I found a super awesome Add-on for Google Docs this week! It’s called Story Speaker. The creators of this add-on wanted to utilize google’s voice recognition capabilities to create interactive stories within Google Docs that can then be played on your Google Home with no coding necessary!

Once you install the Story Speaker Add-on, you can access two ready-made templates to create choose your own adventure type stories.

Then, comes the magic – you can export your story to your Google Home and have Google tell your interactive story and react to your answers!

Don’t have a Google Home in your classroom? Not a problem – once you open Story Speaker in your Google Doc, the add-on allows you to play your story in what it calls “chat preview” right from your computer or Chromebook!

Since discovering this add-on, my brain has been abuzz with different ideas and uses for it in the classroom:

First off, yes, the choose your own adventure story that the creators built it for is super fun and addictive to play around with. Students will have so much fun being creative and testing out their stories with the google voice storyteller.

Second, what about having students work specific vocab terms into the story or character descriptions, or… add your own content expectations into the choose your own adventure template… this could be a really interesting and fun assignment!

Then I started thinking about altering the choose your own adventure template to create my own template – a QUIZ SHOW!

Thus, BRAIN BENDER was born – a 5 question quiz show template for the Story Speaker Add-on in which students can create questions and answers and simply plug them into the areas highlighted in yellow.

Here’s a quick video of my daughter playing through my landforms example of BRAIN BENDER with Google Home:

And here’s what it’s like when I played the interactive story from my Chromebook:

I love the idea of creating authentic audiences for students by allowing them to trade and play through each other’s choose your own adventure stories or BRAIN BENDER quiz shows – or even exporting the stories to their own Google Home or a friend’s Google Home.

Click here for a copy of my Brain Bender 5 Questions Quiz Show Template.

Click here for a copy of my Brain Bender Quiz Show filled out with landforms questions to play through and try it out!

Is your mind racing with ideas for application? What other ways might you incorporate this amazing add-on into your classroom? Leave me a comment!