In children’s and family ministry there is an ongoing struggle to adopt digital tools, but perhaps more importantly there is an ever-present debate about replacing paper Bibles with digital Bibles.  Why is that?  Are children’s pastors, Sunday School teachers, and VBS program coordinators fearful of Marshall McLuhan’s portent from the 1960s “The medium is the message”?  Are we apprehensive, wondering if somehow the digital medium will overcome the message of Scripture?

I hope not.  And my hope is based more on my desire to see leaders and teachers use tools that speak the language of the learner more than my love of technology.  Here are 5 ways to use a digital Bible in your ministry setting:

1. Start with Youversion.  Youversion is a web tool and app for almost every platform. Download here.
2. Make notes on the passage you are studying in your ministry environment and share it with parents on your ministry Facebook page.
3. Promote a reading plan for volunteers.  You can sign up for a reading plan and receive daily email reminders and content that you can forward to a volunteer team.
4. Submit your own reading plan.  Studying something specific?  Put together a reading plan and submit it to Youversion so everyone on your team can follow along digitally.
5. Use Live Events to make your small group curriculum available to leaders to use in their groups.

Using Live Events functionality you can get interactive in a small group setting.  With a smartphone or tablet, let kids post their own prayer requests and praise reports and answer questions using live polls.

What are you waiting for?

For decades, animation has won over audiences both young and old.  From the first animated film, Snow White, to the Toy Story trilogy, animation has become one of the most powerful storytelling tools in our culture.

In the early days of children’s ministry, a church producing original animations was inconceivable.  The time, cost, and expertise required greatly exceeded the average church budget or staff.  Technology has changed all of that.   Now the average Sunday School can produce high quality, original animation for free.  If you’re interested in using animation to help teach children, let me introduce you to some of the tools available.

Toontastic: Toontastic is an iPad app that uses drawing tools to bring original artwork to life. Toontastic isn’t just the brute strength of animating your artwork.  It is a storytelling tool that helps users determine a story arc, setting, and the characters.  Imagine using this with your storytelling team in a training setting to help them illustrate the Bible story!

Xtranormal: Xtranormal is a web animation tool.  You provide the script and Xtranormal animates it for you.  I’m serious.  You type in the script and Xtranormal does the work.  You select the characters and backgrounds, then add the script by typing it or submitting your own audio recording.  Xtranormal allows you to choose the emotions, actions, and gestures for the characters along with the camera angles and sound effects that go along with the script.

What other tools have you discovered to aid storytelling in your children’s ministry context?

Understanding digital learners is the most critical knowledge gap in children’s and family ministry today.

Wow. I think I just summed up what I have sensed for the past 10 years in ministry.  That phrase captures the reason why I started blogging four years ago, the purpose of my ongoing research, and the explanation behind my heart beating so quickly when I get up in front of a group of Sunday school teachers and volunteers to talk about today’s kids.

Understanding digital learners is the most critical knowledge gap in children’s and family ministry today. 

If you are involved in any type of children’s ministry (VBS, Sunday school, Awana, club programs, Sunday morning services), you are in the thick of reaching digital learners.  Discovering their characteristics, tendencies, habits and traits (especially as it relates to media) can bolster your efforts.  In most cases, it will send those efforts into a new orbit.

A great place to start is by reading and reviewing the 2010 seminal report from the Kaiser Family Foundation entitled “Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds.”

The report highlights the following:

• Young people spend 7:38 each day consuming media
• Due to using multiple devices at once and the explosion of mobile tools, total media consumption averages 10 hours and 45 minutes daily
• Two-thirds of young people own their own cell phone, 76% of young people own a portable music device

Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds is a must read for any children’s ministry leader.  Download it, review it, and share your notes with parents and volunteers.

What stands out to you as an action step after reading this research on kids and media?

Music changed with the Internet.  Napster popularly yet illegally allowed people to share their music collections song by song for free.  Songs went from being sold in stores by the album to being sold online individually.  Whole music libraries went from a media cabinet to your pocket.  But most importantly, because music became cheaper, more accessible, and mobile, it fundamentally changed from a hobby to a way of life.

Children today exist with a curated soundtrack to their lives.  Understanding and influencing that soundtrack is a powerful tool for ministry leaders.  That is why I love Spotify.

Free: With Spotify, you can listen to music for free.  No more buying tracks and typing in the 58 digit alphanumeric codes to redeem an iTunes gift card.   You love free, so does your church administrator.

Selection: Unlike other music tools, you choose the music you want to listen to, create playlists, and have access to the latest music instantly.  Your music collection just went from one thousand to several million.

Relevant: I love checking in with kids to see what they are interested in.  Last week I asked my daughter’s kindergarten class if they had ever played “Scribblenauts” because I had read about the game.  Blank stares told me everything I needed to know.  Now, I can ask kids what they listen to and instead of burning through budget dollars to buy it I can listen to it legally.

Simple: To use Spotify, just visit the website and create an account. Spotify has apps for smartphones and your Mac or PC.  It just works.

Unfortunately because of licensing restrictions, you are not allowed to use your Spotify account to play music publicly (in your church, school, etc.).  However, I get so much value out of using Spotify personally that this is not a make or break feature.

If you use Spotify, please share what you are currently listening to!

