Monday, February 17, 2014

IDEA: Have students text in their vote.

Our student ministry is about to have a simple and very familiar thing in youth ministry: a movie night.

It's simple until you get to 1 thing, the movie to be watched.  So as a group of student leaders and I were discussing what movie to watch they came up with a great idea... let's vote on it.  Allow the students to help make the choice.  It gives buy-in and allows everyone's voice to be heard in at least a general sense.

So rather than having a stack of acceptable DVD titles ready to go we did something a little different. We voted on it.

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Is Facebook dead to our students?

This topic has been visited a lot recently, but according to a recent study, although the social media options are wide open, for many students Facebook is still a viable option.

Read the full article here.

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Pebble-icious

I admit it.  Unlike the many younger, more "hip" people that get to hang out with as a youth pastor, I am a watch guy.  There I said it.  I like watches.  Always have.  I even prefer analog to digital because I like the classy look.  But since the invention of the calculator-watch (of which I saved up for as a young teenager - and I know that really dates me) watches haven't really evolved into much that could be considered "techy" at all.  While some have heart-rate monitors and such, the overall function hasn't changed much in the past 30 years.

I admit that I was one of those fanboys that utilized the square iPod Nano with a cool watchband and had a watch that people asked about, but it was far from anything more than a conversation piece.  I wanted something more.

My family surprised me on Christmas morning with just that.  A watch that was oh-so-much more.  A Pebble watch, that niche kickstarted project that has made it to retail prime-time.  It works with Android and with the latest SDK release it works REALLY well with iOS.  I mean it really is a fairly seamless experience.

[read more after the break]

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Digital Credit Card

I'm looking forward to the day I won't need my wallet anymore to carry around my credit cards and reward cards, but the truth is too many vendors still require real plastic instead of scanning your iPhone.  In the meantime, here's a great solution...