Skip to main content

Using OneNote to create a Choose your own Adventure book

[I did have 3 hours of Parent Teacher Conferences tonight, but I wanted to make sure I got my November daily post in!]
I spent way too much time as a kid reading through the Choose Your Own Adventure books. Like these folks (link) I would map out the different paths to see what possibilities existed in the text. If you haven't ever read one, the format is pretty simple (well, to the reader).  You start at Page 1 and read a few paragraphs that are on the page, describing your situation. In "The Cave of Time" you're out hiking in the woods and come across a cave that you decide to explore.
 After turning to the next page (as instructed) you are then required to make a choice, which will require you to jump to a much further page in the book (say, 18 or 27 as in the example below).


From there you keep reading one page at a time, with the bottom of the page asking you to make a choice (or sending you to another page without choice).  As you can see from the narrative structure map (that I remember drawing out as a kid!) there are merging paths and leaps as you work your way to a conclusion. 


Okay... enough reminiscing.  Mark Herring's post from today "How to use Google Forms to make a 'Choose Your Own Adventure' Book" prompted me to choose it as today's November blog topic.  This would be so much more fun (and easier and more creative!) using OneNote.

How to:
1) Create a new OneNote Notebook (you can use your School or your Personal account -- check out yesterday's blog if you don't already have OneNote.  Remember -- OneNote is free for everybody so even if you're a Google/Apple/SinclairZX81 school, you can still do this activity!)
2) Create any number of pages in the first Section Tab... start naming them Page 1, Page 2, page 3, etc.
3) On Page 1, put the introduction to your story.  Remember, since this is OneNote, you can draw, type, insert picture... even embed a YouTube/Vimeo/Stream video onto the page to make it more interesting.  Students could sketch pictures for every page using digital ink in OneNote!
4) At the bottom of the page, write your choices -- what decision does your reader need to make?  Send them to a new page as a result.  They can then scroll/click on the new page number from along the side.
OR
You can use the internal linking within OneNote.  If you have named all your pages as "Page 1", Page 2"... "Page 35" consistently, you can type [[Page 35] and it will automagically create a link to Page 35 as if it were a webpage!  (if Page 35 didn't already exist, it would also create Page 35.  Or you can go to the Page you want to link to, right-click and choose Copy Link to Page and then go back to the earlier page and highlight the text you want to link and then go to Insert --> Link and paste the link you just copied.  Like I said, it's easier to use the [[page name]].
5) Keep building your story.  Now, of course, you should likely map it out as they've done above and then transfer it to OneNote to ensure you have an interesting narrative.  

Since this is OneNote, you can share the writing & design!  Just click on the SHARE button and type in another teacher or student email address and they will be able to edit along with you.

When you're ready to publish, click on the SHARE button again, and create a VIEW link and share that link with your readers.

Here's a video showing you how to do this ... it's not a masterpiece I'm writing, it's just an example (isn't done better than perfect?)


Extension!
What's really interesting is you could add in the BreakOut idea... by collecting clues from within the story you could use the Password Protect for Sections (right-click a Section and choose Password Protect).  It adds another layer to the reading.

If you want to help edit Cowboy Bob's Adventure, click here.  (Yes, it's an open editing link -- I like to live dangerously. But you can only edit it in the browser.).

If you just want to read Cowboy Bob's Adventure, click here.  (It's not going to win the Booker Prize, that's for sure).
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Desmos, OneNote & Replay

So using Desmos activities are a great way to encourage exploration and discussion in math class -- if you haven't tried them, I encourage it.  They're collected at  https://teacher.desmos.com/  But ... Desmos doesn't give you quite enough.  It doesn't have a way of capturing the work that the student does within their space, and it doesn't allow for annotation of class contributions as we come together to discuss.  Well, not surprisingly, OneNote comes to the rescue.  Using the Windows shortcut Windows-Shift-S it is really quick to snag the Desmos screen and pop it into a waiting OneNote page.  From there, we can grab our pen and (using wireless projection) talk about what all the different responses mean and where to go from there. (An aside : one of the nice features of Desmos activities are the way you can hit PAUSE and it will pause all the screens of the students working.  I always give them a heads up "10 seconds to pause..." and it's refr
14 comments
Read more

So you want to hack your OneNote Class Notebook

Taking a brief break from my "Getting Started with OneNote Class Notebook" series (you can start that one here )... This is a little advanced so if you're not comfortable setting permissions inside of Office365 you may want to avoid this.  Or set up a Class Notebook to play with so that it doesn't affect any existing Class Notebooks.  Yeah, the latter is a good option. One of the great powers of OneNote is that you can do some really neat permissioning of the Section Tabs. When the Notebook is created, of course, it gives you an "open permissions" on the Collaboration Space and student-read-only on the Content Library.  And then each student space is wide open to each individual student. But we've found that occasionally you want to mix up the permissions a little.  For example, you could create a space in a student section for your private notes that the student couldn't see, or maybe you want a tab in the Collaboration Space that students cou
39 comments
Read more

Making your own font

Slid in amongst all the announcements for Ignite, Microsoft's big conference in September, as a tool that I thought was quite cool.  Not original, since similar things have existed elsewhere & when, but a nice option nevertheless. Microsoft's Font Maker allows you to create your own font using digital ink.  You get all 26 characters, numbers and punctuation (for English languages) on which you draw your font for each character. (For me, it's the first 128 printable characters out of the ASCII table!)  Using your #digitalink pen, you draw out what you want each character to look like. I just quickly wrote out the alphabet as you can see below: You don't have to do it all at once and you can keep working on your Font as you go; it saves as a JSON Project File which means you can send these between collaborators. Once you have your font done, you can adjust the spacing between characters & words to make it look good (it uses a scene from Hamlet -- I'
Post a Comment
Read more