The next time your students have to make posters, check out Glogster as an alternative to cutting, pasting, and stenciling. This site lets kids create an interactive visual using text, images, music and video. This version works great as a community-building exercise (have students get to know one another by sharing their posters).
For instance, here is a really cool one on The Lightening Thief. There really is something for every kid here. Some kids will love creating the visual itself, others will enjoy looking for relevant video clips, and a few may be interested in creating the text that ties it all together.
We think these would work well as formative assessments or just as an alternative to traditional study and review tasks.