I’m thankful for partners in ministry. I have so much to learn from them.
Check out Simply Youth Ministry for a smattering of free resources like: forms, dramas, media, and videos. A great deal of this can be applicable to kid and family ministry.
Archive for April, 2010
If you want to teach well, teach like Jesus. Today’s leadership nugget is an incredible resource for your teaching. A friend of mine from the Doctor of Education program at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary just finished his dissertation which evaluated the various ways Jesus adjusted his teaching to his audience. In educational circles, this is called differentiated instruction.
Dr. Daniel Ray has compiled an exhaustive chart of Jesus’ teaching methodologies cross-referenced with the audience and situation Jesus was in. This is a fabulous tool to have by your side as you plan children’s messages or large group teaching.
Here it is:
Interact: How have you used differentiated instruction in your ministry?
Crocodoc is a web based application that allows you to share and mark up documents online. It is very simple to use and you don’t even have to have an account to use it. You simply upload a document (MS, PDF, JPEG, PNG), share the link with those whom you want to review it, and take a look at their edits. Here’s an example of one I uploaded.
I can see this being helpful with getting feedback from your team regarding registration forms, important letters, and newsletters. My wife proofs all of my newsletters, but because we do not have MS Publisher on our home computer, I can not just email it to her. This way, I could get a same day proof from her without printing it out, taking it home, having her edit it, and then fixing it the next day.
This tool could be beneficial for a church member to look at bulletin/newsletter proofs and many other admin purposes. Of course there is a short 5-10 minute learning curve, but it is a pretty basic and handy tool!
I’m getting really excited about this one! I was doing a little digging about different ways to organize the content I want to feature on my blog and I came across this handy little program. It’s called Evernote. It is essentially a way to organize notes, ideas, pictures, task lists, and even captured images of your screen or a website you want to check out later.
This thing is way cool. I can’t wait to really dive into it! Not only can I organize my future blog posts categorically, I can use this for a variety of ministry purposes. Here’s how it works:
- Sign up for a free account.
- Download the software to any computer and/or mobile devices (even has an app for the iPad).
- Start creating notes, task lists, guest lists, etc.
At this point, Evernote helps to categorize your notes, organize them, and even allows for detailed searches of common words throughout your entire note library. Here’s how I see it being used in a ministry setting in the future:
- Develop VBS task lists which Evernote allows to be easily emailed to my leadership team.
- Keep up to date guest lists for functions like my volunteer banquet or movie nights. I can then email over to my ministry assistant to easily create name tags or other registration documents.
- Create to-do lists for ministry clean up days that I can bounce back and forth to my leaders.
How else can you see this being utilized?
Apparently Free CM Stuff is not an original idea!
A youth pastor friend of mine, cued me in to Pastor2Youth. They have a ton of games, links, media, and object lessons that we can steal and use in CM.
Now humble yourself and admit it, it is possible to learn from youth pastors!
Contest ends soon: You have until this afternoon to get your name in the hat for the Sovereign Grace CD’s. Hurry!
Have you ever wanted to pull a sound, vocal clip, or sound from a video off of your computer? If so, you need to get one of these two free programs:
Here’s how I used Mp3myMP3 recently. I needed the background sound of a football game. I could not find a long enough effect on any free sound effect sites. I went to the NFL’s website and found some video of a couple of games. I used the program to pull just the sound off and store as an MP3.
Now, you can very easily use this to pull music off of sites like Pandora or Grooveshark. However, that would be stealing licensed music and I can’t say I recommend you do that. Be honest, buy it!
I just came across this one the other day. If you have a lot of expenses you need to keep track of (taking volunteers out to lunch, purchases for events, mileage, etc.), then you may want to try out Xpenser. It is an application that works through your mobile phone (if you get email on your phone). You can track expenses by sending an email, SMS, or placing a call to Xpenser. It then organizes them in the Xpenser online database which easily allows you to organize and download all of your expenses.
