Storylines are pre-designed NGSS storylines that lead students through building their knowledge until they have mastered the bundle of standards. We've designed theStorylines as a series of quests for each Module, which are aligned to standards and based on an overall driving question and/or phenomenon for students to explore.
If you have students do all of the Storylines, you will have covered all the contents in the Module standards with Tyto Online.
These Storylines are pre-built to help you implement storylines, since they help give students coherence as they reach towards understanding. Of course, the Storylines need to be part of an instructional strategy.
We are also creating Teacher Guides for each Storyline that will allow teachers to easily see the flow of the storyline so they can plan how to use it.
If you haven't already, you may want to check our article about how to use Tyto Online to Support Classroom Instruction.
For Storylines specifically, here are some strategies you can use:
Use the anchoring phenomenon suggested by the Storyline as the basis for your classroom lesson plans, as well.
Storylines are best when driven by student questions. The game suggests questions and flows between quests, but as a teacher, you can instead have discussions with students between quests or at selected points in the storyline to engage the students in questioning and explaining/outlining the reasoning they are developing during the Storyline. For example, you could ask students to draw a model of their understanding of a phenomenon after the first quest in a Storyline, and then pause for them to continue to expand on the model as they progress through the Storyline and share their reasoning with the class.
You can use Storylines after you've had students engage in a related phenomenon in your classroom, to elaborate and give them new experiences to apply the content to.