''Story Road'' photo (c) 2007, umjanedoan - license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

For the purposes of post, I’m defining collaborative storytelling as a process where one person begins telling a story, and then various others continue and complete it.

It can be a great in-class exercise just doing it an overhead or whiteboard, and it can be a lot of fun doing it online, too.

A simple way do it online is, while students are doing another project their computers in the computer lab, just keep one computer open where student can take turns writing portions of the story (obviously, having small groups doing it on Google Docs is another option). You can see various tools my students have used do just that, along with a couple of stories they wrote including illustrations. One of the stories ends with me getting eaten by a tiger 🙂 (unfortunately, most of those stories are no longer available).

There are quite a few online tools that a designed make kind of collaborative storytelling much easier do. However, most of them allow anybody make additions and offer few controls for inappropriate content.

Here are my choices for The Best Sites For Collaborative Storytelling:

Folding Story is a new site, which does not have private groups now. They, too, say that they will be implementing feature in the future.

(For another great way use collaborative storytelling, see A Good & Simple Collaborative Storytelling Lesson)

I just learned about another neat low-tech way from Marisa Constantinides. Here’s the tweet she :

Collaborative story writing (or other genre) where Students begin writing and every 2 mins paper changes hands until you get back your own

Chain Stories is from Nesrin Eren’s blog.

Collaborative writing activities is by Rachael Roberts.

Storium Looks Like A Useful Collaborative Storytelling Platform. They now have a tool specifically for classrooms.

A Collaborative Writing Project for the Secondary ELA Classroom is from The Daring English Teacher.

StoryFork lets you create collaborative stories.  I think you can create private groups, though I’m not entirely sure.

Crowd Tales lets you create private “rooms” and collaboratively write a story.

Additional suggestions are welcome.

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You might also want explore the nearly 600 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.