Doing some research on 'Çhoose your own adventure stories'

I have always been interested in getting my students to write stories and present them in different ways. So when someone mentioned these 'Choose your own adventure stories' on a blog post the idea appealed to me very much. Since we are a Google Apps school I thought that I would use Google Slides and a Grade 6 class to explore this way of writing stories. It seems that you can use Docs, Forms, Slides or YouTube Annotations for writing these stories!

What is a Choose your own adventure story?

“Choose Your Own Adventure is a series of children's gamebooks where each story is written from a second-person point of view, with the reader assuming the role of the protagonist and making choices that determine the main character's actions and the plot's outcome.” (Wikipedia)

These are some of the posts I looked at before plunging in:

1. Going Google with Primary Students: “Choose Your Own Adventure” in Google Slides by Rolland Chiliac
http://goo.gl/Zro3VO

This is a great post by Rolland Chidiac showing how he went about getting his class to write these types of stories. He has a blog where he outlines the process in more detail: http://goo.gl/mFkq1i I rather like his story structure diagram that he shared with his class.

Here are some of his classroom examples:

• The pool party: https://goo.gl/ppYRca
• The lost dog: https://goo.gl/hgGBav
• Gomez meets a ghost https://goo.gl/QqiB9A (his own example)

2. ‘Using Google Apps to Make Interactive Stories’ by Sylvia Duckworth
http://goo.gl/QAgwel
Sylvia Duckworth has tried this process using Google forms, Google Docs, Google Slides and YouTube annotations. She gives a useful diagram on how the story could be structured.

Sylvia has a Google site with the details of the task she sat: https://goo.gl/rCslF3. Sylvia provides a linked template that one can use for a ‘Choose your own adventure story’. https://goo.gl/YjNzDo

3. 'Creating Interactive Choose Your Own (Google) Adventure Stories 'by Jonathon Wylie https://goo.gl/zcNHZq
Jonathon Wylie also showed how to get going in all four applications (Slides, Docs, Forms and YouTube annotations) on his blog in a post entitled 'Creating Interactive Choose Your Own (Google) Adventure Stories' https://goo.gl/zcNHZq This is what he says about Google presentations: “Want to try something different? Try using Google Presentations. Instead of creating pages, like you would with Forms, you create slides to tell your story. This gives you a little more flexibility in the visual design of your story, but it also opens up more options in terms of the media you can include…namely video. Slides can be linked together via the link function that you may normally use to insert a hyperlink, only this time you select “Slides in this presentation”

Jonathon Wylie also shows how to link the slides once the story is completed:



4. Choose Your Own (Google) Adventure Stories” by Tony Amsler
https://goo.gl/y8zQ3p
Tony Amsler gives detailed instructions on this process on a Google Sites page entitled, “Choose Your Own (Google) Adventure Stories” He demonstrates the story by creating an example about copyright!



5. 'Choose your own adventure with Google forms' by Michelle Armstrong https://goo.gl/WvgT0X
Michelle gives a presentation on how to write this kind of a story using Google forms. https://goo.gl/WvgT0X . I like the graphic she uses to explain the process:

Michelle also provides a link to a great linked slides template created by Chelsey Eminger https://goo.gl/PwQUXl

6. Classroom examples

• Mrs Pice’s Grade 4 class gives some useful instructions on the process in this video, plus a display of all the stories http://goo.gl/tdu9OT
• Here is a Grade 2 class’s selection of Christmas stories https://goo.gl/kpz6IA

7. The process in writing a choose your own adventure story

1. Show students some sample stories:
2. For example: Mrs Coopers Third Grade class: https://goo.gl/5ESgeK
3. Decide on a template to use. Illustrate the process via a graphic. https://goo.gl/w7ocVy
4. Use a mindmapping to plan the story An example is Mindup https://www.mindmup.com/#m:new
5. Decide on an assessment rubric and show it.
6. Once the story is written – each slide needs a heading – link the slides together.Show how they link: The key is linking all the slides together https://goo.gl/xY1a36

Happy writing!