Making writing assignments more interesting

This one will be short and sweet.  I was rethinking my writing assignments this semester, after having students do blogs on Blackboard last semester, which may have been my worst idea ever. (Blogs in Blackboard basically don't look anything like real blogs.  They make it impossible to forget that you are only there to grade an assignment, not to enjoy what you're reading.)

So this semester, I switched it up a little.  Students can choose their format, and can submit a Word document, a PowerPoint presentation, an Adobe Express page, a video recording, or an audio recording for each homework assignment.  

What is Adobe Express?  It's basically a page that looks like a blog post, without the hassle of actually running a blog.  (It's also very easy to find nice images using their image search tool.)  The idea behind allowing a variety of formats is that students can feel free to be creative if they want. And I particularly like the PowerPoint and Adobe Spark options because assignments are visually much more interesting and appealing to me, the reader, when they include images (and when the text is broken up into smaller chunks).

Here are some examples: