Create Random Story Starters in Google Sheets
Many years ago, before I taught social studies or got involved in educational technology, I taught a ninth grade language arts class. That year was a learning experience for me as much as it was for my students. Getting students to write short fiction pieces was one of things that I struggled with during that year. If I taught that class today, I would use the Flippity templates for Google Sheets to create random story starters. Flippity offers two templates that can be used in this way.
Flippity’s Mix & Match template can be used to create image-based and text-based random story starters. Basically, the Mix & Match lets you create an online grid featuring phrases or images that you have included a spreadsheet. The template then show students the phrases or images in a random order. Watch my video that is embedded below to learn how to use Flippity’s Mix & Match template.
Flippity also offers a Mad Libs template. You can see how that template works by watching my video that is embedded below or by visiting the Flippity Mad Libs demo page.
If you don’t use Google Sheets or you don’t have the time to use the Flippity templates, you might want to check out StoryToolz. StoryToolz offers a nice collection of useful tools for writers. Writers who are struggling to come up with ideas for fiction stories will like the story starters featured on StoryToolz. StoryToolz has three tools that you can use to get story ideas; Random Conflicts, Half Title Generator, and Story Idea Generator. To use any of these three tools just select the tool from the main menu then look at the randomly generated idea. If you don’t like the options, run the tool again until you get options that you like.
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