I’ve learned that most kid’s pastors I’ve met are highly resourceful. They’re always looking for great new resources and the cheaper it is, the better. If it’s free, well that’s incredible.

So, I figured that all the resourceful kidmin peeps who read this blog would be interested in this great free resource. Are you ready for this?

Really?

Here goes….

It’s called following #kidmin on twitter.

Wait a second, before you bail on this blog post, hear me out. Some of you have refused to get on twitter because you’ve not seen it’s relevance to your life or you don’t need another social media element in your life. I totally get that. However, you don’t have to sell your soul to Zuckerberg to get a twitter account (yes, I know Zuckerberg is with facebook, not twitter) and signing up for an account doesn’t mean you have to use it an the traditional way. Whatever resistance you might have toward getting on twitter is keeping you from joining the most active and relevant conversation in kid’s ministry today. Every day hundreds of kidmin leader join in the conversation. Many are just being conversational, while others ask questions and seek answers. Some are selling a product or resource and dozens of others are linking to relevant and current articles on their blogs. It’s a wealth of information right at your fingertips, and it’s free and effortless.

If you subscribe to a ministry magazine or enjoy reading and experiencing new ministry ideas, then following #kidmin on twitter is perfect for you.

So, here’s how you do it.

1. Go to twitter.com and create an account.
2. Don’t forget your username and passord, otherwise you won’t be able to long in and follow your twitter feed.
3. In the top right corner of the page, you will see a search bar. Just type in #kidmin

That’s it. That’s all there is to it. You’ll see a never ending list of tweets starting with the most current. Click on links to read posts, visit site or whatever they send you to. Experience and learn. Who knows, maybe you’ll decide at some point to interact.

You can also download the twitter app for iPhone or android. It’s free and you can search #kidmin there as well.

I’m always intrigued the origin of things. Why we say certain words or how names come about. What’s even more interesting is when you see the origin of something new right before your eyes. A handful of children’s pastors saw the very thing happen almost three years ago… the birth of “Kidmin.”

At this point, the term kidmin is still catching on, but I suspect that will change in the coming years and perhaps more people will refer to children’s ministry as kidmin as opposed to… well, children’s ministry.

For those of you who are new to this blog or the greater “kidmin” conversation, let me tell you how this whole thing got started.

I first became involved in children’s ministry as a four year old… back in 1981 and ever since then, I’ve been involved in the ministry either as a participant, a junior volunteer or as a ministry leader. From my perspective, ministry leaders began referring to children’s ministry as kid’s ministry about 5-10 years ago. It seems to be a more casual term, probably more appealing to the older kids in the ministry who prefer being called kids as opposed to dear little children. In the last 5-7 years, I met more and more people referring to themselves as kids pastors, referring to their children’s program as kid’s church and beginning to use the term “kids” in their ministry environment names.

Step forward to 2007… the birth of twitter. I knew one or two people on twitter in the early days, but it wasn’t until the winter/spring of 2008 that people in ministry really started to use twitter as a way of communicating. It was a great way to follow ministry leaders from all around the nation… and world.

Then something changed in February of 2009. For almost a year, hashtags were growing in popularity as a way of categorizing tweets. This allowed people to follow specific conversations, even among people they did not follow or know. I remember experiencing the superbowl on February 1st in a way that I never had before. I was supposed to go to a church party, but with a sick wife, I stayed home to enjoy the game. I ended up thoroughly enjoying the game through a fun conversation of dozens of ministry friends on twitter. It was more fun reading everyone’s color commentary of the game, commercials and half time show than just watching the game alone. The superbowl hashtag made following this conversation so easy.

The next day, @johnincolorado (John Mullis) sent me a message asking me if Children’s Ministry had a hashtag. He was one of the folks in the conversation during the superbowl. I was unaware of any exclusive hashtag, so I threw out the question on my blog here.

Be sure to read the comments. You’ll see the birth of kidmin there. Several suggestions were made such as kidsmin, cmin and even a simple CM. As the comments came in, kidmin seemed to stick. Interestingly, several other ministry leaders who didn’t necessarily comment on this post began adding the hashtag to their tweets and before the day was over, #kidmin had been adopted. Within weeks, we were referring to Children’s Ministry as kidmin as well. That’s how it all started. I must say though, I’d wish I could actually see the first tweet containing #kidmin, but twitter doesn’t make tweets available to search past a few weeks.

