Using Social Media in Religious Education by Will Kahn-Greene is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at bluesock.org.
The following sites can be demoed. If you plan to do demos on any of them, you’ll need to set up an account ahead of time–it’s not something you can do during the demo.
If you plan to do demos of these systems, then you need to have them installed on a server you own or control:
If you’re planning to do slides, you’ll need to set them up for Present sections and anything else you want to cover.
Present
Coordinating a large group of volunteers is difficult. It’s not uncommon to spend a lot of time coordinating the coordination effort. In this session, we’ll talk about tools that will make it easier to coordinate the coordination efforts so that you can spend less time on it and get results that are less error-prone.
Present
Calendar and event data is the lifeblood of any community because it’s the timeline of upcoming events. It’s one of a few pieces of information that are critical, need to be up to date, and needs to be available to everyone.
When choosing a calendar tool, make sure it supports the iCalendar format [1]. This format, much like RSS feeds which we talked about previously, is a format for encoding calendar events in a way that can be parsed by software. In this way, you can publish a calendar, give your congregants the url, your congregants can subscribe to the calendar using software that supports iCalendar, and any time you make changes, they’ll see them.
Software that supports iCalendar includes Apple’s iCal [2], Microsoft Outlook 2000 and 2007 [3], Mozilla Sunbird [4], Google Calendar [5] and others.
We’re going to talk about Google Calendar and use it as an example of other calendar systems.
| [1] | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar |
| [2] | http://www.apple.com/macosx/what-is-macosx/mail-ical-address-book.html |
| [3] | http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/ |
| [4] | http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird/ |
| [5] | http://www.google.com/calendar/ |
Present
One of the hardest parts about having a meeting is getting everyone together at the same time in the same place. Increasingly, our volunteers have crazy schedules that change month to month and year to year. Coordinating a meeting is sometimes so complicated that you have to coordinate the coordination and that’s a lot of time and energy.
Doodle [6] is a web-site that makes that a lot easier.
| [6] | http://www.doodle.com/ |
Present
Doodle doesn’t require an account and it makes scheduling meetings easier. Let’s spend a little bit of time using it to schedule a meeting in the future.
I want you to work in groups.
Go to the Doodle site at http://doodle.com/ .
Read through the information on the front page.
When you’re satisfied, click on “Schedule event”.
Go through the steps.
If you give Doodle your email address, then it will send you an email with links to the event scheduling page and an administration page where you can adjust the event and do some other things. Feel free to give it an email address or not–whichever you think is more interesting to you.
After you’re done, go to the event page and fill it out.
Notice the green and red boxes.
Fill it out for a few fictional people with different schedules.
Notice the green and red boxes.
Notice how you can see how many people have filled in details. Notice how they don’t have to use their real names. Notice that someone can fill in details multiple times.
Generally, people don’t use names that are totally flip–you’re using this tool to schedule meetings with people you know and trust and they’ll act accordingly.
Present
When you schedule events, you have to keep track of who’s RSVPd and who’s planning to show up. If it’s a potluck, it helps everyone to know who’s planning to bring what. Additionally, it helps to remind everyone who’s planning to come of when the event is, where, and any details they need to know.
Event scheduling systems handle all of this and they keep track of the current state allowing you to quickly figure out where things are at.
We’re going to talk about two systems: Evite [7] and Crush3r [8].
| [7] | http://www.evite.com/ |
| [8] | http://crush3r.com/ |
It’s likely that people have seen an Evite invitation before, so you probably just have to show off how to set up an event.
Crush3r is like Evite, but it’s got a cleaner interface and there’s less advertising clutter. It might be more pleasing to use.
Present
Let’s say your youth group were planning a trip down to New Orleans to help with rebuilding. Tapping your community or even the bigger community of the entire world is a worth-while thing to do. It’s possible that you can raise money from other places rather than continuing to sap the resources of your local church community.
KickStarter [9] is a site that facilitates raising money for a well-defined project. There are other systems out there–this isn’t the only one.
This is an interesting tool that can allow you to engage other members of the larger community.
| [9] | http://www.kickstarter.com/ |
Show the Kickstarter site and some of the projects on there. Show what kinds of things the projects tend to have.
Present
Communities run on consensus and one of the ways to get consensus is to survey people. There are several tools that make it easy to do surveys for feedback and learning about your congregation.
Running a survey and collecting the data is not hard and you can automate most of it.
We’re going to talk about three tools: Survey Monkey [10], LimeSurvey [11], and Google Docs.
| [10] | http://www.surveymonkey.com/ |
| [11] | http://www.limesurvey.org/ |
You need LimeSurvey installed on a server that you control.
Present
We’ve talked about coordination tools that will make your lives easier. Let’s talk about things in your program you can use these tools for.
Discuss as a group the coordination tools we covered.
Spend 10 minutes to about their properties and what kinds of things they could make easier in a program.
When the conversation peters out, bring up one of the following:
feedback surveys
attendence
inviting volunteer teachers to an end-of-year potluck
checkin forms
maintaining event calendars
maintaining teaching calendars
maintaining resource calendars
scheduling meetings
raising funds for important projects
registration
surveying potential contributors to discover their talents
Every year, you can send out a survey to all the parents of RE youth and ask them what their skills are and whether they have time to contribute to the program.