Youth Ministry Geek | Youth Ministry + Technology = Our World

Guest Post: QR Codes

August 25, 2011 in Administration, For Fun, Gadgets, Media, Web with 1 Comment

How are you getting information to your students? Years ago you had to stick a piece of paper to a bulletin board and send home a newsletter. Remember having to actually cut clip-art out of a book? That used to be incredibly effective at getting information across to people. Now it’s almost a joke. Students are so wired now, and in some cases so environmentally conscious that to send them a newsletter is slow and a waste of paper.

At my church we have begun using QR codes. You know, those little squarish bar codes that resemble something the UPS man should scan on your box? Basically, a QR Code is a bar code that embeds information such as a web address, and is designed to be “read” by smart phones. Most of our students carry either a smart phone (Android, iPhone, or Blackberry) or an iPod Touch, and they bring them into our worship services. So, instead of forcing students to put their phones away, we ask them to participate in the service with their phones! Each week in the center of the tables that our students sit at we have information pieces about upcoming events with QR Codes on them. Students can scan the code which links to a web address with further information about the event, class, or resource. Sometimes the code takes them to a page with a funny YouTube video, other times it takes them to a page to register for Camp. The great thing about the QR Code is that once a student has scanned it, they can then revisit the information on their mobile device. It’s like a newsletter that follows them around everywhere!

So how do you get a QR Code and then use it? Well, my favorite QR Code generator can be found at QR Stuff. Once you follow the link all you have to do is select the options you want, enter your info, and the website automatically create the code for you. Simply download the code to your computer and attach it to anything you want! There are so many possibilities for using these little guys, and students love them!

Jon Homesley

Jon grew up around Charlotte, NC. He graduated from The College at Southeastern in 2010 with a BA doubling majoring in The History of Ideas and Biblical Studies. In 2008 he married his wife Chelsea. They currently live just north of Charlotte where Jon serves as the College Pastor, and Youth Ministry Geek (not his real title) at Christ Community Church. He prefers Windows 7 to OSX, Android to iOS, and Walkmans to iPods.

Jon’s church- www.ccchuntersville.com
Jon’s personal site- www.jonhomesley.com

Free Fonts to Kick Off the Fall

August 21, 2011 in Design, Web with 1 Comment

With back to school in full swing or coming very soon, you may be working on flyers or calendars for your fall season. I saw these two collections of free fonts come across my twitter feed this week, and thought i would pass them along. Enjoy!

Fresh Collection Of High Quality Free Fonts for Professional Designs

A New Adventure…Again

August 17, 2011 in HouseKeeping with 5 Comments

I started a new adventure this week. After 4 great years at Simply Youth Ministry, I’ve returned to Youth Specialties. I’m super excited about the opportunity. When I was serving in a church as a paid youth worker, I used their resources all the time and recieved encouragement and training from their events, and in 1998 I had the opportunity to join the YS team running the store at events and the IT guy for the office. Now I return as the Director of Digital Marketing which means I’ll be planning and building websites, plus dreaming up new ways we can serve youth workers online.

What does this mean for the blog? Not much, we’ll still be bringing you the same geeky thoughts, ideas and resources to help you in your ministry.

If you are coming to the National Youth Workers Convention this fall in San Diego or Atlanta please track me down and say “Hi”, I’ll also be leading a few technology seminars. I’d love to grab a coffee and talk about geeky stuff.

Also, if you’d like to know what crazy projects I’m working on, follow me on my new YS twitter account YSChrisDavis.

Clips For iPhone — Movie Clip Teaching Ideas

August 9, 2011 in iOS, mobile, Resources, Software with 1 Comment

Have you ever hunted for just the perfect movie clip to use as an illustration for your teaching? There’s brand new iPhone app to help with that: Clips ~ Teach the Bible; Use scenes from movies. I love that it’s made by a Youth Pastor that’s also a developer, RJ Grunewald.

Description from iTunes:

Have you ever noticed that a scene from a popular movie can often teach better than any great lesson from a pastor or small group leader? Clips is all about helping people engage with the Bible by using scenes from great films. Pastors, small group leaders, and youth ministers can all benefit with the tools provided. Clips tells you exactly what scenes to use, what topics to teach, the verses you could use, and even some possible discussion questions. It gives you everything you need to easily find the scene you are teaching from, even linking to it in iTunes.

