Collaborative Stories with Writeboard

This writing activity gets students collaborating on a story using a website called Writeboard (http://www.writeboard.com). It works best with small classes.

Example
Follow this link to see an example. This is a screenshot of an actual Writeboard. A screenshot is used as it is not possible to restrict editing access. Click on the image to see a larger size.

Lesson plan
Before the lesson

1. Calculate how many groups you will have if students are working in small groups of 3 or 4. You will need to create a separate writeboard for each group.
   
2. Go to writeboard.com and create a new writeboard by filling in the yellow box. If you are going to create a number of different writeboards then use an easy to remember name like writeboard1, writeboard2 etc. Also use the same passwords.

3. Write an opening paragraph for each writeboard. Copy and paste the instructions from the example above into your writeboard page. You will need as many separate writeboards as there are groups.
   
4. Save all the URLs (web addresses) and passwords to a document, allocate one URL to each group. Each writeboard will have the URL available at the top of the page as in the image below. As the URLs are very difficult to type out, it is best to make this document available to your students as a soft (electronic) copy.

In the lesson

1. Put the students into their groups and provide them with a computer.
   
2. Ask students to open a copy of the document with the URLs on and ask them to click on the link that has been assigned to them.
   
3. Ask students to complete the next paragraph of their story. Provide a time limit of 5 minutes for this.
   
4. When the 5 minutes is up, ask the students to save the file.
   
5. Ask students to rotate around the so that they are now at a computer with a different writeboard open.
   
6. Ask them to read the paragraph that has just been written and make any edits necessary. Ask the students to save this edited version.
   
7. Ask the students to return to their original story and decide whether the corrections are correct. They can compare the two versions to do this by checking the version boxes on the right.

8. This process is continued for a couple of rounds, each time the students adding an extra paragraph and another group proof reading it.

Alternative process
Students could rotate around the different computers adding a paragraph to another group's story.

The advantages of doing this on Writeboard

A similar activity could be done using Microsoft Word or any other word processor. However using Writeboard allows students to easily track versions.
As this is web-based the exercise can also be continued by students out of class, something that would be harder to do with Word.