talkingDigital

Have you been sleeping well? How many hours did you get last night?

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Do you get up and walk around at least once an hour?

Do you feel awkward reading a text message when your phone goes off in a meeting?

Do you fumble around with your media player when you should be paying attention to what you’re doing?

Perhaps you’ve noticed that more people are wearing bulky electronic bracelets or funky, digital watch-like devices. These are called fitness trackers and they monitor how many steps you’ve taken or when you’ve been sitting too long. They may even display your heart rate or tell you how well you sleep. Some fitness trackers even control your music player.

Whether you are a fitness junkie or a couch potato, you may be interested in what a fitness tracker can do for you.

What to look for

The best fitness trackers connect wirelessly to an app on your smartphone that tracks and provides real-time reports on your activity.

Cheap trackers (under $100) generally provide basic activity monitoring, such as step counts and sleep patterns. More expensive trackers add features such as a watch, heart rate monitor and GPS. Some devices also track types of activity, laps and calorie counts.

Most devices will vibrate when you are getting a text message or phone call. Some are equipped with screens that display caller information or a summary of the text message.

The top three brands

There are dozens of fitness trackers on the market, but only three major brands tend to dominate the positive user reviews: Fitbit, Garmin and Apple.

• The Apple Watch is no ordinary fitness tracker. It allows you to install apps, make phone calls and control your iPhone, but it offers enough health monitoring features to make it a serious—although expensive—fitness tracker. The latest basic model costs around $300, but they go up to $10,000 (seriously).

• Fitbit and Garmin make a number of affordable trackers. Read reviews before making a purchase. Essentially, the more you spend, the more features you get, but the accuracy of the data is about the same across all devices.

Connect other apps

You may want to consider a fitness tracker that you can connect with other apps through your smartphone.

• MyFitnessPal is an app that lets you track your diet. If you want an extra 200 calories in your diet, your fitness tracker will report your walk or jog data and update your calorie budget in real time.

• Endomondo is an app that allows you to record your movement-based activity—runs, bike rides, swims, etc. It tracks laps and distance and gives you real-time, audible updates through your headphones.

• Runkeeper records historical
and real-time data about your runs. It’s specifically designed for those interested in improving their running skills.

The art of storytelling telling is likely world’s oldest form of communication. Before civilizations were populated with citizens who could read and write, all information was passed from one generation to another through storytelling. The Odyssey wasn’t written down for over 700 years after the civilization who believed the tales had faded away. So, the hot new storytelling trend is more of a renaissance than a modern innovation of communication genius.

Stories (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of course, the fact that storytelling has been around as long as civilization isn’t going to keep every marketing, communication, public relations, and education conference from featuring speakers who will dissect the science of storytelling ad nauseum. I know, because I have given several of these lectures over the past two years.

If storytelling is such an ancient practice, why has it suddenly taken hold of the professional world? The answer is most likely three-fold. It’s entertaining, it’s scientific, and it’s effective.

I have taught a Multimedia Storytelling course at Colorado Mesa University for five years. For the final assignment, I require students to create a corporate story video using the concept of manipulation. Sounds pretty horrible, right? Nobody likes to be manipulative. Even worse, what kind of teacher asks his students to practice manipulation? I will explain.

The cold hard truth is that manipulation is the essence of storytelling. In fact, Americans have words that refer to stories that aren’t manipulative enough – we call them cheesy, hokey, corny, thin, or lame. These are words for movies, books, or other stories that aren’t capable of sucking the audience. A great story not only makes you forget time, space, and reality, it also transfers a predetermined emotion from the creator to the audience.

The word manipulation, when it relates to storytelling, is generally not about forcing an audience to feel or act against their will. It’s usually about pulling a willing audience out of their reality and placing them into a new dimension. In this instance, the word manipulation is similar to how an artist manipulates clay or paints. The big difference here is that a storyteller manipulates his/her audience and the tools he/she uses are found in the craft of storytelling.

An exhaustive analysis of each tool at a storyteller’s disposal is not possible or appropriate within a single blog post, but there a few basic concepts that all great stories have in common. These include, but are not limited to Freytag’s Pyramid (also called the narrative arch), characters, conflict, cause, context, plot, and point of view. Each of these deserves its own blog post, if not it’s own book. The following video will also demonstrate the importance of storytelling in the world of communication.

Related articles

• Teacher Lesson Plans: Carry on the Storytelling Tradition from Crayola.com

Dogwalking service (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Every generation since the Baby Boomers has had a nickname. I am 40, that makes me a gen-Xer. I was raised by Baby Boomers who were the mainstream adopters of the VHS, microwave and Atari 2600.

Grand Junction, Colorado, where I was raised, is a suburb without a nearby metropolis. The town is large enough to be self-sustaining without a metro economy, but small enough to have a quaint downtown with parades on the appropriate holidays.

In a vin diagram with one circle representing my socioeconomic status and the other representing my generation, the point where the two circles merged would be called Read the rest of this entry →