Several months ago there was an incident in our home that has caused me to ponder my over-connectedness.  It was a cool spring evening.  My wife and I were settling in for the night and I began, what was then, my nightly routine.  Checking last minute e-mails on the laptop, checking Facebook on the iPad, sending a Twitter update on my iPhone, and pulling up the newest book on my Kindle.  It was this sight that prompted a slightly sarcastic remark from my wife, “are you serious…I think screens are little to important to you these days.”

At the time I didn’t want to admit it…but my wife was right…I was in love with my screens.  But it was more than just my screens, it was the connection that they represent.

When Katie and I got married 10 years ago I didn’t have a cell phone.  I didn’t have a laptop.  Smart phones and tablets were just a twinkle in Steve Jobs eye.  And I didn’t even have a Myspace account, let alone Facebook and Twitter.  It was a different world.  A world where the only screens I owned were far from mobile.

This has all changed.  And for the most part I am thankful. The connections and networking that is possible because of technology and social media is incredible.

As ministry leaders, connection is at the center of our ministry.  Relationships are everything.  They are the foundation for growth.  But if we are not careful, our connectedness can actually lead to neglecting the relationships that are the foundation of our world.  We are so connected everywhere else that we forget to be present…here.  at home.  at work.  at play.  with Jesus.  And when it comes to building healthy relationships, presence is key.

We have amazing technology that holds incredible potential for the movement of the gospel.  We just have to use it wisely.

Is your connectedness keeping you from being present?

What’s your story?  How do you fight against the ever-increasing difficulty of presence?

KB

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.

It’s becoming more and more common for children’s ministry leaders to create their own video content for large group programs.  One of the options available to leaders is a DSLR camera.  This is a professional-consumer piece of equipment that delivers high quality results without busting the budget.

If you’re children’s ministry is thinking of purchasing cameras and producing original content, I’d recommend investigating DSLR as an option.  One of the resources that helped me learn more about my DSLR camera came from Vimeo.com in a series dedicated to DSLR cameras.  Here’s a sample video! I encourage you to take a look!

Also, here’s an example of a short promotional video we created for parents of middle school students.  The video was shot using our DSLR camera.

Nielsen just released a report on the “Media Universe” in the United States.  Here are the highlights of the report for children’s ministry:

• The average number of TV sets per household is 2.5
• Almost 1 in 3 kids comes from a home with 4 or more TV sets
• Kids 2-11 watch an average of 25.8 hours of television every week
• Kids 0-12 send/receive an average of 1178 text messages per month

+click to enlarge

For more, download Nielsen’s State of the Media – U.S. Audiences and Devices

If you’re in children’s ministry, you know the Wiggles: the  part education, part Boy Band, all fun group from Australia.  Their meteoric rise to popularity has several lessons for children’s ministry.  Check out the article!

Previously I wrote about five forces or broad trends that we are facing as children’s and family ministry leaders (the rise of the individual, connectivity, Twitter Speed, Rip-Mix-Burn-Share, and Motion Blur).  Today’s blog deals with the fourth force.

From the original article:
Rip, Burn, Mix, Share:  The iTunes mantra has become the new normal for content.  Television shows or news programs get live video responses then mashed up, auto-tuned, and delivered to YouTube.  Did you know that Google recently changed its copyright enforcement largely because of a YouTube video of a wedding party dance that turned a song into Sony’s 8th best seller in history?  Tutorials for professional software are distributed with the original files so that users can think up new ways of creating content, all for free.

Kids are used to creating their own content.  One of my favorite weekends of the year is the weekend after Christmas because I love finding out what kids get for Christmas compared with what they asked for.  In 2009, a laptop and cellphone was a popular gift.  The Nintendo DSi was probably the most popular “big gift.”  Wii games were far more common than XBox or PS3 games.  What’s the common thread here?
•    Digital tools
•    Mostly portable
•    Customizable: phones have apps, games have avatars, electronics have preferences)
•    Little to no text involved (more on that below)
•    Content-creation: Most of these gifts carry the ability to create, draw, paint, write, record, and distribute content.
•    Web: these tools mostly connect to the Internet either wirelessly or through a computer connection so that content can be shared
What content are we allowing kids to create in our ministry?  How are we delivering the life-changing, soul-transforming truth of God’s infallible, everlasting Word to them?  Are we just talking to kids who learn and play digitally?

For generations, graphics were generally illustrations, accompanying the text and providing some kind of clarification to a concept. For kids today, the relationship is almost completely reversed. The role of text is to provide more detail to something that was first experienced as an image.  Since childhood, the digital generation has been continuously exposed to television, videos, and computer games that put colorful, high-quality, highly expressive graphics in front of them with little or no accompanying text.  The result of this experience has been to considerably sharpen their visual abilities.  They find it much more natural than our generation to begin with visuals, and to mix text and graphics in richly meaningful and personal ways. Digital learners need to be able to communicate as effectively graphically as we were educated to communicate with text.

So here’s some points of application:
•    Use more pictures, music, and video in your ministry
•    Create your own content (I’m always surprised at how much more kids enjoy video content that we create in-house than content we purchase)
•    Limit text (says the man writing a blog – but this blog is for digital immigrants, not digital natives so I guess I’m okay)
•    Start exploring your creativity (you have to read Henry Zonio’s article on creativity – it’s a great start)
•    Explore ways for kids to create their own content
•    Invest in a popular digital tool and start experimenting with it!  Have a child teach you how to use it (as my 3 year old daughter taught me how to use her new digital camera)