Use Free Interactive Storytelling Tools to Engage Learners

Few learners can resist the allure of great eLearningstorytelling, enhanced with interactive illustrations. A set of free tools,developed for journalists, can help L&D professionals easily addinteractive elements, such as timelines and before-and-after images. These freeinteractive storytelling tools, developed at Northwestern University KnightLab, have already been used to create thousands of engaging online stories—thetypes of stories that eLearning designers and developers can use to draw inlearners while presenting information in a variety of formats and media.

Students and professionals at Knight Lab collaborate tocreate prototypes of tools that can be used in conventional media reporting andfor data visualization, research—and eLearning—to enhance storytelling.

The open-source, JavaScript-basedtools are available for free; they use other free tools, such as Google Sheets,or pull in photos from social media sites including Instagram and Twitter. Eachtool is presented on the Knight Lab site with examples, instructions, tips, andlinks to FAQs and a support forum; some even have short tutorial videos. Thetools are:

• TimelineJS:Start with a Google Sheets document that includes a list of events and dates.End up with an interactive timeline that pulls in photos, graphics, web links,maps, and videos. Any story or information that follows a chronologicalprogression is suitable for presentation in a timeline. Use it to create ahistory of your company for new hires or step-by-step instructions foronboarding. A timeline could also be used to illustrate the development of acompany product, highlighting key features and benefits.
• Soundcite:Liven up a text passage with audio. Learners don’t need to switch to anothertool to hear sound clips that bring stories to life. It’s easy to add ambientsounds, music, or spoken words to stories. Soundcite can pull multiple shortclips from a single audio file.
• JuxtaposeJS:Compare before and after or similar images using the JuxtaposeJS tool. It’seasy to create a Juxtapose if you have two images that are the same size andare in alignment. You simply upload them, enter the labels and credits, andchoose the initial position of the slider. Learners can move the slider backand forth to compare the images.
• StoryMapJS:Build a story around a map or around sections of a large image with StoryMapJS.The “gigapixel” featureof StoryMapJS allows designers to use a large image as the basis of aninteractive narrative. These tools are useful for annotating a map or imagewith historical or other information. Note that StoryMapJS lacks a tutorial,and learning how to use it is not as intuitive as some of the other Knight Labtools.

Beta versions of two additional tools are also available onthe Knight Lab project website:

• SceneVR:This new tool offers an easy way to turn a collection of panoramas or photosinto a navigable 360-degree image. You simply add tags and other information toa Google Sheets document, along with links to the images.
• Storyline:A basic data visualization tool, Storyline lets developers illustrate andexplain a data-over-time story. Designed for mobile use, Storyline limits thelength and number of “cards” per story.

Developers with some coding knowledge can use JSON or CSStools to customize their interactive stories, but little technical skill isneeded to get started using these free interactive storytelling tools. To learnmore about free and low-cost tools that can enhance your eLearning, downloadThe eLearning Guild’s free eBook, High Performance, Low Cost: The BestBudget-Friendly L&D Tools.