Recently my very good friend Todd Owens upgraded his cell phone. After 29 years of carrying the Palm Uno, he moved into the 21st century by upgrading to a Motorola Droid 2.  (Okay, so maybe it was a Treo, but barely….)  It wasn’t long before he was texting me to ask what apps were most helpful for youth ministry.  Which got me thinking: Blog post?  Apparently the answer is yes.  So here they are, my can’t work without apps.

Astrid: The first app I downloaded to my Droid is perhaps the best of them all.  Astrid is the To-Do list of the 23rd century.  Features I like the best? The widget puts to-do list on my home screen; the app features the ability to prioritize tasks, schedule repeating tasks, and list according to context; and it syncs with Remember the Milk, so my wife can add things to my to-do list as well; and finally, setting both goal and final deadlines reminds you lest you forget something important. (Granted RTM has since released a Droid app, but Astrid works so well, I’ve not even considered changing.

GroupSMS Scheduler: This is, quite literally, the text messaging app I was searching for.  When it comes to communicating with students, text works best. I want to be able to message my students from my cell phone number, so they can contact me when they need me.  And I want them to be able to respond to my text messages without having to log in somewhere and get the replies.  So I like texting them from my phone.  But students could also get in trouble if a text from me goes through to a phone they forgot to silence during school.  For a long time the apps I could find would let me either send messages to groups or schedule them for later delivery. GroupSMS scheduler lets me do both.  It sends a single text to each contact in the group, so I can use groups larger than 10 at a time.  And it lets me schedule them so I can write them when I’m thinking about it and send them when they’re out of school to receive them.

Contacts GroupU: Speaking of texting groups, this is the app I used to text groups before they released GroupSMS scheduler. It didn’t allow scheduling, and you could only send to groups of 10 or less at a time, two drawbacks GroupSMS Scheduler fixed. But I still use Contacts GroupU because it is the best way to manage groups from my phone.  I used to have to go to Gmail in a browser to set up and manage groups, but not any more.  With Contacts GroupU I can do it from my phone.

Android Time Card: I realize that different churches have different expectations of their ministers, especially in terms of office hours.  I’m fortunate to serve a church that allows for flexibility and that values the importance of being out of the office and present with my teens. However, just because my boss doesn’t micromanage my time doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be aware of how and where I am spending my time, especially now that I have a convenient excuse to do less.  Add to that the advantage of being able to see what projects are monopolizing my time and Android Time Card is a win-win. If someone asks me to justify my 20 hours of work a week, I can document it’s regularly 40+.

Twidroyd Pro: I realize there are a lot of options for Twitter clients for the Droid out there, especially a truly nice app from Twitter themselves.  I use Twidroyd Pro for one reason and one reason only, it does the best job of handling multiple accounts. I tweet as myself, obviously, but I also tweet on behalf of my church @middletownnaz. Twidroyd Pro makes it easy to post from either account, with a full arsenal of tools for getting the most out of Twitter. Of course, if I didn’t have a need to post from multiple accounts, I’d probably not use this at all.

Bible from YouVersion.com: This one is pretty much a no-brainer. YouVersion has what is hands down the best Bible app on the market. Great navigation, multiple versions and daily reading plans make this more than just your everyday Bible app.  Plus you can link into YouVersion Live if your church does that sort of thing.

Evernote: I don’t even know where to start with Evernote, because I’m not sure I’ve come to fully grasp just how much you can do with this app.  It is my digital Moleskine.  I used to carry a Moleskine notebook with me to write down ideas, work through my thoughts, even even collect clippings from various magazines, newspapers and whatnot.  Evernote is the same thing only digital.  Write yourself notes, clip websites, take a picture of something and tag it with a note. And as if that isn’t enough, it automatically syncs with companion apps on my computer and netbook so I have those notes anywhere I need them.  It even imports notes from OneNote, so I can have meeting notes available in the cloud as well.

