Updated Interactive Stories

I did a lot of work with interactive stories over the period when school closed in the spring. It was a good challenge keeping students engaged at that time. I learned a few things that worked and some that didn’t.

I’ve been writing about these stories in one way or another for about three years now. At the core, they are stories told a bit at a time and they allow readers to provide feedback after each section is presented. You can read more about my favorite way to run these in class in this post.

This most recent experiment (called The Visitors) can be found on this Google Site. Here are some unique things I tried this time.

• This story was written exclusively by me and two other educators. I wanted to make sure quality and regular posting was not affecting engagement, so this time I kept the pace of production on track.
• I tried to do some related tech activities on the website to engage students. This started off well, but frankly I was swamped during the shutdown and I couldn’t keep up with that part. I only created some for the first few chapters.
• I provided some illustrations for Chapter 2 and students seemed to like them. Again, I didn’t have time to keep that up. I think it would be great to integrate this project with an Art class so students could contribute illustrations. This could be done by the readers or students working with the writers.
• I enlisted the help of guest authors. It was fun working with other teachers on the story and it helped generate some interest.
• I started asking a question on the survey that would allow students to enter parent contact information. That way I could send an email when the next part of the story was posted. I only had a couple students do this, but by that time of the school year we were seeing low engagement in almost all classes. Developing an email list was encouraging enough for me to at least continue it for future stories.

I’m pleased with how the story turned out overall. It reads like a first draft and the tone changes from a silly first chapter to a more serious tone in the last few. That’s the nature of these, I think.

The best thing for me was to see a couple students who faithfully followed the story and consistently gave positive feedback on each chapter. One student mentioned she also wrote a story for her family and used a feedback survey to collect opinions. Contagious creativity is a good sign we are on to something good!