I am fascinated with the teaching and learning process.  As children’s and family ministry leaders, part of our work is educational so being attenuated to issues related to learning theory is critical.  In Approaches to Training and Development, Dugan Laird posits that the vast majority of knowledge (75%) is learned through seeing.  God created our eyes to help us learn.

So often in children’s ministry we overemphasize learning through hearing, even though hearing accounts for only 13% of retained knowledge.  Learning to represent ideas and concepts visually is a worthwhile skill to acquire for anyone involved in the teaching and learning process.

I know what you’re thinking:

“Wait, I don’t draw!”  “Even my stick figures are unrecognizable!”

Have no fear, technology is here to help.  Here are 5 resources that can help you begin the process of learning how to represent ideas and concepts visually.

Draw Something – This app is being played by over 20 million people all over the world.  It’s turn-by-turn Pictionary for your iPad.

Vizthink.com – Free articles, media, podcasts, and presentations cover topics like Idea Mapping, Drawing Ideas, and Visual Note-Taking.  There is a fantastic library of articles covering the basics, including how to conquer the fear of drawing.

Paper – My favorite app for the creative process.  Simple tools make it easy to pick up a “pen” and brainstorm.  Available in the iTunes store.

Napkin Academy – Dan Roam, author of The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, is on a mission to help people learn to use simple pictures.  With Napkin Academy, you can begin with a variety of free lessons that help you go from “I can’t draw” to “I can draw any idea.”

How to Draw Faces – This is one of my go-to resources by author and artist Austin Kleon.  It’s a simple video of how to draw faces with a square, two dots, 2/3 of a triangle and three lines.  Watch and learn.

The purpose of this series is to equip leaders in children’s and family ministry with tools and resources from the digital world.  We’ve covered theological topics, leadership issues, volunteers, worship and music, research, budget, and social media.  Today I want to introduce you to a concept that completely changed my work style and effectiveness.  Whether you are a Sunday School Director or Children’s Pastor, you are a busy person, so busy that often people tell you, “I didn’t want to call you because I know you’re so busy.” Am I right?

The problem with being busy is that you reach a certain threshold where no matter what you are working on in the present; your mind fixates on the things you’re not working on.  We tend to think about what needs to be done instead of focusing on what we are doing.  This is a critical issue for children’s ministry leaders because in the moments when we are strolling the halls of our ministry environment, instead of looking like we have all the time in the world to stop and talk to parents and kids, we look like we’re trying to solve a complex algorithm.

Are you too busy?  Determine how much time you can spend with people without thinking about supply shopping, set-up, or curriculum and let your heart decide.

Almost five years ago I read a book called Getting Things Done by David Allen.  Getting Things Done (or GTD for short) is a system of organizing your work.  In GTD, I learned to give all of my work a place.  It was a pivotal moment for me as a leader and pastor.  I recommend the book and invite you to look across the interwebs at the myriad tools available to help you keep track of what needs to be done: Remember the Milk, Omnifocus, Nozbe, Wunderlist, Action Method, Outlook, Google Tasks, Things.

This weekend my senior pastor talked about three reasons why people should take God’s challenge in Malachi 3 and give to the church.  One of the three reasons was “financial accountability.”  In my ministry context, every dollar in the budget goes through a robust, detailed budgeting process.  When ministry dollars are spent, each purchase is scrutinized to make sure it was worth the investment and placed in the right budget.  At the end of the year our church invites an outside auditor to look over our records and publish a public report.  Financial accountability is part of our church’s stewardship of the gifts and offerings people give. 

As children’s and family ministry leaders, we are often called upon to steward church funds.  This is why I love to find ways to save money, free tools, or discounts – it helps me fulfill my Biblical role to be a shrewd manager of resources and provide financial accountability to the church and those who give.   Qpon Monkey is one of those tools.

Qpon Monkey is a new service that launched today.  Qpon Monkey provides fantastic savings for all your ministry needs.  The savings are mostly from special web deals, but printable coupons are coming soon.  Brought to you by the CMBuzz this money-saving, budget-stretching tool also supplies honest, straight forward reviews of products from local ministry practitioners.

At launch, Qpon Monkey already has deals ranging from music to video tools, so drop by the website today!

I am always looking for new tools to help me understand the forces of technology.  The technological future has great implications on the culture and environment kids will grow up and learn in.

Envisioning Tech has put together an interactive map that aims to predict where technology is heading in the next 30 years.  “Looking at emerging trends and research, one can predict and draw conclusions about how the technological sphere is developing, and which technologies should become mainstream in the coming years.

Envisioning technology is meant to facilitate these observations by taking a step back and seeing the wider context. By speculating about what lies beyond the horizon we can make better decisions of what to create today.”

According to the visualization, cloud computing, gesture recognition, speech recognition, pervasive video capture, and augmented reality will be mainstream within the next 5 years.  Take note of these terms because they will play an important role in the lives of the next generation of kids and families.

Recently the New York Times spoke with education experts about what the classroom will look like 10 years from now.  The written excerpts from the predictions are fascinating, but even more compelling are the audio interviews.Check them out here.

This brings up a great project put together by Greg Baird from Kidmin360 and Kidmin Jobs, The Future of Children’s Ministry.  Twenty different leaders in children’s ministry contributed to this resource which focused on predictions for the future of our field.  The resource is available for free download here.