Dropbox: First things first, do you have a free Dropbox account? If not, use this link and sign up now. We’ll both get an extra 250MB of storage if you use this link to sign up.  Done? Now you have a great place online to store files. Install the Dropbox app to your computer, and you have a folder on your computer that automatically syncs to the cloud.  Install the Android Dropbox app and you can access those files any time from your phone. Now when a teen texts you asking you how to register for an upcoming event, you can send them an email and attach the registration form from your phone. It’s that easy. Using someone else’s computer? You can access your files by logging into the Dropbox website.

Those are my top eight, but I’m always looking for the next must have app.  So sound off in the comments. What’s missing from this list?

I was recently asked to write a guest post for Tiger Bytes, a relatively new blog from my alma mater Olivet Nazarene University.  I chose to write about how the recent closure of Geocities and the archiving of many of the Geocities sites by the Internet Archive serve to illustrate the public and permanent nature of digital communications.

I think the principles are important ones for youth leaders to understand, and to pass on to students.  The impact of careless words “spoken” in the digital public can be severe and long lasting.  You can read the entire post here.  And while you’re at it check out the rest of Tiger Bytes, and if you like what you see, follow OlivetNazareneU on twitter too.

Given my recent post about getting past PowerPoint I found this video not only entertaining, but a helpful criticism of PowerPoint “worst practices.”  It’s funny because it’s true.

(HT to Tim Sanders whose Tweet sent me to this video.  Told you I was a Sanders fanboy.)

One of the things I do here at Middletown is make the sermon graphics for my Senior Pastor’s (Dr. Phil Rogers) sermons each week.  Phil likes to distribute notes when he preaches, and likes to have the “answers” show up on the screen while he’s preaching so people don’t get lost trying to fill them in.   That means Power Point!

Of course, Power Point is less than ideal when you’re trying to communicate to people.  There was a time when Power Point was new and cutting edge.  But the fact is, many people “get” to watch Power Point presentations every day at work (and a lot of times, it’s bad Power Point at that).  There’s few things worse than coming to church and getting hit up with more of the same stuff that left you bored and uninspired all week at work (especially when the Power Point at church is bad Power Point too).

That’s why we’ve tried hard to leave Power Point behind.  Each of our graphics is designed in Corel’s graphics suite, but we do use Easy Worship’s integrated PowerPoint viewer to make displaying them easier.  That way we get the ease of Power Point’s presentation interface without the often clunky and bland Power Point clip art and text rendering (and NO WordArt!!!).

To give you a feel for what our slides look like, here are some sample slides from a sermon Dr. Rogers is presenting today at ONU’s Pastor Appreciation Days.  His message shares the story of our small community and our church, and lessons that he has learned in more than 30 years of pastoring in Middletown.  The analogy he’s using for his message is the difference between throwing rocks (creating exciting but only short lived splashes) and the less glamorous task of digging channels so the current can flow.  I’m pretty excited about the message, and hopefully after he delivers it he’ll let me blog some more about what it all means.  (I’d hate to steal his thunder . . .)

Pictures after the jump…

I saw a post the other day on the Swerve blog from Lifechurch’s innovation leader (and fellow former Decaturian) Bobby Gruenewald about a time when the Presbyterian Church took official action against the dangers of riding your bicycle on Sunday.  Bobby sees in this bit of arcane Americana a reflection of how the church often responds to innovation.  He writes:

It speaks volumes about how the Church reacts to innovation at times. Instead of embracing it and looking for ways to leverage it, we feel threatened.

Obviously, this kind of reaction reminds us of cell phones in church.  But that is beginning to change.

After years of slides, videos and announcements asking people to turn off their cell phones and pagers, we’re seeing more and more stories these days about churches that are telling people to turn on their cell phones.  From encouraging people to tweet about their worship experience to using SMS polls to solicit instant responses from the congregation, to the creation of YouVersion Live, a fascinating mashup of Scripture and Social Media, the signs of a turning in the tide are everywhere.

