Youth Ministry Geek » communication

Guest Post: QR Codes

Chris — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 15:05:29 +0000

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

Audio Podcasting 101 (Part 1)

Jeremy — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 04:53:22 +0000

A while back I began an interview-style youth ministry podcast called 10-Minute Training. Now that I have published about a dozen, I feel ready to share the process here. Keep in mind that there are many ways to do this. Mine is focused on making the least amount of work for me without giving up the ability to edit the podcast afterwards.

I am sure I don’t need to give you ideas on using a podcst in your ministry, but just in case, here are a couple:

Daily/weekly devotion or thought for students
Daily/weekly Bible memory verse
Rebroadcast of your message
Youth volunteer training/tip
Parent update

This will be a series of posts. Part one will focus on describing the gear and basic schedule, part two will look at the setup and actual recording, and part three the publishing.

The Schedule

I don’t have the kind of time every other week to devote to recording, editing, and publishing the podcast. So in order to limit the weekly work, I schedule a couple of half days of recording every six months. I schedule the interviewees a couple of weeks before the recording date and get a basic outline of their training piece via email. Usually, I am able to get about 30 minutes of content in each one-hour session which is three podcasts. By doing it this way I cut the weekly work down to about 10-30 minutes depending on how much editing is required. If you end up doing it this way, I will give some tips for things you can do while recording that will make the editing easier months down the road.

The Gear

I say work with what you’ve got. If you are starting, you may not need to buy anything, but I found a couple of purchases that streamline the process for me and bring the quality up a bit as well.

Shure X2u ($99 on Amazon) – I reviewed this in an earlier post. This alows me to take any mic I have and turn it into a USB mic that can be recorded in my audio recording program. Though your built-in mic will work, this will make you sound professional without spending a fortune.
Skype (Free) – This is what I use to get the audio from the interviewees. I also pay for a Skypein number so that people who do not have Skype can use a regular phone to call me on Skype. The cost for that is about $18 a quarter.
Garage Band (Free with Mac) – I have access to high-end audio software like sountrack Pro, but have found that this is simple and quick to record and edit something as simple as a two person interview. It also has built in EQ and Compressors for podcasting that makes the mic and Skype audio sound a lot better. If you are on the Windows side of things, Audacity is a great free option.
Wiretap Anywhere ($129) – This is a bit of a splurge, but worth it if you can swing it. Wiretap anywhere will take audio from any program or hardware device on your computer and convert it into a virtual sound card that allows you to record those pieces of audio on separate tracks. I tried several methods to get this working when I was researching and found this to be WAY above everything else in reliability and usability. This gets it all into Garage band live eliminating any later steps/synchronization.
Squarespace ($10+ per month) – This is a content management system/hosting solution that I use for our youth site. It makes publishing the podcast content and feed as simple as posting to your blog. Pricey if you are only using it for your podcast, but worth it if you are shopping around for web hosting/authoring.
Macbook ($999+) Even the most basic macbook will do the job. I will hold back my fanboyness here, but I think that for most youth ministers the ease, quality, and price of creative tools (most need no more than those included with every mac) along with stability makes it a no-brainer.

My advice with this sort of gear is to go as cheap as possible at the beginning. If the podcast does well, you can always add sound quality later. As far as I am concerned, the audio quality cannot make up for poor content, but great content can go a long way towards overcoming less-than-professional audio quality.

Upload HD from your iPhone with PixelPipe

Jeremy — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 01:13:22 +0000

It is frustrating to have to allow some app to compress you video or image files before you can upload them to your intended destination. Also frustrating is the cap on “over the air” uploading from your iPhone even when it is connected to WIFI. To top it all off, I like to have my video residing natively on YouTube and Facebook, but hate having to go through the painful uploading process twice. PixelPipe solves all of those problems.

PixelPipe focuses on one thing: publish photos, video, audio, text and files on over 100 online destinations. Basically that means it will put your media on every blogging, social media, and online storage site you can imagine.

Once you register for an account, you set up “destinations” like YouTube and Facebook and it adds them to your list of destinations. Then, once you are ready to upload, you select the media you would like to upload, click upload and it does the rest (one upload to multiple destinations). It has a 250MB cap which should make most of your HD clips uploadable; though, if you have edited them into a snazzy video, it may exceed the limit.

Its one flaw is its UI. Once you fire it up, it is not obvious how to go about selecting which destination you are uploading to at that particular moment (you have to go into settings>edit destinations and then select “enable default” or “disable default” in a drop-down next to each destination). It is this kind of unfriendly UI that would make you think twice before buying it, but is worth putting up with in this free version.

The bad UI aside, this app should be on everyone’s iPhone who does ministry as it allows you to easily upload media to lots of locations on the spot without having to wait until you get back in the office and have the time to sync it with your computer.

