Education Technology


NCTE: Interviewing an Elder & Writing a Narrative

Activity Overview

Students will interview an elder (parent, relative, person in the community) outside of the school environment using questions developed in this activity.

Before the Activity

See the attached Activity PDF file for detailed instructions for this activity.

Print the appropriate pages from the Activity for your class.

Install the NoteFolio(tm) App on the students' graphing calculators following the attached instructions.

Review with students the objective of the interview: to collect a detailed account of an important journey.

During the Activity

  • Distribute the appropriate pages from the Activity to your class
  • Distribute the NoteFolio(tm) file(s) to your class using TI Connect(tm) and the appropriate TI Connectivity cable
  • Follow the procedures outlined in the Activity


  • Students will:
  • Formulate questions addressing issues or problems that can be answered through a well-defined and focused investigations.
  • Conduct interviews, taking notes or recording and transcribing oral information, then summarizing the results.
  • Present findings in oral and written reports, correctly citing sources.
  • Compose and publish analytic and reflective writing that conveys knowledge, experience, insights, and opinions to an intended audience.
  • After the Activity

    Each student should bring in his/her interview notes to get suggestions from fellow students and the teacher for shaping the notes into a narrative and/or follow-up questions for a second interview.

    Each student will use notes to write a narrative of the subject's journey. Give students a window of time in which to write the narrative. Some students may discover that they need to conduct second interviews to get more details and anecdotes for their narratives.