It’s no secret our youth ministry has been asking the question “How can we leverage SMS and MMS technology for the kingdom?“  Last Lent we started asking the question “How can we make sure the next time one of our students pulls out their cell phone to tell a friend ‘Hey check this out’ that the content they are sharing comes from Water’s Edge?”  We’re still asking that question.  Our You Decide series is also trying to leverage SMS technology to engage students in community and conversation.  But we’ve still got a long way to go.

Here are some ideas we and others have used to try to leverage the ubiquitous cell phone technology rather than try to fight it.  Some of them are just for fun, to get people talking. “You wouldn’t believe what we did at Water’s Edge this week.”  Others are more directly related to our attempts to minister to our teens or reach out to others.

1. Cell Phone Picture Challenge: Tim Schmoyer at studentministry.org recently blogged about an in-house picture scavenger hunt game they played with cell phones at their youth ministry.  (An idea that was itself inspired by a suggestion from Jonathan McKee on the Youth Specialties podcast.)

2. Macro Middletown: We did a photographic scavenger hunt of a different sort.  We took close up pictures from several locations in town, and then challenged students to send us pix messages of themselves in those locations. Each day we added more pictures and student got bonus points for getting the pictures in the same day the new locations were posted.

3. YouVersion Live: This one is beyond the scope of our youth ministry right now — it requires a web enabled phone to work, rather than simply relying on SMS or MMS, and most of our students don’t have data packages yet.  However, we can’t talk about leveraging cell phone technology for ministry without mentioning the exciting things the digerati at Lifechurch are doing.  YouVersion Live brings a whole new level of interaction to preaching and teaching.  Check out the link to see all it can do.

4. Prayer Hotline: This is actually a revision of an idea I used way back before cell phones when I was still carrying a pager.  Back then I gave each student a unique id code and a list of numbers assigned to typical prayer needs and told them they could page me any time and know I’d be praying for them.  Now days we use cell phones to take in prayer requests.  A Ping.fm account with a unique email address that students can text allows them to send in prayer requests that show up in an rss feed on a special prayer request website.  There’s no moderation involved with Ping.fm, so the email address can’t be passed out to the whole world, but with the moderation available with Presenter plan from Poll Everywhere you could do the same thing and still have some control over what gets posted to your site.

5. Instant Evangelism: I hesitate to call this evangelism, because evangelism is so much more than just  inviting people to come to church with you, but with cell phones you can encourage your teens to instantly reach out to their friends.  Rather than relying on them to remember to invite a friend for next week’s service, why not tell them “Next week we’re going to be talking about xxxxxx and maybe you have a friend that could really use this.  Go ahead, take out your phones and text them right now to invite them to next week’s service.”

6. Instant Feedback: Whether your teens know they can tweet an @reply to you that will show up on your iPhone while you speak on the stage, or you set up a Poll Everywhere feedback keyword to solicit responses, providing means to ask questions or make comments while you are teaching can help you respond to audience questions or confusion without interrupting the flow of teaching with a question from the audience.

7. Sermon Notes to Go: We have a twitter account and tweet our outlines to our Senior High students as we teach every week. For those that are present, it gives them an outline and scripture references they can take home with them.  For those that have to miss a week, they can still see what we’re talking about even though they aren’t there in person.  And getting people signed up is as easy as telling them “Send a text message with the words “Follow Watersedgeyouth” to 40404 and you’re good to go.”  (Of course, you’ll want to substitute your own username…

Chances are, some of you out there are seeking to leverage technology too.  How are you using cell phones to enhance your ministry?

So, you’ve made that awesome Animoto video of scenes from your last youth retreat. You want to show it before service starts, but you always show countdowns before service so things start on time, and you just don’t know what to do about this connived conundrum . . .

Don’t worry.

Do the logical.  Turn your own custom video into a countdown.

There are a couple of good ways to do this.