Open the app and you are free to browse the movie library, look up topics you’d like to teach, or even search for a scene based on a particular verse. Once you’ve found the movie you want to use, Clips makes it easy for you to have exactly what you need to lead a discussion on that scene.

Features:
- Library of 50 movies (and growing…)
- Over 80 topics
- Search by title, topic, or verse
- Share scene details via email
- Save your favorite clips and add used clips to history
- Easily find movies in iTunes through download links

Looks like a great youth ministry resource, go grab it on the app store now!

Can Playing with Legos Help Problem Solving?

August 5, 2011 in Administration, For Fun, Gadgets with 0 Comments

I saw this article over on theNextWeb: Playing with Lego helps you create better websites, apparently.

From the article:

Can playing with Lego help you design better websites? A new, entirely serious, document from a Swiss team claims it can. URL – User Requirements with Lego is a process that creative teams can go through to help work out the best ways of communicating online.

Why Lego? Apparently because it’s simple to use; is known by most people; offers shapes and colours to aid with inspiration; can be built into simple or complex forms and is used in many different cultures. The process is based on an official Lego initiative called Serious Play, which looks to get all kinds of businesses using Lego to enhance their innovation and performance.

Read the rest of the article HERE.

I love the idea of helping teams work out solutions using Lego models. The article talks about using it for web projects, but i wonder if you could use the same ideas for other projects. Anyone want to plan their Fall Retreat this way?

I’m not sure it will work, but I’d love to try. Can I buy Legos as a work expense?

Quick Tip: Laboring with Technology

July 21, 2011 in Featured with 0 Comments

It’s been a while since I have posted here because I was a youth minister who was having a baby in the middle of the already full-throttle state that is a youth ministry in summer. This being our third child and me being a geek, I thought with my first post back, I should pass along a great iPhone app that has been a part of the birth of all three of our children: Labor Mate.

Labor mate is a typical great iPhone app in that it does one thing incredibly well. It times contractions. Press a button when the contraction starts, press again when it stops, and Labor Mate puts together a nice list of the frequency and duration. Think it’s about to get real? Labor Mate will email the contraction log to your doctor for him or her to review. It will even update twitter and Facebook if you are the type who loves to over share!

My advice for all people who are pregnant is to go straight to the app store and spend the $0.99 for this perfect little app (and ask your wife before tweeting contraction information).

Evernote…Again

July 20, 2011 in Administration, Software, Web with 0 Comments

I may be late to the game but did you know you can email notes to Evernote? They have created a slick way to not only send your notes to your account but also to tag and place them in folders.

Here’s a clip from their site:

How it works
First, find your Evernote incoming email address. It’ll look something like [username].12345@m.evernote.com. The address is located under Account Info in the desktop versions of Evernote, under Settings in Evernote Web, and in the Sync tab of Evernote for iPhone. We recommend adding this email address to your address book or contact list.

Next, try emailing something into Evernote. In the subject line of your email, write the title of the note as you want it to appear in your account. In the same subject line, add one or both of the following:

Use @ for notebooks: Use an @ symbol followed by the name of your destination notebook

Use # for tags: Use a # symbol followed by the tag or tags you wish to assign. You can have multiple tags just make sure each one starts with an #

For example, Subject: Trip to Florida @travel #expense report

Would create a note titled Trip to Florida in my travel notebook, tagged with expense report.

This has been a useful new discovery for me, I hope it helps you in your note taking. To read more check out their blog at: blog.evernote.com/2010/03/16/emailing-into-evernote-just-got-better/

Guest Post: Link Your Accounts!

July 18, 2011 in Administration, Web with 0 Comments

Simply Youth Ministry has always been about saving youth workers’ time. I too love efficiency. I want my computer to run faster. I organize files like an archivist. I even plan my calendar down to the day and hour I’m going to fill up my car with gas. Well, not that last one, but I LOVE being efficient. And the same goes for when I want to get the word out on a youth ministry event.

There are so many different social media routes to do ministry on, and you can spend/waste a lot of hours just keeping up with facebook, twitter, and now Google +. So here’s my philosophy on the proper role of social networks in youth ministry, and how to use them efficiently.

