Write Your Own Adventure

Inklewriter is a free creative writing resource designed to help students build “choose your own adventure” stories! Brilliantly created with multiple visual viewing options (like side bars, arrows, overlays, and story webs) to help students understand the quickly complex relationship of different pieces of their story, this website is good for logic building as well as encouraging writing. Students are assisted in making complicated, overlapping story paths and automatically reminded by the website of loose ends where a trail ends prematurely or accidental endings. Ideally for middle school classrooms because this is the age when this style of book seems most popular, the site is accessible to all ages, even upper elementary due to its simple lay out.

From my limited experience using this site with my German students, they were suddenly marvelously motivated to read German because they enjoyed the idea of a text-based game. It was seriously like magic. They even decided to build their own stories (which wasn’t originally in my lesson plan). It was the first time I’ve seen them struggling with the language on their own volition and with such focus. Creative writing assignments are always good, but the website aspect of this makes creative writing more organized and exciting!

One drawback is that sharing and publishing stories is difficult. There is a link option, but it directs the user to another website which requires a whole new account. I think I was successful though with this practice German story. Another confusing aspect is that students don’t need to create an account when writing and the story seems saved but then is later inaccessible. Because you can write without an account, it lends a false sense of permanence to the story, but your work is immediately lost upon quitting. Also, students don’t need a working email to log-in (it accepts anything resembling an email) so though it’s quick to create an account, there’s no way to retrieve lost passwords. Teachers must take care to check that each student is working under an account and have written their password down for future retrieval.

Despite these glitches though, Inklewriter is a creative, fun, logic-based writing website for all ages that encourages writer and reader interaction and is fun and enjoyable to use.