JAY – Three sophomores presented School Committee members with multi-media projects they did to decipher and defend a theme in a book in teacher Kristal Anuszewski’s class.

They had all read “The Pearl” by John Steinbeck and chose a theme of greed while other students in their class did the same or chose different themes, Anuszewski said Thursday night.

The project was the culmination of the class’ reading of the book and she asked them to do a photo story so she could assess what they learned.

Anuszewski said she set some perimeters and students took off with their ideas to stay within those guidelines.

“I want to thank you for making technology a priority at the high school,” she said.

She also thanked information technology Director Frank Williams for his efforts to make programs available to teachers and students.

Student Dylan Stefani said he had stayed after school three days to work on his project because he had dial-up Internet access instead of high speed.

He ran into some roadblocks on school computers, he said, such as filters, but was able to do what he needed to do. He wove music with words and photos on the slides highlighting the theme.

The story is about a young pearl diver, Kino, who hopes for education and a real wedding among other things but finds a pearl that destroys his dreams after people turn against him and plot to kill him and his family, to get the Pearl of the World.

Fellow students Elizabeth LeBlanc and Josh Allison also showed their presentations on an overhead projector.

LeBlanc, who has an old computer at home, had a lot of trouble initially but was able to create a photo story at school with different options available.

She mixed pieces of music together instead of staying with one song in the story to demonstrate her theme.

Josh Allison used a movie-maker program on his home computer to present his project like a video.

Anuszewski said students really got engaged in making their photo story projects.

“Kids love working with music. That’s their culture,” she said. The project caught their attention and they produced.