A great way to help students understand how writers use point of view and how narrative choices can impact a story, is to have students rewrite a portion of a piece of writing in an alternate point of view. For example, using a piece of writing in first person, and rewriting it in third person omniscient. Through this activity, students can assess which point of view they found more enjoyable as a reader and whether they would have made different narrative choices than the writer of the material. For this activity, students can use any novel or short story around them, or you can provide them with a list of approved links to sites containing novel excerpts. One site that I’ve used is earlybirdbooks.com.
Another, more visual option is to provide students with a page of text from a novel (photocopied or printed from the Internet) and ask them to find all of the pronouns or proper nouns that would indicate point of view and black them out with a marker. Then students would go through the text and change all of the blacked out sections to tell a story in a different point of view.