Gather your story ideas with lino-it

Whether you believe in using very structured outlines or just like to brainstorm before you settle down to write, lino-it is a great tool to add to your arsenal. Lino-it allows you to post e-sticky notes, images, and even videos to a virtual bulletin board or "canvas." What's more, if you'd like to make your brainstorming a group effort, you can invite others to view and even edit your canvas.

Lino-it is free but you do have to register and you can use your Google account to do so. Your initial dashboard allows you to see your current canvases (lino-it creates a few starter canvases to get you going), Group canvases (you won't have any to start), and public canvases.

When you create a canvas, you have the option to select the background and choose your privacy options.

You also can generate an RSS feed for the canvas and select from various email options, particularly useful if you're working with a group of people.

Once you've created your canvas, lino-it makes it pretty easy to figure out all of it's useful features. When in doubt hover over something and explore. If you want a more structured approach, don't worry! At the lower left side of the canvas, you'll see a view of some other canvasses you might be interested to help you orient yourself. One of them includes a canvas with how-to information.

I recommend clicking on the how-to canvas and panning around it to explore the features of lino-it. One of the helpful "notes" is a video, shown below:


Online Stickies lino from Infoteria Online on Vimeo.

Applications

You can use lino-it to:

• brainstorm story ideas
• outline a text story (collecting notes on plot, character, setting, etc)
• outline a digital story (add images and videos to your collection above)
• collaborate with others to create a story or to gain input on story ideas
• create a digital story (you can use the relationship of different notes to create a sequence but you can also allow readers to create their own sequences which might be interesting)

In addition to these creative uses, lino-it  can be used as a project management tool since you can set due dates for tasks and lino-it will actually send you email notifications on the due date. Finally, you can send note content to others, using the email icon at the bottom of a note.

There are other virtual bulletin board tools out there, including edistorm and Wallwisher, and they're both robust tools. Lino-it currently has more features than edistorm and is more flexible (in my opinion) than Wallwisher, which doesn't allow you to pan around a larger canvas easily.

Whatever  platform you decide to go with, a virtual bulletin board can  help you corral your storytelling imaginings before plunging into an actual story. It can also serve as the stage for a digital storytelling experiment. Why not play with both uses?

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