Inspiring Reading and Writing With an Authentic Audience - Part 3

In this third post about this project, I'll list some resources and focus on the final steps we go through to complete the digital products. I'll conclude with a bit about the challenges we faced to bring it together. If you want to read about the background, including why I think this lesson is so valuable, see Part 1 and Part 2.

 

The Planning Sheet

Once students were given the younger students' responses from the survey, we gave them a printed copy of this planning sheet. I added the planning sheet this year, since we had seen students struggle with it in the past. Here's a breakdown of the planning sheet:

• The first seven questions ask them to simply copy down what their assigned 5th grade student had submitted on their survey. That is meant to just ensure the writer read the younger student's information.
• The next few questions take them through the process of connecting those ideas (which are sometimes very unconnected) into a simple story. Some students had trouble with this, but I was impressed how imaginative they could get with just a little prompting.
• The last question asks them to outline the story. I assured them nothing was written in stone here, but it was important to make a plan.

I and the teacher worked with students individually to get through the outline process.

My plan was to have them start typing the story after the outline was done, but the teacher wanted a first draft to be written in their notebooks. I can see this group benefitted from that, so you can decide if a handwritten draft will be better than moving right to the digital part.

Making the Digital Booklets

I refer to these as digital books, but we just build them in Google Slides. I assign this template in Google Classroom, so that they each get a copy. It has two sections on each slide, so there's a place for text and a photo, like this.

Note that the first slide of the template has a place for a title page. I don't like them to take time making that at first, so the directions (typed on the slide itself) ask them to come back to that after they've completed a few slides. I provide these examples of cover images. Normally I encourage them to use Word Art, drop shadows and a good layout. See below about some challenges we faced this time around. Eye-catching title pages were not our main concern this year!

Preparing the Files

After students work through some drafts and revisions, they submit the stories in Google Classroom. I make a copy of each one and move the copies into a new folder in Google Drive. That way the teacher can grade the originals as normal, but I can polish up the copies so they're ready for the younger readers. 

The amount it takes to "polish them up" varies quite a bit from student to student. Most times it involves some punctuation corrections and some wording changes. Over the years I've had to rewrite some or nearly all of some stories for various reasons. For example, one time a younger student stated her problem as, "Sleeping through scary nightmares." The older student tried to provide a situation about overcoming fear that, even after her revisions, would have been too intense for the young student. I get input from both teachers involved, in some cases, just to be sure sensitive cases are handled appropriately.

I also rename the file so it includes the younger student's chosen nickname. That's so they can easily identify their story, depending on how they are given to the readers.

On that note, I prefer to download PDFs of each Slides presentation, then upload them to Drive. When I have a lot of time, I then build a Google Site and link to each story. This was not a year where I could do that in a timely manner, so I just sent the 5th grade teacher the link to my Google Drive folder with all the presentations. She shared that link with her class. 

Finished Examples

This first example is a very direct imagining of a situation based on what the younger student had stated in the survey. Here's what the 5th grader submitted

Here's the final story written by the 6th grader. I really appreciated this student's concern to include so many references to the younger student's responses in his simple story. 

The second example is one of the longer stories we received. There's a lot I like about this 6th grader's writing, but the detail overshadows some of the main theme of overcoming obstacles to achieve a goal. The writer's desire to address the younger student's responses is still very evident, though, and that's one of my favorite things about this project. Here are the 5th grader's responses:

And here is the finished story.

Conclusions

The additional scaffolds we provided (through question sheets) helped a lot this time around. The 5th grade teacher didn't know much about this project when I first asked if we could use her class as our audience. She was more and more impressed with it as we went along. She said her students loved getting the stories. It was a success in many ways, and I look forward to trying it again in the upcoming semester. 

I do want to address some challenges we faced in bringing it together this time. The project started as strong as ever, but a couple days into it we had several students out due to quarantines. Since every student had to write for a younger student, this activity really needs 100% involvement to come together well. For several days only half the writers were in class! Getting the ones to work on it diligently from home was a huge challenge. Even a couple students who were in class most days were resistant to writing. This was the first time some students did not care to write for younger students. We are sure this was due to the effect the absences were having on the students in general. All their classes throughout the day were impacted by it, so by our 6th period class, productivity was way down. The teacher and I almost decided to forget the project and try again next semester. 

It ended up taking several days longer than usual, so I was not in the classroom with them the final week or two. The teacher had students help each other to complete some stories. We never did get a workable story from those two tough cases. It was unfortunate, but given the situation, we focused on what we did accomplish. Two other students volunteered to write those missing stories. Their extra work and concern for the young readers was great to see!

Making a Story Together - High school and elementary connections for authentic audience and engagement

We recently tried another interactive story experiment connecting older students with younger students. As always, the goal with this is to encourage reading in the earlier grades and creativity with the older students. All feedback so far indicates this was a success.

I've written previously about ways to do this with comics or just writing in a Google Doc and one very different method with less input from the younger students.

This story we just finished up is more like the latter case, with a twist inspired by our Boomwriter activity from last winter. The final result can be read at the links below, but first here is the process we used.