First, istockphoto.com has some decent countdowns over green backgrounds perfect for chroma keying, assuming you have a video editor capable of chroma keying.  Don’t know what chroma keying is?  It’s a way to combine two videos, one over another.  The chroma key selects a color and makes all areas of the top video which are that color transparent so the background shows through.  You might have heard it called shooting in front of a greenscreen or a bluescreen and it’s how meteorologists show up in front of their weather maps on the news.  With a chroma key countdown from istockphoto, you can do the same thing to put a timer over your video.

Of course, that may not be the most cost effective way of making your own countdown, especially when you can buy the Countdown Creator for $34.95.  Countdown Creator is a program that will allow you to take your own photos or video and add a countdown clock over the top.  You can even customize the soundtrack and font of the countdown.  It’s quick.  It’s really easy.  And the final product is great.

And no, I didn’t receive any perks for this endorsement – I had to buy my own copy just like the rest of the world.  But for the same cost of two countdown video from sermonspice.com, I figure it may be one of the best video purchases I ever made.

So, you’re fresh back from your youth retreat with a digital camera full of stunning photos and you want to know the best way to show your church all the great things that happened while you were away, but you don’t have the time to spend all day editing a video together.  What do you do?

If you’ve been reading this site recently, you know what I’d do.

Head to Animoto.com.

Animoto is a web-based service that takes your photos and video clips and edits them into a montage, complete with a tightly synced soundtrack.  It is, quite honestly, amazing what this software can do.

First, sign up for an account.  With a free account you can make as many free 30-second clips as you would like.  Want a longer video?  That’s easy.  For $3 you can buy an upgrade credit and make a full-length video.  Even better, in my opinion, is to upgrade to an all-access pass for $30 and for a whole year you can make as many videos as you want.  (As easy as Animoto is, you’ll make a lot.)

Or you can even go to the next step up, and for $249 you can not only make as many videos as you want for a year, you can make as many Hi-Res videos as you want.  (Hi-Res upgrade credits for all-access pass holders is $5 per video and with one you can download a hi-res mp4 video as well as .iso files for easy burning to DVD.)  What’s more, with the $249 professional account you can make videos for commercial use, access a wider range of soundtracks licensed for commercial use, add buttons to your video that drive viewers to your website and strip the Animoto logo from the end of your video so the focus is on you and your organization rather than on Animoto.

Once you have your account, making your first video is just three easy steps. 

First, upload your photos. You can either upload them directly to Animoto, or retrieve them from your own Flickr, Facebook or Picasa account.  (Since I use Flickr I know you can even retrieve the photos by photoset, so creating a video from a specific event is fast and easy.)  Or, if you want a montage of video clips you can upload them directly to Animoto (there are currently no retrieval services available for videos.)  Then you can adjust the order of the elements and even add some text.

Once you’ve chosen your photos, you pick your soundtrack.  The program will tell you how long your final video will probably be and you can search Animoto’s collection of soundtracks for tracks of similar length.  (The even have a nice collection of music from Christian artists.)  Don’t like what they offer? Upload your own audio (keeping in mind to respect copyrights as you do so).  Is the track too long? Don’t worry; Animoto will let you set start and stop points, or, if you prefer, trim the audio automatically to match your video length.

Finally, give your video a title and optional description (which appears on the Animoto site), and your video’s ready to render.

When it’s done rendering the video, Animoto will notify you by email with a link to your final video.  From there, if you don’t like it, you can remix it or fine tune it.  Or if you do like it, you can use the video toolbox to share it with your friends by sending it as a video email, embedding it into your website, or exporting it directly to YouTube.  The YouTube export can take a while to complete, but once you set it to export, you don’t need to babysit the process and in the end, you expose your video to the world’s second most used search engine.

As is so often the case here, I’ve received nothing from Animoto in exchange for this review.  It’s just a great web service that has made my life easier and created some great quality content.  Go ahead, try it out. It’s free.

polleverywhere.com SMS Audience Response System

We’ve introduced you to our new series at Water’s Edge called “You Decide.”  The essence of this series is the opportunity for students to text in questions and topics for us to cover in our teaching.  To facilitate this, we’re using the SMS poll service from polleverywhere.com.

