Jewitt, 2009).