• I found five high school students who were interested in trying this and their teacher agreed they could work with me. I managed it all through Google Classroom.
• I also gave a survey to elementary students asking them to name some characters, choose a general setting and choose some character traits. This was presented to all students in grades K - 4, but only a few classrooms really participated. 
• In pairs or individually, the high school students wrote short introductions to a story that fit the criteria generated by that survey. Alone or in groups, they generated a total of three different starters.
• I made a second survey presenting those story starters to the elementary class so they could pick their favorite.
• For the next round of writing, the high school students added to the story starter that the elementary students liked best. Again, each of those groups or individuals wrote the next part as they wanted the story to turn out. That again produced three different possible stories. 
• We continued this for a couple rounds of elementary students voting on their favorite, writing the next parts, voting again and so on. Along with asking which story the elementary students liked best, I'd also ask for suggestions for dialogue or action. It gave them a fun chance to be creative.
• Then since school was getting out soon, I had the high school students work together on bringing the story to a conclusion.

As you might imagine, the students wanted it to be humorous. That and the disjointed way we built the story definitely made it silly. You can read the story here:

• This page has the first three parts.
• This page has the final parts.
• I also had the students at the high school write these short bios so the younger students could get to know them.

The teachers told me that both groups of students, young and old, really got into the activity. We had to rush a few stages, so by the last round only one 3rd grade class was still voting. Their input showed enthusiasm, though, and the teacher told me they were excited to see where the story was going.

Which Method Is Best?

Having tried a few different methods now, I have to say my original approach (again, you can read it here) is still my favorite. In that one, the readers gave their input on the direction of the upcoming chapter, then the writers wrote it how they wanted to. I prefer that because:

• The writers have more control (and therefore more buy-in) over the outcome of each chapter.
• More importantly, they won't be disappointed when the ideas they worked hard on don't get picked. As I said with the Boomwriter activity, I can tell some students lose enthusiasm when their work isn't chosen.

There are still some downsides. You'll have to manage multiple stories if you have multiple groups of writers. Along with this, the readers will probably not be reading every story. They too will work in groups and probably will read only one or two different stories.

Boomwriter for Engaging Collaborative Writing

Boomwriter is not new, but I hadn't used it with a class until recently. I am presenting a session about collaborative storytelling at the MACUL conference this week, so I asked our middle school Creative Writing teacher if she'd be willing to let me run the activity in her class. After I explained what it is, she was excited to try it.

For those unfamiliar with it, Boomwriter is more or less a game where students write stories one chapter at a time. Everyone writes, then everyone votes on the submissions. The winning submission becomes the official next chapter. The process continues until the story is done.

Overall Thoughts

If this sounds at all interesting, definitely try it out. The students really enjoyed the activity. Due to a number of circumstances, the teacher and I had to rush much of the activity. I'm not thrilled with the quality of the writing that came out of it, but I am looking forward to trying it again. So are the students!

What We Did

Our class had 27 students in it, mostly seventh graders. I divided them randomly into groups of 5 or 6 students. The site allows students to dress up their "Boomer" avatar using Boomer Bucks. More Bucks are earned through writing and winning the votes. I wasn't sure how seventh graders would take to this, but our group was definitely into this feature.

With five groups, that means we had five stories. I provided a single sentence as a story starter. Boomwriter has several initial chapters to choose from and, judging by the ones I saw, they expect the first chapter to provide a lot of detail. I didn't want to give them a long passage to read, so my first "chapter" was just one sentence. For example, one of them was The main character is trapped in a video game. I wanted the students' imagination to drive the direction as much as possible.

I set the length of our stories to five chapters, so that meant we had four rounds of writing and voting. The teacher and I were very impressed with how the students were engaged by the activity. Almost all the chapters they submitted were fairly short, but the teacher provided some feedback on the second round of writing and I saw an improvement.

We had many snow days this semester, so we have been pressed for time in all classes. For this activity we really rushed a few rounds. In a couple class periods we just rapidly went through as many rounds as possible (usually two writings and a vote). This amounted to a lot of frantic clicking on my part as I approved chapters, called for some revisions and moved stories along to the voting stage.

When the stories were almost done, we gave the class a survey about the experience. When asked how they liked Boomwriter for collaborative stories, 68% gave it five stars and 20% gave it four stars. Some were disappointed when we didn't immediately start a second story!

Before we did the activity, I wondered if the voting process would discourage students who didn't get picked. Well I did see some sign of this, only 12% said on the survey that it affected them in this way.

Be aware that Boomwriter hopes you and the students' parents will buy the stories as books when they are done. Because of this, I didn't find any way to view the complete stories. Maybe I missed it, but the only solution I came up with to see the whole story was to copy and paste each winning entry into a single document. (While I'm not against them selling a product and I would consider buying one in the future, this time around our stories were not good enough for that.)

What I'd Do Differently Next Time

We plan to use the activity again next marking period. If we do, I will have larger groups and fewer stories. I was hoping to keep the number of submitted chapters down, so students didn't get tired of reading several. Since there was very little sign of that problem in our class, I am going to aim for about 10 students per group in the future, which means three stories.

This should help with what I considered to be the biggest negative on the site. The students' submissions were organized by story, so I was constantly clicking on a story, then clicking through the submissions to approve them. I had to keep going out of one story and into another to find the students who were ready to be moved along. It would have been much easier if there was another view where I could just approve any student regardless of the story he or she worked on. Having fewer stories will at least make this a little less frantic.

And along those lines, I also hope we will have a lot more time to work on each chapter. My plan would be to use the activity along with other things we are doing in the class. After several days of having the chapter open for writing, we would close it then vote. That way I could send back revisions and raise expectations on what they are submitting (in content, spelling, grammar, etc.).

I'm looking forward to our second attempt with Boomwriter and I hope to share some of the stories next time around!