It seems really simple from the audience’s viewpoint.  At the start of each service we invite students to text in any questions they’d like us to address.  “Simply text ‘youdecide’ and your question to 99503,” I say, and questions start rolling in.  “Have Twitter? Just tweet an @reply to @poll with ‘youdecide’ and your question.  And if you don’t have a cell phone, you can always go to our website, watersedgeyouth.com and follow the link to submit a question.”

During the week, students can check the live text wall at watersedgeyouth.com and see what questions come in.  As questions are submitted, we moderate the answers to make sure inappropriate messages don’t get posted to the wall of our website.

And all of it is made possible by polleverywhere.com.

Ask Anything

Polleverywhere.com is a SMS voting and audience response system.  A subscription allows you to ask as many questions as you want in a month, and results can be posted to your website or even sent live to your video projector in the room.

Multiple Choice Poll

Your question can be a multiple choice poll where participants send a keyword or number to 99503 to cast their vote for one option or another.  (See the image on the right for a detail.  To vote for “dam : river” (the ‘correct’ answer, btw) all a student would have to do is send the code 26157 to 99503.)

Or you can ask an open ended question (like “What would you like us to address at the next Water’s Edge?”) in which participants include a keyword or number at the beginning of their text message, and then use the rest of the message to send in their answer.

Customizable Subscription Plans

Subscription plans run from free (maximum 30 responses per poll) to $1,400 per month (20,000 responses per poll).  Each subscription level provides additional features.

For $15 per month you accept up to 50 responses per poll, and you can track users across multiple polls to see how they answer multiple polls.  Make one of the polls an open-ended question that asks their name, and you can identify what responses come from what participants.

For $65 per month you can accept up to 250 responses per poll, two users can create polls, and live response moderation is enabled so you can approve responses before they get posted to your live response wall.  Finally, the $65 per month plan allows you to create custom keywords that add a level of usability and professionalism to your poll.  (You can say use an easy to remember word like “youdecide” rather than a hard to remember number to identify your poll.)

Each upgrade in plan from there includes the same features, and accepts additional responses and users per plan.

One Tool, Multiple Uses

We’re obviously using Poll Everywhere to accept questions and topics for our You Decide series.  We’re also using it to enable students to ask questions or make comments during the teaching by sending a text message to an open ended poll.  I have my laptop up front with me and see questions and comments come in as students respond.  That way I can address questions without questions interrupting the flow of the teaching.  (Although we also have a question and comment time during the lesson for students who don’t have a cell phone.)

We’ve also used Poll Everywhere in the past for games.  The poll pictured above came from a trivia game in which we pitted a contestant against the combined intelligence of the audience.  We threw a analogy from SAT practice tests up on the video screen and had the contestant select their answer and write it down in advance.  Then we opened the poll to the audience.  If the student got the answer right and the audience got it wrong, they won a prize.

(When we played this at Water’s Edge, we enabled multiple responses per poll, so students who didn’t have a cell phone could borrow a friends to participate.  Of course, a select few students found it funny to spam the poll with multiple entries of the wrong answer, which not only skewed the results but also froze up the poll once we hit our maximum response limit.  Needless to say, next time we try this we’ll disable multiple responses.)

We’re also planning on using it the next time we play “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” for the “poll the audience” lifeline.

Have you used Poll Everywhere in Your Ministry?

We’re always looking for new ways to use tools like these.  Maybe you’ve done something creative with Poll Everywhere in your ministry.  Sound off in the comments and share your ideas.

I’ve you’ve been reading youth ministry tech blogs or listening to many youth ministry twitters, you’ve probably come across talk about the digital camcorders from Flip, including the fan favorite Flip Mino (and Flip Mino HD).  At least I have. And so this morning I set off for Indy, in part to drop by Best Buy and check out this thing they call the Mino.