Since then, at least one book has been published using the term and even a conference. I remember Chris Jones saying that Group named the new conference Kidmin because, “That’s what you guys call children’s ministry now.”

So, there you have it. It was interesting to see this new terminology evolve and will be interesting to see how pervasive it becomes in the coming years.

Hey, don’t forget to help us celebrate kidmin’s third birthday. Go here for details.

Another year gone by already.

Last year I wrote this post a few days after the #kidmin twitter hashtag turned two. Apparently no one celebrated the first birthday either. What a shame.

So, being the infamous creator of #kidmin (I say this tongue in cheek only because I feel it was more of a group effort) I put this date on my calendar so that we won’t forget again. February 3rd. That means that this Friday, February 3rd… #Kidmin turns 3.

So, here’s how we celebrate. Sometime between now and February 3rd, write a post on your blog explaining how #kidmin has affected your life or ministry. (No, I’m not talking about kids ministry in general, but the twitter search term). Tell a story about someone you connected with, a blog post that revolutionized your ministry or the introduction of a new resource or event as a result of the #kidmin community on twitter. Once your post is live, link back to this post or even put a link in the comments. If you don’t have a blog, just write your story in the comments. On Friday, I’ll compose a post with links/portions of everyone’s tributes toward #kidmin celebrating the actual day.

No idea what I’m talking about? Never used twitter? Never searched #kidmin on twitter? Well, you’re in luck. This week I’ll be sharing more about the fusion of Children’s Ministry and Twitter into what we know today as #kidmin. Stay tuned!

Last night I had the opportunity to speak to the High School group here at Gateway. It was my second time ever to speak to High School students, my first time in about 9 years. It went well, despite my apprehension speaking to High School students. However, as I’ve been very involved in our student ministry this past year, I’ve been concerned about the lack of information that we have on our students. Last year as we needed to quickly promote our student ministry camp, I found that we literally had no contact information for our High School students. Since most of their parents don’t attend Gateway, we really had nothing.

This year I’ve been plotting ways that we can better care of these students even in an administrative context. How do we track their attendance and know how to get in touch with them when they’re here? I decided that last night while speaking to them, I’d try an experiment and see if I could start the process of collecting their information. First, I figured that if I had email addresses, cell numbers, schools and grades, that would be a great starting place. So I created a little game to play that also tied into what I spoke about… a texting trivia game. I had several iTunes gift cards and put up random trivia questions with a google voice number. The first person to text the answer to the number won a giftcard. It was fun and we had significant participation.

After the last question, I posed one more challenge. I explained that we wanted to better know who they were and how to contact them for things like camp and such. So, we asked them to text their first and last name, their email address, their school and grade the the same number. We said that we’d award iTunes cards to the 1st, 20th, 40th and 60th person to respond. Of the 70-80 people to attend, we capture this data on almost 60 of them. Because it all went to a Google Voice number, I could simple cut and paste the data to a spreadsheet. Later this week I’ll have a volunteer cut and paste the data to individual cells, probably only an hour or so of work.

So, if you ever need to collect a lot of data from a crowd in a short amount of time, consider using a Google Voice number and have people text in their responses. Participation is high and the work to get the data is easy.

If you came to this site yesterday, you noticed that it was intentionally down in protest of the two bills going before congress next week. You can read more about this stuff in a post I wrote yesterday. A lot of people participated yesterday and good stuff was done. Here’s an email I got yesterday from Fight For the Future.

Today was nuts, right?

Google launched a petition.  Wikipedia voted to shut itself off.  Senators’ websites went down just from the sheer surge of voters trying to write them.   NYC and SF geeks had protests that packed city blocks.

You made history today: nothing like this has ever happened before.  Tech companies and users teamed up.  Tens of millions of people who make the internet what it is joined together to defend their freedoms.  The free network defended itself.  Whatever you call it, the bottom line is clear: from today forward, it will be much harder to mess up the internet.

The really crazy part?  We might even win.

Approaching Monday’s crucial Senate vote there are now 35 Senators publicly opposing PIPA.  Last week there were 5.   And it just takes just 41 solid “no” votes to permanently stall PIPA (and SOPA) in the Senate.  What seemed like miles away a few weeks ago is now within reach.

