There’s tons of items online and even here at Cory Center about working with and teaching digital natives. The children in our classrooms don’t know what it is like not to be bombarded with information, images, and messages. They interact differently with technology than their teachers.

Rather than fight to get them to be more like you – which will never happen – be creative, see how you can leverage the world that they live in to help pass along the message you have.
One idea, inspired by the RSA Illustrate people is to augment your talk with drawings…here’s a sample that I’ve used:

The week I used this, the student’s were captured. I had their full attention for the length of the video and several moments after – not a peep. I used the moments after to clarify the message and drive home a few points….

And believe it or not, this video only took about 2 hours to create. I’m sure that my next one will go from brain to screen much quicker since there will be less of a learning curve on my end.

Here’s what I used:

1. Story – we’re using Tru, but any story will do
2. iMovie – Windows movie maker may work as well
3. Garage Band – any way to record your voice so that you can import it into your movie software
4. ScreenChomp app on my iPad – I’m seeking another app, but this one will serve me for now. It’s possible to do the entire talk on ScreenChomp, but their server seems to have issues with large videos.

Here’s the process:

1. Record the story. (This is where I used Garage Band)
2. Using screen chomp, illustrate a point. It’s helpful if the illustration is longer than what you are saying.
   * With screen chomp, you have to save the movie to their server, then download the mp4…another app may save the file locally.
3. Import into iMovie.
4. Using the clip adjustment, adjust the speed of the clip to fit the portion of your talk.
5. Repeat 2-4 until you’ve illustrated everything
6. Show the movie

As you can see, with the right tools, this is a simple process that enables you to make a quick video to get a point across or to illustrate an entire talk. Just don’t over use it, the natives will get restless.

What are you doing to facilitate native learning in your classroom?

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?

A couple of weeks ago I started watching the following video on YouTube and I was moved to watch another, including the one following. If you’re short on time, just watch the second one and pay close attention at 4:40…

First:

And another:

Did you see the family bow? It didn’t seem like they were involved in the mob.

Anyhow, I wound up watching video after video. At times, I was scared by the power that these mobs could have…but I was also moved to think of the power that the Church has in proclaiming the name of Christ: Especially if we would do it outside the walls of our meeting space.

This year, do you have a plan to do something outside the building? Have you considered how you can make an impact in your community as a group?

Last week I noticed Howie Mandel is hosting a new show, “Mobbed.” (How will he deal with being around all those people?) I’m not sure if I’ll watch it, but I’m certainly inspired by the notion of group influence.

How do you think we can use the power of people?

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

In years gone by I heard the argument over and over again, “We cannot do video in our ministry context because the cost is too high.  We do not have the equipment or the budget to create videos.”  And 15 years ago, it was prohibitively expensive to create videos for the average ministry.

Now all you need is a mobile phone.  If you have three, you can create the world’s largest stop-animation film, Gulp.  If you have not heard about Gulp or seen the video, be sure to watch it below.  It is an incredible movie.  But the amazing thing to me is that the entire thing was shot using three phones.

If you wanted to know how they did it, see the Making of Gulp below.

~ Matt Guevara

There’s a new “Did You Know” video put together by XPLANE | Dachis Group entitled “Iowa, Did You Know?”  The video highlights global statistics about the web, technology, and learning.  While the video was made for Iowa School Administrators, it highlights the struggle to teach digital learners.  Watch it here:

Some fast facts from the video:

• There are 7 billion people living on the planet and 5 billion mobile phones.
• More people have access to a mobile phone on the planet than a clean toilet
• 2 billion people are on the Internet globally
• If Twitter and Facebook were companies, they would rank 3^rd and 6^th in population worldwide
• 25% of all people under 25 get all or most of their TV online
• 92% of American children have an online presence before age 2
• 87% of all teenagers text, sending an average of 3339 texts per month

Puppetry is an art form that various companies and professionals across the world are re-imagining.  While puppetry has a long history in children’s ministry, the primary forms of puppetry have stayed the same over the years.  A puppet plays the role of the goofy, sarcastic, comedic foil to the teacher onstage or a troupe of puppets act out a song.  One of the things I admire so much about Phil Vischer is that he has reimagined puppetry for children’s ministry, using the art form to teach older kids digitally through the What’s in the Bible series.  Phil’s puppets are theologians.

In this Ted talk, Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones from the Handspring Puppet Company tell their story about War Horse, a show that opens in New York at Lincoln Center on April 14, 2011.  You’ll see the mechanics of their puppets and the brilliance of the life-sized horse they built.

Click to watch!

One of my takeaways from Adrian and Basil is their relentless pursuit of an idea required countless hours of work, prototyping, practice, pictures, drawings, and team discussions.  And after all of that effort, they did not even know if their life size horse puppet would work!

To find out more about Handspring Puppet Company, visit handspringpuppet.co.za or check out their Flickr page at http://www.flickr.com/photos/handspring/

There is a great wiki resource that I found last week called K12 Learning 2.0.  With all of the changes in technology and the web, the teaching and learning process has shifted dramatically.  K 12 Learning 2.0 is a “self-guided online learning adventure designed to provide classroom teachers and other school personnel with an introductory “What’s out there?” exploration of some common tools and concepts related to Web 2.0.”

Anyone can join and discover ways to engage digital learners and discover how the world around them has changed.  Here are a couple of the videos on K12 Learning 2.0 that explore some significant 21st century shifts for digital learners.

Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us by Michael Wesch (4:30)

Did You Know? 4.0 by Xplane, the Economist, Karl Fisch & Scott McLeod. (4:46)

A Vision of Students Today by Michael Wesch and students at Kansas State University (4:45)

The Networked Student by Wendy Drexler

The story this video tells is amazing and anyone involved in children’s ministry (where ideas are central to events, programs, ministries, outreach, recruiting, and every facet of what we do) should watch it.  I plan on using this video to share before my next big meeting with our team as we continue to plan for Hot U (our version of VBS).

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.