A couple of days ago I was searching for a way that students could make an online classification system for living things (SOL5.5). I wanted them to be able to answer questions about a living thing and have their search get narrowed until they were able to classify it. I found a site called Inklewriter that was pretty cool. It allows you to write “choose-your-own-ending” stories. It was perfect for the classification lesson, and I made a sample that you can see here. Unfortunately, that lesson was cancelled because of testing. However, I was able to try it out today with a couple of 2nd grade classes as part of a creative writing assignment. I explained the idea that their stories had to have a dilemma with two choices for the reader to make. One choice should result in something good happening, and the other should result in something bad happening. Each student typed up their stories and wrote the two choices. Then I showed them how to add a picture by searching for an image of something in their story and pasting in the weblink to that image. Next they wrote about the results of each choice. Inklewriter was fun and easy to use and it didn’t require any login to write the stories (although you need a login to save them… we did run into a little problem when we all tried logging into the same account, so I just saved their stories one at a time afterwards). Their stories turned out great! You can try a couple of student samples here and here, or you can find all their stories here: Marable and Street. (PS. This site would also work great with an economics lesson on choices and opportunity costs SOL3.9).