We just recently used this to upload videos of our kids on a mission trip every day while we were on the trip, and got rave reviews about our communication from parents as soon as we stepped off the busses. Do yourself a favor and try PixelPipe out today. There are versions available for tons of phones and operating systems (iPhone, Android, Nokia, Palm, IM clients, Windows, Mac, and Linux).

Communicating youth group news with teens and parents … From SYMC

admin — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 04:55:14 +0000

Last weekend was the Simply Youth Ministry Conference, and there was lots of great training. One of the speakers, Tim Schmoyer videoed his seminar on Communicating Youth Group News with Teens and Parents and dropped it on YouTube. You can watch it here (it was really good):

If you’d like to pickup more seminars from last week end you can get them here. Or if you’d like to register for next year (It’s going to sell out early) Visit: youthministry.com/symc.

Free Personal Secretary: Google Voice

admin — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 02:05:10 +0000

I finally received my invite from Google for the Google Voice service, and like a huge retreat coming down to the wire, it is getting me excited and frustrated all at the same time.

The exciting part revolves around the concept that you can have one local phone number that forwards to other numbers based on who is calling and will text message you a “preview” of the content of the voicemail that is left if no one answers.

I think that the texting feature is by far the most interesting. When I tested it, it did not do perfectly, but got the job done. I left the message: “Hi, this is a test message testing the text feature on the google voice service. I received back via text message, “hi this is a test message testing the text to make sure on the google voice servers.” Pretty good, and I didn’t have to click through and listen to find out what the person wanted.

The other great feature is the one that has gotten a bit frustrating in the initial setup. The basic idea is that you can set up several forwarding phone numbers (home, cell, office, your senior pastor’s direct line… whatever), and google will ring one or more of them depending on the assigned group of the person who is calling. Sounds easy, and it probably is if you have already been using google contacts as your primary address book.

If you are like me and have a gmail account but use something else as your primary address book, you will have some problems. First, if you have had a gmail account you will have a ton of contacts that have no name… just an e-mail address. These will be everything from amazon support to some random applicant for a job you corresponded with twice two years go. Second, if you choose to sync via an exported .csv or by checking the schnazzy box in Apple’s Address Book, you will have MANY duplicate contacts. The real problem with all of this is that the contacts area has no advanced search feature. You cant just find duplicates, or those people with just e-mail addresses. What you’ll have to end up doing is manually scrolling down the list and either adding the missing informtion, deleting them, or merging them. One word: hassle.

Once you’ve got the contacts all nice and clean setting up groups is easy and you are off to the races. Now the sixth grader who just got their first cell phone and has two numbers, yours and their mom’s, will go to voicemail 20 times a day and you’ll get 19 preview texts of “what’s up… just bored… call me” and no interruptions in the meeting with the senior pastor about getting the thousands of flecks of neon spray paint off the gym floor. On top of that, you can have it ring your home, office and cell all at the same time (not in succession like many forwarding services) when your baby is due any day now and save your wife the tracking down of her too busy youth pastor husband.

Another interesting feature is called ListenIn. It allows you to listen in on the message someone is leaving and jump in by pressing star as if you were screening calls on an answering machine.

This has tons more features including conference calling, recording phone calls, temporary forwarding, and much more. for an explanation of all their features you can click here to see their help page on the subject.

Overall, I think this is a great product, and if I have gotten an invite they are sure to open it up soon to the whole world. To request your invite, click here and fill out the form.

Communicating Throughout the Week

admin — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 03:38:57 +0000

Here’s another video from Tim Schmoyer for a session he did in the media center at the National Youth Ministry Conference last week. He talks about the tools he uses to keep the lines of communication open between him and the students and parents in his ministry.

Communicating with teens and parents throughout the week from Tim Schmoyer on Vimeo.

You may also find some helpful links on this topic on our Communcation Tools page.

What are the best tools you use?

Six Tools for Twitter

Chris — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 20:15:54 +0000

This is for all you twitter users out there. I saw this over on CNET today, it’s a listing of Six “Social Secretaries for Twitter.” I thought it was a pretty good list. I use some of them and some of them I haven’t heard of but are worth taking a look at (like the temporary unfollow).

I just love twitter. You can follow me at Twitter.com/crd55. If you aren’t sure what twitter is and would like to learn more here’s a post I wrote on SimplyInsider.com about it: What is Twitter.

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Email is for old people

Chris — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 22:58:25 +0000

Every time I ask students if they got my email, they tell me they never check it. They might check their facebook or myspace, but even that is it or miss trying to communicate with them. The one thing they all seem to do is txt message, and they do it a lot. If you’ve ever wondered how you could use text messaging as a way to communicate with your students, here’s a little video demonstrating a new service from Simply Youth Ministry. I stated using this a little while back and it’s super easy. I’ve also found that my students are actually getting my messages now.

If you want more information, go to SimplyYouthMinistry.com/TXT. They even have a free 30 day trial you can sign up for.

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