Collaborative storytelling fosters student collaboration, critical thinking skills, and creativity. It is also a fun activity for students that typically creates high student engagement. 

For ESL students, it provides a forum for students to practice sharing their ideas and opinions within the small, low-pressure group setting of the Zoom (or other platform) breakout room if synchronous; for asynchronous settings, it allows students the time to refine their ideas and opinions before contributing.

Below is an example activity I have used in a synchronous setting and another example of how I plan to use collaborative storytelling asynchrononusly.

In this activity for our unit on purpose and tone, students are provided with the photograph collage, and groups decide which photograph they want to use to construct their story. 

In their individual breakout room, each group then decides upon a primary purpose (inform, entertain, or persuade), pick a primary tone, and then writes the story.  When they have completed, we come together again as a class and each group presents their story while the others provide their opinions as to what the intended purpose and tone was. If the structure and language did not communicate the intended purpose and/or tone to a lot of the other students, we talk about this and what choices could have been made to better hit the intended target. 

In variations of this activity where the target content is not purpose and tone, students could be tasked with strictly writing a narrative story with a conflict and a resolution. This type of activity can work really well where the target content is a grammatical construction, such as compound & complex sentences, adverb & adjective clauses, or a particular tense.

Use the Zoom button below to Zoom in and out, and use the cursor to move the whiteboard around to view the different student submissions.

In this asynchronous  collaborative storytelling activity, students are given an opening prompt to begin their story, and then throughout the week (student 1 assigned to complete on Monday, student 2 on Tuesday, etc.) each student adds their section to the story.  

At the end of the week, students can put the entire story in a Google Doc and work the following week on editing before presenting to the class (or doing another round of editing after instructor and/or peer feedback). 

This can be coupled with using targeted content themes, vocabulary, or grammar as part of the requirements.  Also, since they are working asynchronously, I would provide a separate Padlet for each group to ensure that all their work is original.