Social Networking is supplemental.

What I mean is that I believe social networking can only accomplish so much. I can keep in touch with hundreds of students, but those relationships must have a “real life” component for meaningful discipleship to occur. In other words, you have to have face time with individual students! Social networking is a bonus to, not the foundation of, a relationship. Therefore I will use social networking for a limited number of tasks.

sharing event info
writing quick notes of encouragement to students and volunteers
checking a student’s wall to gather info that will help me minister to them
making fun of students by posting pictures of them with panty hose on their heads

I really only spend 10-15 minutes a day on facebook. I see it as being supplemental to all of the other relationship building I do throughout the week. Now, how do we make it efficient?

Let technology work for you!

When I first began using social networks I would waste so much time writing individual posts for a blog, facebook, twitter etc. To be an efficient social networker you have to learn how to link accounts. When you link accounts, any information you share on one network gets automatically copied and pasted to the linked account. I began doing this with twitter and facebook. I love the brevity of twitter (you have to be efficient with 140 characters) so I linked twitter to my facebook using the facebook twitter app. Now when I tweet it instantly posts to facebook. Pretty cool huh? But I didn’t stop there…

Our youth ministry also uses the mass text messaging service SimplyText (now Communicate) from Simply Youth Ministry. When you create a text message in SimplyText you have the option to link to your twitter account. This means that every time I send a mass text message close to 300 students who subscribe instantly receive the message on their phones, and the message goes to twitter. Because my twitter is linked to my facebook account my status is also instantly updated. Plus, Simply Text allows me to set up multiple texts and assigned them to be sent at different times and dates. In one 20 minute sitting I can set up 2-3 weeks’ worth of text messages and forget about it. I know that every day for the next month close to 300 students will get daily contact from me, not to mention the 1000 people who follow me on twitter and facebook. Doing a month of social networking in 20 minutes… now that’s efficient!

Favorite iPhone / iPad Apps Part 2

July 7, 2011 in iOS, Mac, mobile, Resources, Software with 0 Comments

Here’s part 2 of my favorite iPhone / iPad apps for ministry and everyday life.

1. Bible – LifeChurch.tv - This is my go to Bible reader on the iOS platform. I’ve tried others, but I always come back to this one. The team at LifeChurch just keeps making it better and better.

2. AppShopper - As a app junkie, I’m always looking for new apps and AppShopper is a great way to find out what’s new. One of my favorite things about this app, is creating a wish list, and you’ll receive and email when the app is updated or on sale. I’ve saved a ton just waiting till the app I wanted was on sale or even free.

3. Kindle - This is my go to book reader. I think iBooks is prettier, but I love Amazon’s pricing and I love being able to access my books on all my devices. I always look to kindle first for ebooks.

4.GarageBand - This one is iPad only but if you are interested in making music, this is an amazing app. It’s the touch version of the popular app on OS X. You can play piano, drums, or guitar and record them. It’s also been so fun watching my kids make music of their own and get into it. I love this app.

5. iMovie - This is my favorite quick video editor for iOS. Again, the touch version of another of Apple’s desktop iLife apps, but it works so well on iOS. It’s great for simple videos on the go that you can upload directly to YouTube or Flickr. Easy to use and fast.

6. OmniOutliner for iPad - Another iPad app here, but it’s so useful. I often organize my thoughts in Outlines, and this is a great tool for that. I use it for projects, teaching, writing, and just organizing. It also works with the desktop version which I also really like. Like all Omni apps, it’s a little on the expensive side, but I always feel it’s worth it in the end.

7. Documents To Go® – Office Suite - I’m a big fan of Google Docs and do a lot of my writing there, and this is best Google docs editor I’ve used. I can access all my google docs there so I can edit or write on the go. It also can access microsoft office docs stored in dropbox so you can edit or access on the go.

Bonus Pick: Live Curriculum - OK this one is a little selfish, but I’m pretty proud of it. It’s the first app I helped design and produce. It’s the app to access Simply Youth Ministry’s LIVE Curriculum. Click here to learn more about it.

There are so many other apps I use all the time, but I’d love to hear about some of your favorites. What ones did I miss? Tell me in the comments.

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