Creative writing is the main motivation of this digital storytelling project.  Throughout the curriculum students are required to write a narratives, examining different literature to understand the creative writing features.  Teaching and learning narratives requires examining and unpacking their features, exploring descriptive language, sizzling starts, character development, and so on.  At times, students can be unmotivated by the process throughout the years, with teachers looking to provide engaging and new ways to motivate creative writing.  By allowing student to create a digital storytelling project, such as a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA)’ students are delving deeper into the features of the narrative, exploring more possibilities in the story and developing a more engaging story.  This process challenges students to be critical and creative thinkers to compose different pathways of the story for the reader to select while still making sense.

The intended purpose of this task is to allow students to be more creative than just writing a narrative. The Australian Curriculum requires students to create their “own imaginative texts using a range of software, demonstrating editing skills to refine ideas, experiment with different structures”.  While Home Sweet Home provides an example a fiction narrative, the concept of the CYOA can easily be applied for Persuasive, Informative and Procedural Texts with the element of choice being applied.  Matt Bergman (2018) demonstrates how students can create their own CYOA information report to teach their peers about a topic they have researched, using a Google Form.  By creating a CYOA teachers are incorporating a variety of General Capabilities, namely Literacy; ICT; Critical & Creative Thinking; Ethical Understanding; and potentially Intercultural Understanding and Personal & Social.  There is the potential to include the Cross Curriculum Priorities as well, depending on the focus of the unit this task is chosen for.  The focus for this task is for Stage 4, Year 7 and 8, however the practice can be used for many stages and across many subject areas.  After all, digital storytelling is where the spoken story meets the digital world.

This activity does requires specific planning, Using Technology Better (n.d.) provide a CYOA planning template to ensure there is structure and shows all possible paths flow with a graphic organiser.   There is plenty of scope to differentiate across a class of varying ability with using Google Forms from simply having a story of pictures with the storyteller providing two images for the reader to select to students creating their own audio and/or visual resources to include in telling the story.  Planning can be as simple as creating two storyboards or using the aforementioned Google Doc template.

As this is a digital task students will learn about copyright and ethical use of resources as it calls for visual and audio aids to assist in telling the story, thus requiring students understanding the ethical use of digital resources.  The classroom teacher can take the opportunity to collaborate with the teacher librarian, who can bring their knowledge of creative commons, referencing, researching, ethical digital use and also Creative Commons to teaching of this task.  These skills are important for students to understand how licensing of creative works, both of others and sharing their own.  When creating their own supporting audio visual, along with their digital story, the TL can support best practice with this project.

To showcase the culminated efforts the class can bring their Google Forms together on a class blog, or wiki, to create a digital library.  Students are able to read each other’s stories easily, rather than sharing the link.  In this virtual world, and COVID-19 teaching and learning environment, having such a space where students can share their work with the school community and their families is expanding their audience.  Reflective practices is also becoming more common in schools, Google Forms allow the author to read the responses, or selections of each reader, in either a graphic form (Results Graph) or data form.  This task brings together a variety of storytelling, language, literacy and digital literacy skills, knowledge, and reflection which can allow students to express their creative and critical thinking regardless of their age, ability and subject area.

(Results graph from Home Sweet Home: Talbot, 2020)

 

References

Australian Curriculum. (n.d.). F-10 cross curriculum capabilities overview. Australian Curriculum https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/f-10-curriculum/cross-curriculum-priorities/

Australian Curriculum. (n.d.). F-10 curriculum English. Australian Curriculum. https://bit.ly/3cZPljQ

Australian Curriculum. (n.d.). F-10 general capabilities overview. Australian Curriculum. https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/f-10-curriculum/general-capabilities/

Bergman, M. (2018, April 10). Choose your own adventure in google form. [Video] YouTube. https://youtu.be/VWwWcuBiJzk 

Creative Commons. (2020). Introducing the CC search browser extension. [Blog]. https://creativecommons.org/2020/01/06/cc-search-browser-extension/

Talbot, K. (2020). Home sweet home (responses). [Google sheet] shorturl.at/imxKY

Using Technology Better. (n.d.). How to use Google Forms to make a ‘choose your own adventure’ book. [Blog]. https://usingtechnologybetter.com/blog/how-to-use-google-forms-to-make-a-pick-a-path-book/

Using Technology Better. (n.d.). Pick a path planning template. [Goggle Doc]. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YAtA0H7DTpmmFJxp1ovqWsWnOhhH38WFdrf7uyCxYm0/edit?usp=sharing