Mr. Petty's Tech Class: Making Interactive Stories Using Google Slides

If time is your enemy when it comes to tech projects, let me teach this one for you!

This Interactive Story project from Mr. Petty's Tech Class is an engaging way for your students to tell a short story that lets the readers determine how it ends. Remember those fun Choose Your Own Adventure books from the 1980's? Now your class will have a ton of fun making similar short stories and reading the ones their classmates write.

This is the first in a series of self-contained tech project lessons. In this four-page teacher guide, you'll get a link to a single Google Doc that you can assign through Google Classroom. It will walk your students through a fun project and it includes my short video demonstrating how to do the one slightly advanced tech skill that's required.

You can have the students incorporate your course content into their stories. From social studies to language arts to science, any topic can be used in a short, interactive story. The readers and the writers will love them!

I have used this lesson plan in class. I've seen students make a complete story using my video and example resources with absolutely no help from the classroom teacher. Most students were able to complete the work in three or four class periods.

If your students can make a simple Google Slides presentation with some pictures, they'll be able to make one of these interactive stories.

The directions document for students is a Google Doc, so if you do want to modify the directions or specify your own requirements, you will have no problem doing so. For example, my directions ask students to make at least 10 slides, but you can change that number however you like.

Besides the student directions document you'll get:

• Suggestions for project requirements to tell your students
• A link to my sample interactive story
• A link to the short presentation I've used to introduce the activity to a class
• Information about how we make this into a contest for the whole school to vote on their favorite stories
• My "lifetime tech support" -- Contact me anytime if you have a question!