Below are the notes for my lecture I gave at Faulkner at their Youth & Family Summit on February 29, 2016. 

A few notes before we begin:

• Isaiah 44.9–20 – don’t make your tech an idol
• People shouldn’t say “Wow that was a great presentation” - they should say “He or she really brought that passage to life”
• Don’t ever let your tech speak louder than the Word.
• God used people - Moses and Joshua and Jesus and Paul - he didn’t use an app to spread the Gospel
• If your focus is on your PowerPoint and not pointing kids to the Gospel, you need to reevaluate your preparation
• My process: [1] Look at the Word, [2] Write my lesson, [3] Add in any technology.

Bible Study / Apps

• TheBible.org app / greattreasures.org (it ain’t pretty but it works!)
• Logos Bible Software
• YouVersion (YouVersion Live interactive notes)
• Faithlife Study Bible
• Accordance
• ESV Bible

Resources

• AdventuresInMinistry.com
• AIM Series
• Ministry Bits podcast
• Active Digital Parenting
• Start2Finish
• Wes McAdams
• The Bible Project on YouTube
• The Youth Cartel
• YFC.net
• Download Youth Ministry
• The Source for YM
• Youth Ministry 360
• The Clues Brothers (escape games from Andrew and Philip Jenkins)
• Open.Lifechurch.tv

Reasearch and Writing

• Editorial for iOS
• Byword for iOS
• Apple Notes for iOS
• Copied for iOS
• Simplenote
• Evernote (good app but not recommended)
• Microsoft OneNote

Social Media

• Instagram (fastest growing social network in the world)
• Flow for Instagram (nice UI, multiple accounts, iPad app)
• Tweetbot for Mac / iOS (great Twitter client, multiple accts)
• Fenix for Twitter for Android
• Tweetdeck for Mac (multiple accts)
• Buffer (time-deliver posts, multiple accts)
• SaveFrom.net
• Adobe Post
• Adobe Clip

Graphics

• Canva for iOS
• Gimp
• Photoshop + Lightroom subscription (9.99/mo)
• Pixelmator for Mac

Organization

• MinHub Youth for iOS
• Microsoft Excel or OneNote
• Dropbox
• Postagram
• Ink Cards
• Wunderlist
• 2Do
• Omnifocus

Websites / Mobile Apps

• Squarespace
• Hover
• Clover sites
• Subsplash

Organization

• MinHub Youth for iOS
• Microsoft Excel or OneNote
• Dropbox
• Postagram
• Ink Cards
• Wunderlist
• 2Do
• Omnifocus

A luxury once tried becomes a neccessity.

In the case of the mobile web and its status in 2015, we have forgotten what it was like just a decade ago.

In 2005, Windows Mobile, Motorola and Blackberry ruled the mobile browsing world with horrible WAP (Web Access Protocol) browsers, or what they liked to call browsers. The web experience, for the most part, was terrible and confusing. Which is why no one used it.

So this week when The Verge published their article attesting to how bad the mobile web is, I had to take a look back.

How quickly we forget.

It all changed with the iPhone. Suddenly you could view entire websites on Safari, and pinch to zoom on those sites to see in greater detail. Then, years later, circa 2012-ish, the mobile web started to take form. No longer did you have to build different websites for mobile and the desktop (even though, to this day, many websites still do just that), but you could build once and deploy everywhere. Squarespace is a great example of this - the very website you're reading right now was built on Squarespace, and I didn't have to write one bit of code for my mobile website, which always looks fantastic.

So for a blogger on a prominent internet tech website to write an article criticizing the mobile web when their very own site is part of the problem greatly irritates me.

The problem is not the mobile web. The problem is monetizing the mobile web. The Verge loads no less than twenty ads, trackers, and services that no doubt make them money for every page view but slow down the web experience on mobile terribly. iMore dealt with this criticisim a week or two ago.

And all this comes into the discussion because of one thing: Safari Content Blockers.

You see, in iOS 9, Apple is providing users a way to block all those ads and trackers (which take the form of various scripts in the webpages that you don't see), and that's not making some many websites who depend on these trackers for revenue very happy. I couldn't put it better than Marco Arment:

I’m interested in running a content blocker not because I don’t want to see ads, but because I feel the need to fight back against being opted in, without my knowledge or consent, to third-party collecting, tracking, and selling of my personal data just by following a link.

And if such blocking becomes a big problem for publishers, it’s up to them to switch to ad delivery methods without these privacy invasions.

And there's your big concern. Have you ever been browsing websites and then see ads on Facebook or Amazon for something you looked at recently? That's an invasion of your internet privacy. While some websites argue that just you visiting their site allows them to legally track you and catalog your data, that doesn't mean it's right.

Websites and the companies that monetize them are going to have to get better at the experience and better at not invading your internet privacy. Up until this point, it hasn't been an issue because people have largely ignored it.

Since this week marks 10 years of podcasting on the iTunes Store, I thought it was great to share this from ChurchMag:

According to Edison Research, 15% of Americans (39 million people) listen to podcasts at least monthly, with 13 million people tuning in to podcasts on any given day.

Chances are good that your church members are subscribing to, downloading, and listening to podcasts throughout the week. Are they listening to your message?

Some great tips for ministry podcasting, including hardware, software, where to host, and how to distribute. If your congregation isn't podcasting, they should be. Take a look at the full article over at ChurchMag.

Having just gotten an Apple Watch, I disagree with about 75% of this article, especially this:

Don’t buy the Apple Watch (yet) unless you are a developer/designer who needs to develop for it. I’ve tasked myself to fully integrate the Apple Watch into my every day in order to understand it’s full potential. To my surprise, the process of doing so felt a little bit like a burden since I had to constantly remind myself to actually USE it in order to form my opinion.

Read Tobias van Schneider's entire article over at Medium.

If you've listened to Ministry Bits for any amount of time and you have read anything about how I like to handle text, you'll know that I love to write in Markdown. And Beegit has an excellent little cheat sheet I saw today for help in writing simpler and better.

Markdown is a simple way of styling plain text. So instead of having a .txt file, you will have a .md file that can be styled yet still be opened with any app, virtually forever. The short story is that I write in plain text/markdown because I can open the same files ten years from now. All the things I've written in MS Word in high school are completely inaccessible now, and I don't like that.

Markdwon is easy. For example, putting a single hashtag (#) before a heading makes it an H1 heading, the biggest heading. Putting two hashtags makes it an H2, a slightly smaller heading that can be used as a subheading. One asterisk indicates italics while two asterisks tells you it's bold.

Go ahead and check out Beegit's Markdown Cheat Sheet and fire up your favorite text editor (I love Brackets for Mac) and get started with Markdown today. Write simpler, write better.