One immense benefit of being connected to other health educators is the consistent sharing of ideas for lessons, assessments, and classroom activities. Last year, Andy Milne, the SHAPE Health Teacher of The Year, shared a “Party Choose Your Own Adventure” Google Slides with the #healthed PLN on Twitter. Here’s what Andy had to say about his activity on the Global PhysEd Voxcast with Jorge Rodriguez:
“I created a successful “Choose Your Own Adventure” last year using Google slides. Students worked their way through a narrative and reacted to various choices presented to them. My story addresses the topics of binge drinking and consent. The stories weaved in and out, but managed to present every student with two videos and some questions to consider. There is potential to create more of these stories and then eventually bolt them together to make a giant interactive story with multiple adventures. I’ve sat on this project for a while, but I think it might be time to bring it back to life. A global, crowd-sourced, immersive, interactive health story! Think how successful that could be. Perhaps in a few years we could even add some virtual reality elements to it, too!”
I took Andy’s idea and made a blank Google Slides template so my students could make their own Choose Your Own Adventure stories that follow the DECIDE Decision Making Model. This was first an experiment for my seventh grade students last June, when the school year was winding down and I had some students all set with their final projects. I had them try it out to see how it worked. This year I had my colleague, Danielle, look at it when I used it with students as a filler activity while I got other classes or students back on track, and she made a few changes to the instructions we gave students.
This link will take you to the Choose Your Own Adventure Slides template. By looking at the slides in “present” mode, you can see how the story unfolds through each step of the DECIDE process. If you want to use this in your own classroom, just make a copy of the Google Slides and share it to your own Google Drive account. We do need to make one change to the template, which I forgot about until I reopened it: when viewed in “present” mode, any link all the way on the bottom left corner is covered by the presentation toolbar that appears when you hover your mouse there.
While we currently don’t use this as a definite piece in our curriculum, it might be something we utilize in some way with our new batch of students this spring: so far, students completing an end of health class survey have indicated that practicing the DECIDE Model (which we do as a formative assessment, either completely or broken down in some way, almost every class during that unit) became a little stale and others suggested an option to complete our decision making comic strip (the unit’s summative assessment) electronically. This could fill that need, and we’ve been working on adding more student choice (which Andy talks about in the blog post above) to our assessments.
Access our “Choose Your Own Adventure!” slide deck here or take a look at it embedded below. I think Andy is on to something about being able to link stories to other stories; for us within a classroom or maybe even between my classroom and Danielle’s classroom…now the brain is spinning!! Happy Decision Making!
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