We’re getting ready for a new series at Water’s Edge called My Brand New Life which we hope will not only challenge students spiritually, but also unleash their creative side. One of the aspects of the series I’m most excited about will hopefully send them out into their world with camera phones to capture pictures and video that demonstrate what they’re learning.  Of course, not every student has a camera phone.  That’s why I wanted to check out the Mino.  At less than $150 a camera, I figured wouldn’t mind loaning one out to a trusted teen each week to enable them to take part in the video challenge.

When I arrived at Best Buy I was greeted just inside the door by an end cap display featuring their Insignia digital camcorders.  They are the same concept as the Flip, just from Best Buy’s discount brand.  The upside that caught my attention – $99 per camera. And the price was the same for both the SD and HD models.  But of course the skeptic in me wondered what’s the catch?

I looked into them, compared them with the Flip Mino, and bought a couple.  Here’s why:

Obviously, my first point of comparison was video resolution. Both the Flip and Insignia cameras shoot at the same resolution.  Standard Definition models shoot at 640×480, HD models shoot at “720p” or 1280×720.  Both brands shoot H.264 AVI videos.  The Insignia SD optics have an f3.2 aperture, whereas the Flip Mino has a f2.4 aperture. That means the Mino is probably slightly better in low light environments, the Insignia has a slightly better depth of field.  Personally, as long as there’s enough light to get away with it, I prefer shooting video with the smaller aperture.   Of course, all those words probably mean nothing compared to some sample video to compare, so here you go.

First a sample video I shot with my new Insignia:

And here’s a video from the Flip Mino, that  I didn’t shoot:

My second point of comparison was storage capacity. The Flip Mino comes with 2GB of flash memory built in.  The Flip Mino HD comes with 4GB.  The Insignia models come with 64MB.  Not much, and therein may lie the price difference.  However, all four models support SDHC cards to supplement the camera’s memory, and with Best Buy selling Sandisk VideoHD 4GB SDHC cards for $12.99 a card I could buy an Insignia, double the Flip SD Mino’s built in memory, and still pay less than the Mino.

The third point of comparison, design. And I’m not talking about the customizable skins the Mino offers.  I’m talking about product design.  Both models are about the same size.  However, it’s about there that their design similarity ends.  The Flip’s lens is on the profile (think the wide flat side, like the front cover of a book).  The screen and controls are on the back, opposite the lens.  The controls are nice and big, and designed (I expect) to resemble an iPod’s controls. Finally, the flip gets it’s name from the fact that it has a built in USB jack that flips out so you can plug it directly into your computer’s USB 2.0 port.

The Insignia, however, has the lens on what would be the spine of the book.  The controls are much smaller than the Mino and located opposite the lens.  That makes them, at least I imagine, a little harder to use than the Mino.  (I haven’t actually had the opportunity to shoot with a Mino.)  Furthermore, the Insignia doesn’t have a built in USB jack.  Instead you have to use a USB cable (included) to connect it to your computer.

However, the Insignia makes up for any inconvenience with a larger display (2.4″ to 1.5″ on the SD models).  What’s more, the screen flips out, and rotates 270 degrees.  That means you can rotate it around to see yourself as you film yourself, should you so choose.  If you wanted to design a feature to flip out on a camcorder so you could name it the Flip, I’d choose screen over USB jack any day.

Other differences I noticed. The Insignia felt heftier to me.  Don’t know for sure if that was just my imagination or reality, but it felt sturdier in my hands.  The Insignia is also powered by 2 AA batteries, rather than built in rechargeable like the Flip.  The Insignia has far more video controls (white balance and exposure controls, for example).  The Insignia doesn’t have the software for editing and direct links to Youtube or email like the Flip.

Like I said, all considered I went with the Insignia.  I like it better, and it cost far less.  $99 for your choice of SD or HD at Best Buy right now.