What do you think kidmin will look in 10 years?

Several universities and educational organizations in the UK recently released a report entitled “Children’s Playground Games and Songs in the New Media Age.”  This report addresses the rising concern that free play is disappearing from childhood.  The perception is that parents and teachers often provide so much structure to a child’s time that free play and games fall by the wayside and the worry is that children who engage in media and technology play even less, especially outside.

What kind of games to kids play?

According to the report, while children have a access to more choices in relation to their leisure activities and greater independence from adults than previous generations, play is alive and well.  However the findings were clear that media, specifically television, has influenced the types of games and play children create in social settings.  While clapping games, rhyming games,  ball games, jokes and rude rhymes still permeate child’s play, researchers observed children pretend playing (and singing and dancing) reality television shows like X-Factor. This type of play is referred to as “media-based play.”

The report presented this conclusion about the influence of media and technology on modern play:

Modern children are, then, immersed in an enveloping mediascape, which is impossible for them to ignore.  However, our research indicates that playground culture, and children’s games are not overwhelmed, marginalized or threatened by the quantity and plurality of available media.  We have seen that children make use of the cultural and media resources that surround them, and creatively manipulate them to their own ends.

You can download the entire report here.

The recent release of the documentary “Divided” has caused quite a stir in the church – especially those with strong educational ministries to youth and children.  Again, if you haven’t watched it, you can do so now.  I won’t spend much time going over the details of the movie or the claims it makes, but I think the very first question we should consider is this:  Are they right or wrong?  (I prefer a fairly direct approach.)

Is systematic, age-segregation of children & youth for discipleship unBiblical?  Does it have a place in the modern-day church?  Youth & children’s ministry is in nearly every church in America, but is it the Biblical model?  I think this movie (as well as the book Weed in the Church) is onto something.  And I think we should seriously consider it’s claims; especially if your initial reaction is a negative one.

Does it make a difference that age-segregation does not exist in the Bible? In fact, we see a very different picture, which is what we will explore in the next “Divided” post.

There was a documentary movie recently released that calls into question age-segregated ministries within the church.  The young brothers who filmed and produced it are part of the National Center of Family-Integrated Churches and believe that all systematic, age-segregated educational ministries are non-Biblical and based upon secular, humanistic ideas.  There is also, in essence, a companion book written by Scott Brown called “A Weed in the Church.” 

If you have not watched it yet, let me encourage you to do so right now.  It is just under 1 hour long and can be viewed for a brief time for free.  You may not agree with everything (if anything) within it, but I believe it provides for a necessary check into just why Children’s Ministry exists the way it does.  Is children’s ministry Biblical? Is it the MOST effective way to disciple children for the Kingdom of God?

I’m going to spend the next few weeks to write about the movie and blog some thoughts on what I agree or don’t agree with from the movie.  Check back every so often and let us know what you think?

If you’re interested in making creative videos for your children’s ministry large group or storytelling environments, you can go the traditional video camera and editing suite route or create animated movies on the web or iPad.  Developing high quality animated videos is possible!  Here are four of my favorite tools to create animation for children’s ministry:

Some tools to making fun vids

Xtranormal

With Xtranormal you can choose character, voice, background, and camera movements for your video, upload the script and Xtranormal will animate the video and speak the script for you.

Digital Films

Using templates and a character creator, you can make an entire video (including opening title sequence and end credits).

Voki

You choose a digital character, provide the audio for the voice, and Voki animates the character’s mouth for you.  Pretty awesome.

Toontastic

Creating cartoons with Toontastic is as easy as putting on a puppet show – simply press the record button and tell your stories through play!

~ Matt Guevara

One of the most helpful tools to learn and grow in leadership and creativity is to follow a wide array of blogs.  Thankfully this is a lot easier that going to each blog to read the latest news.  Using Google Reader, I subscribe to the RSS feed of over 100 blogs and connect my Google Reader account to the Reeder app on my mobile devices.  Here are 9 creative blogs that children’s ministry leaders can learn from:

How can we increase our creativity with kids?

Accidental Creative: Articles - This blog is all about teaching creative people and teams how to experience flashes of brilliant insight more consistently by equipping them with the mindset, tools, and systems they need to do generate and execute ideas consistently and effectively.

Innovation Tools’ Innovation Weblog - The Innovation Weblog is a meta-index of the latest innovation trends, news, technology, resources and viewpoints. It covers topics including innovation research and best practices and strategies, innovation management, business use of Weblogs for ideation and collaboration, and much more!

Gamestorming - This blog is about games designed to help you get more innovative, creative results in your work. We’ll show you not only how to play them but how to design them so they fit your own specific work goals.

Daniel H Pink - Personal blog of author Dan Pink who wrote Drive, A Whole New Mind, and Johnny Bunko.

xBlog: The original visual thinking weblog - The xBlog is a weblog that discusses and links to resources for information design and visual thinking, social business smarts, customer insights and other fun and fascinating things along those lines.

IDEO Patterns - PATTERNS shares some of the common insights IDEO (the design giant) sees across projects, as well as out and about in the world.

Unleashing Your Creativity - Blog by Matthew May (author, speaker, coach) about creativity, innovation, and design strategy.

The Heart of Innovation - Great blog by the Idea Champions on innovation, teamwork, and the creative process.

Idea Sandbox - Uniquely designed blog with tools for brainstorming.