Feedback Welcome: Choose Your Own Adventure Projects

If you would like to view and give feedback on the students' projects, there is a link at the bottom. We would love your feedback!

Our middle schoolers in ELA have spent term 2 working on Choose Your Own Adventure Stories using Google Slides.

In many settings, this might have been a two or three week project. But in ours, it took every bit of the term to manage the completion of a handful of hero stories. Several students did not complete the project at all.

One of our biggest challenges was simply getting students to write about heroes with positive values. We work at an alternative school, and our students tend to focus on less-than-heroic values...which was part of why we chose this project. One of the most interesting things was the way they projected themselves into their characters:

• "Max is a troubled teen with a difficult history as a child but tries to overcome what he saw the night his mother and father vanished."

• "This character’s name is Hot Head. He has a problem and it is his temper. He has had three important events in his life.The first was he gets annoyed at little things. This made him a big fat meany. The second was he kidnaps kids and that caused him to be a criminal. The last important event was he’s a bully. This made him decide to push away people that tried to help."

If you look at the projects, you will see we had mixed success,with some instances of plagiarism of ideas, some projects in need of editing, and some students who were less than inspired. But there are a few nuggets of inspiration and creativity, a few students who truly embraced the project, and many students who learned a lot about technology and what it means to be a positive hero.

You can comment on my document or in the comment section below.