Chrome Can: Interactive, Non-linear Stories

One way to help make learning to write and building a students competency in writing for a variety of audiences and styles is to give students a chance to practice writing different genres. However, this might be considered boring for some students and may not be effective. One of the things that integrating technology can do for students, is bring a fresh and exciting activity to a typically considered boring topic. It can also help create a finished product that can be shared with a wider more authentic audience. As I wrote in a previous post, “The authentic audience helps students build ownership of their learning process.  Parents are more connected to the learning happening in the school and a better relationship around learning can be formed at home.  The teacher can see more clearly what students know and this can help the teacher reach more students. Overall, a better learning environment and culture is formed.”

Twine is a fantastic tool to help students in creating an interactive, non-linear story. I would highly suggest taking the time required to learn about how to use Twine as it requires a little bit of coding to make it work. However, it isn’t hard, I have personally had kids in grades 4 & 5 using it without any support after an initial learning session around the tool. A great place to start is at the Twine Wiki.

What does Twine enable you to create? Do you remember reading those great books in elementary school that let you choose what happened next? Choose your own adventure books are fun to read because they are interactive and give the reader some choice. Twine is perfect for creating these types of stories. According to the creators of Twine, “At its heart, Twine is a tool for creating hypertext. The difference between hypertext and a linear story, the kind found in books and magazines, is that it allows the reader to have some measure of agency. In other words, the reader has some ability over what he or she reads next.”

Twine is also a capable platform to build text based games! According to the Twine Wiki, “Twine has the capability to do conditional logic, so if the protagonist finds a key in an early part of the story, he or she can use it to open a door later on. It can also incorporate variables, which encompass the traditional trappings of games such as hit points and score. These, along with agency, are foundational concepts of interactivity, the currency of game design.”

These two things make creating interactive, non-linear stories and games easy. What is great about Twine is that it doesn’t require a login. In fact, the stories are stored in the browsers history, so if you delete the history then the story will also be deleted. This means that it is completely safe for students to use as no login is required. If you are worried about students losing their work they can archive their work which downloads a copy to their harddrive. If something happens and their browser history gets deleted they can easily import the archive file and everything is restored.

Students can share in multiple ways. They can show their stories on their own device. This is a great way to share during a gallery walk set up in a classroom. Students could also easily share their stories in this fashion during a student-led conference. Twine also enables authors to publish their work. Published work can be shared on websites that allow you to add your own HTML files. There is also a free hosting site specifically made to host Twine stories. Another way is to share the published files through email. The receiver then just need to download the file and open it in a browser.

Another tool that can be used to create interactive, non-linear digital stories which allows greater flexibility and is a whole lot easier to use is Google Slides. What makes Google Slides great for this is that images are easier to insert into the story. While Twine allows for the insertion of images it requires that the images are hosted somewhere in the web if you want to share it with others. It also requires some HTML code. On the other hand, Google Slides is simple and straight forward with inserting images and videos.

In order to create interactive, non-linear slide shows you just need to create links within the slide show to other slides in the show. These hyperlinks can be made from text, images or shapes. This means that the stories and the user interface of the story will be much more visually appealing than when using Twine. If you are not sure how to add these links to a Google Slide see below.

One thing that I like about Twine is that it is far less confusing to keep track of than using Slides. In Google Slides you will have to mentally keep track of what slide is what and adding links can get confusing. In Twine you just have to remember the title of what you want as a choice. Twine automatically connects it for you and makes an easy to follow web for you.

With both these fantastic tools, students will be able to create interactive, non-linear stories. My suggestion is to use a Google Doc as the place to create rough drafts and when the final draft is ready to be published students can cut and past their finished text into the appropriate places in the Twine or Slides story.

Thanks for reading

Dr. Shannon H. Doak