Inklewriter: interactive story designer

What it is: Inklewriter is a great digital tool that lets students (and teachers if you are so inclined) write and publish interactive stories.  Inklewriter lets students create choose-your-own-adventure type stories, story lines can come with choices and then be linked back together.  Inklewriter makes this process easier by keeping track of which story paths have been finished and which still need work.  There is no set-up required, no programming language to learn and no diagrams.  Inklewriter is free to use and easy to share with the world when it is published.  When a story is finished, it can even be converted to Kindle format!

I found the Inklewriter format to be pretty intuitive and easy to use.  I think intermediate elementary and older will have no trouble using this tool for creative and informative writing.

How to integrate Inklewriter into the classroom: Inklewriter is a great digital tool for creative writing.  Students can explore multiple plot lines and what-if scenarios in their fictional writing.  I also like the idea of using Inklewriter to ask kids to explore the “what-ifs” in history.  What if we lost/won this war/battle?  What if the other guy (or girl) had been elected president?  What if the Berlin wall hadn’t come down?   These types of stories are fantastic opportunities for students to explore their curiosities and, in the process, learn more about the event they are exploring.  After all, you have to know something about how an event actually went in order to write alternate endings.

Inklewriter would be a fun way for students to come up with alternate endings to a novel they are reading.  Our students wrote a variety of endings for The Giver.  Each student wrote a different ending that picked up from the last chapter of the book.  Inklewriter would have been a great tool to use for all of these endings to be available in one place.  Students could copy/paste the last paragraph of the actual book and then offer their alternative endings as options.

In science, students could use Inklewriter as a tool to record their hypothesis. Students can write out the objective and steps in their experiment and make a new “alternate ending” for their various hypothesis.

In math, students could create story problems where they lead others down the path to discover the correct answer.

Tips: These interactive stories are MADE for your tablet devices…if you have some in your classroom, take advantage of them!

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using  Inklewriter in your classroom.

A Thanksgiving Story

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What it is: A Thanksgiving Story is a site that lets your students star in a story all about Thanksgiving.  Students fill in some blanks (Mad Libs style) and a Thanksgiving story is generated with students as the stars of the story.  This is a quick but fun Thanksgiving activity for your students.


How to integrate A Thanksgiving Story into the classroom: Set up your classroom computers as a Thanksgiving publishing center where your students can quickly fill in the blanks and create a unique Thanksgiving story that stars them.  Make sure that you have a way for students to print or email the story home when they are finished.  The story would be a fun one for students to share at Thanksgiving dinner.  If you have access to a computer lab, students could work on these independently in about 10 minutes.


Tips: I learned about A Thanksgiving Story from @cindybrock on Twitter.  My PLN is the best!

Leave a comment and share how you are using A Thanksgiving Story  in your classroom.