Two days in to collaborative storytelling on Neo 2 notebooks and it’s going really well. The students really seem to enjoy writing stories on the notebooks and the quality of writing and the imagination they have shown is fantastic. They are working in pairs, and each pair in the first lesson of the day are given a Neo with a first story sentence already typed in. They then work for 20 minutes to write a paragraph following this sentence, then the Neos are swapped with others in the class and they work for 20 minutes on a paragraph of another story. The Neos then travel to the next class and they work on a paragraph for 2 stories and so on until the last class who work to write a finishing paragraph bringing the story together. The pupils have said that they would like to see how ‘their’ stories end up so hopefully once they have been checked we will be able to share them on this blog. Comments have ranged from “why can’t we have lessons like that every day – that was fun!” (my favourite comment naturally!) to “but they have changed our story!!” Several students have commented that they liked writing together with a partner and that it has helped them improve their teamwork skills although some found it hard to ‘give way’ and allow others to air their ideas. Not without a few glitches of course – on checking yesterdays stories that were sent to my netbook by a year 9 class it appears one story is missing which is upsetting and will be disappointing for those young people that worked on it – it is unrecoverable sadly. I will make absolutely sure that all stories are received in future.
