Google documents and an animated octopus

I was assigned a group of teachers and had to demonstrate how to teach writing. I was a guest speaker for a workshop on teaching writing and they were excited! What is he going to do? They wonder.. Would it be fun?

Then I introduced my lesson, I told them that today we are going to do a fun activity. Eyes were gleaming, spirits were high, then came the news. We were going to do writing.

Smiles faded, laughter stopped, shoulders slumped. How is writing fun? Writing is such a boring thing to do.

Image taken from https://goo.gl/images/2v3EXQ

While all that is true, I was trying to introduce something new and fun. So I started with three questions:

1) What is an octopus?

2) Do you like them?

3) Can they be in love?

There were few who responded but the rest were starting to show signs of boredom and so I introduced my video:

A brief summary of the video is that it consist of how two octopuses were in love with one being taken away. The male octopus then begins a harrowing journey to try and rescue its partner only to take her place. The video does not have an ending, which is perfect! This is because it allows me to get the audience to write something creative to explore what happens next.

The video is also perfect for younger children because the animation is fun, entertaining and fast paced. It also has no dialogue nor script, perfect for teaching second language students as it keeps a lot of things to interpretation. This provides teaching opportunities for the teacher to reuse the video again for other purposes.

However, after the video ended I was stuck with the gazes of the teachers expecting more. I glared back and thought, "ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?"

Image taken from https://goo.gl/images/aPBQFF

Yup, there weren't. Furthermore, I could not end a workshop that was supposed to teach writing without teaching writing. As such I proceeded to introduce Google documents to the group of teacher. Google documents is a collaborative writing app provided by Google and can be used without the need to install any program.

Upon signing in, I created a document for each of the teachers who were in groups of four with the question:

In 100 words, write the ending of the story as seen in the video

As Google documents allowed for real time typing to occur, the groups were able to co-create a story and an ending of the video. Once the teachers started creating the story together you can see enthusiastic teachers claiming that it looked exactly like a chat-room on a word document. This was exactly the case, as they could see what they were each typing, allowing for the task to be completed very quickly.

At the end, it was a very interactive workshop with many excited to try out the program when they returned back to their schools. Hopefully, the children in the school will have as much fun as their teachers when they went through the workshop.

I hope this helps all you teachers out there when it comes to teaching writing. I intentionally kept this short and if you are interested in how to carry it out in full, do let me know in the comments below.