Consequences on the Computer - Part 1

I guess most of us have played consequences at some point in our lessons. If you don't recognise the name, it's that activity where a student writes the first line of a story, prompted or otherwise, folds over the paper and passes it on for the next student to continue.

Consequences is good for motivating students to write, helping uncreative students develop an imagination, handwriting practice, reading practice...

To be honest, this isn't the kind of activity I was thinking of giving my Advanced teenagers today, but suddenly I wondered whether I could give it a modern twist on our class blog.

The advantage of using the blog is that it will encourage my class to check it more often, to see the next line of the story. They could even all be online at once, vying to post the next sentence before their classmates.

The disadvantage of course is that they can see the story as it develops, so there is no element of surprise at the end.

I could get around this by asking them to do it in class time, where each student will have, say, only 90 seconds to write the next line, forcing them to skim the text or just pay attention to the last line. The previously written part could actually be hidden from view until the end.

What I'd like to do most is take all the students to the computer room, give them a computer each, and have the students change computer after every line, instead of swapping papers. Fast typing in another alphabet is a useful skill for my group. If I were more familiar with twitter, that would be a third option for Consequences on the Computer.

If we do one of these activities, I'll post our results...