How to find and tell your story

"Writer's block is  a crippling condition in which one's creative process slows down to the minimum. It's a symptom of 'creativity blockage' which hits writers. People differ in how they deal with their writer's block but one effective way we have at our hands is the use of technology."

Read the full article to obtain the links and find out more about these iPad apps that tackle writer's block by providing prompts and incentives to write creatively:

• Write About This
• Prompts
• A Novel Idea
• The Brainstormer

Via Ariana Amorim

"Here is an example of what you can do with Puppet Pals in a history classroom. This is a digital story I made to show the students what can be done with the app."

Read the full article to access brief tutorials and examples of digital stories made with the apps:

• Puppet Pals
• Tellagami

"Storytelling with multiple media, often a combination of written text, photography and videos (but has can encompass all kinds of media – from illustrated graphic novels, to interactive visualized data) make for a much more captivating and engaging narrative. As more and more people head out to craft their own multimedia stories, so we’ve seen more app and web developers rise to the challenge of making this easier and quicker to achieve.

Some of the new storytelling tools have taken the form of desktop and HTML 5 web-based tools, while others the form of specially-developed applications for iOS and Android devices. Some of them are aimed at casual storytellers, others for those who have devoted their lives to it. One thing most of them have in common, is a thorough embrace of the multimedia or interactive approach."

Read the full article to find out more, see examples and access links to these 5 online storytelling tools:

1. Storehouse
2. Racontr
3. Interlude Treehouse
4. Exposure
5. Explory

"Telling your personal or organisation's story does not have to be expensive or time consuming.

In March 2012, Cesar Kuriyama gave a TED Talk entitled ‘One Second Every Day’ where he detailed how he had committed to using the HD camera on his mobile phone to record one second from each day of his life from the time he turned thirty until…. well until he was too ill or dead to do it anymore. He compiled his first year of one-second snippets into a 6-minute video. It tells a great story of his year, featuring highlights, & acting as a trigger to remember things about each day.

Having found it to be incredibly fulfilling, he was keen for as many people as possible to join him on this new creative endeavour – so naturally, there is now an App, hence the $0.99. It takes less than a minute a day to take your video on your phone & then select the one-second slice you want to use."

Read the full article to view Cesar's TED talk, access the demo and link to the 1 Second Everyday app, and find a challenge you could issue to your staff.

"ASF: “Alternative Storytelling Forms”. It made Journalism professors drool, and it made us students roll our eyes: scholar-speak for captioned photo essays, or a unique graphic, or, for the ballsiest of muckrakers, a social media shoutout (crowd-sourced tweets!). Just a few years out of living exclusively within NPR and multiple-choice questions in journalism classrooms across the country, heightened storytelling online has matured from awkward Frankenstein experiment to something streamlined, accessible, awing and entirely expected of major publications.

Storehouse brings illustrative storytelling to the everyman (and everywoman) through an iPad app with a very basic formula: add photos from dropbox, your photo library, Flickr or Instagram, then swipe, pinch, and pull to structure them in a wide variety of formats, with or without text, which can likewise be added and edited. The app is free; the stories you create are entirely public and all readable through the app."

Read the full article to find out more about the app, links to major publications using ASF, and a list of three more storytelling apps.

"The art of comic creation is one of the best representation of creativity at work. As teachers and educators, we can use the power and versatility of iPad to cultivate a creative culture within our classes and among our students through helping them tinker with and design comics."

Read the full article to obtain the links and get a synopsis about these iPad comic creation apps:

• Strip Designer
• Comic Book
• Comics Head
• Comic Life
• Moodboard Lite
• My Sketch
• Art Studio

Via Baiba Svenca, Ariana Amorim