Your Ministry with Tech #1
So, I was speaking at CCYC a few weekends ago and my wife was amazingly wonderful and allowed me to get an iPhone 3G and the world is a better place (seriously it is). I have been amazed at how I can get the information for ministry faster, connect to people, share life, and ultimately do more with this little device.
Over the next few posts we’ll be discussing how Your Ministry with Tech can benefit from using social networking, blogs, interactive web, mobile communication, email, etc. to meet the needs of your people and to make your job easier.
First, we’ll start with something that is overlooked for most people, but it makes total sense… iGoogle. If you are wondering what this is check out an overview video below:
iGoogle helps you dump outlook, calendars, mutliple pages to view, and so on and to bring everything to a web based interface and basically it’s your “landing pad” for all things you need (i.e. RSS Reader, Google Calendar, Gmail, To-do Lists, News Feeds, Facebook, Twitter, Etc.)
You can have one place to get everything you need without haveing to visit 10-15 different websites or have your outlook open, calendar open, web browser open and the list goes on.
To start off, just go to Gmail.com and sign up for an email account. Once that is set-up:
- You can make a Google Calendar (import your outlook to google calendar)
- Set up your blog feeds in Google Reader
- Store and edit documents online with Google Docs
- Store & Keep Photos online with Google Photos (Picasa)
- Then you can set-up your iGoogle Page and add all of these to the main page
- Just save iGoogle as your Homepage in your web browser and… That’s It!
Some other great add-ons/ widgets for your iGoogle page are:
- Twitter Add-on
- MySpace Add-on
- Facebook Add-on
- Enhanced Bookmarks Add-on
- Framed Photo (I keep my family photos on here wherever I go)
Once this is up and running it will set the stage for everything we’ll do from here. But having this one landing pad for all things communication is such a huge help to you as a pastor/ leader to keep communication flowing at all times. If you don’t have some of those things like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Don’t rush out and create an account yet. We’ll talk about social networking and you can decide for yourself if it’s something for you and which one you want to dive in to.
Until next time,
J-del * over and out*