But don’t trust predictions.  The forces behind SOPA & PIPA (mostly movie companies) can make small changes to these bills until they know they have the votes to pass.  Members of Congress know SOPA & PIPA are unpopular, but they don’t understand why–so they’re easily duped by superficial changes.  The Senate returns next week, and the next few days are critical.  Here are two things to think about:

1. Plan on calling your Senator every day next week.  Pick up the phone each morning and call your Senators’ offices, until they vote “no” on cloture.  If your site participated today, consider running a “Call the Senate” link all next week.

2. Tomorrow, drop in at your Senators’ district offices.  We don’t have a cool map widget to show you the offices nearest you (we’re too exhausted! any takers?).  So do it the old fashioned way: use Google, or the phonebook to find the address, and just walk in, say you oppose PIPA, and urge the Senator to vote “no” on cloture.  These drop-in visits make our spectacular online protests more tangible and credible.

That’s it for now. Be proud and stay on it!

–Holmes, Tiffiniy, and the whole Fight for the Future team.

___

P.S. Huge credit goes to participants in the 11/16 American Censorship Day protest: Mozilla, 4chan, BoingBoing, Tumblr, TGWTG, and thousands of others.  That’s what got this ball rolling!  Reddit, both the community and the team behind it, you’re amazing.  And of course, thanks to the Wikimedians whose patient and inexorable pursuit of the right answer brought them to take world-changing action. Thanks to David S, David K, Cory D, and E Stark for bold action at critical times.

P.P.S. If you haven’t already, show this video to as many people as you can. It works!http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa/

So, it’s not over yet. If you haven’t signed the petition yet, do it today!

I don’t really ever get political on this blog, but I guess when political issues intersect with the content/purpose of this blog, then I feel like I have something to say. Actually, I want to do more than just say something, but ask you to do something.

Next week, two bills go before congress that threaten the freedom we have enjoyed over the years on the web, putting the power to sensor in the hands of large corporations and the government. This is not good for our nation!

The Protect IP act goes before congress and the Stop Online Piracy Act goes before the house. I’m not going to go into detail on what both of these bills are about because so many others have explained it much better than I could.

Click here to read about these two bills in detail.

Click here to see an infographic that clearly describes both these bills.

These bills were written to stop piracy mainly distributed by foreign entities, but this bill really isn’t going to be able to stop piracy as there are already too many easy work arounds. But, it gives significant power to government and big media in hollywood to shut people down with little to no restraint. It’s an assault on our freedom and many have declared this bill unconstitutional. However, due to the power of lobbies, these bills have a lot of congressional support.

You can help though. Contact your representatives and let them know that you oppose these bills. This task has been made easy.

Click here to petition your representatives easily… you just provide your info and they’ll get your message to your representatives! This site also contains tools to help get the word out.

Click here to visit Google’s petition if you prefer.

Here’s a great video that will even better explain how all of this works.

I’m all for stoping piracy, but this is NOT the answer!

So, please take a moment to let your representatives know how you would like them to vote!

There’s probably no way I can write this post without coming across as a little bit of a jerk… so I apologize and the front end. This isn’t directed to any particular person… but just multiple encounters I seem to have on a weekly basis.

It seems that almost everyone has a smart phone today. That’s probably thanks to the iPhone where a very friendly mobile internet is available to all. With our phones, we have access to almost anything and everything. It’s an amazing time in which we live.

My pet peeve comes from when people with these amazing tools to access almost infinite knowledge ask me questions that no longer seem necessary any more. Obviously, if its something I should know that you don’t know, then ask me. But if it’s one of those things that very few people would know… then for goodness sake, look it up. Google it. Map it.

I know some people with a smart phone that rarely if ever have opened up google maps on their phone. Sometimes they ask me for directions and my response is almost always the same. Don’t you have google maps on that phone of yours? I get asked how to spell stuff all the time. I’m a horrible speller. I think people don’t realize how easy it is to look up a word, even on google. You could probably get the correct spelling faster than asking me, even if I was a good speller. Nine times out of ten, when someone asks me a question like this, I end up looking it up on google. Why? Because I have a smart phone with access to the internet.

Oh, so do you. You’re paying $30-40 a month to have google in your pocket… look it up.

Actually, my wife has gotten very good at this. We talk about all kinds of random topics every day. There was a time when the answer to 6 out of 10 questions she would ask me was “Google it.”

Now we’ll be talking about something random, like who won the oscar in 2003 for best actor and we’ll both reach for our phones at the same time and I’ll say, “Am I looking it up or are you?”

Sorry for being a jerk. If we’re going to talk, let’s talk. But if you just need answers to simple little questions, go talk to Google.

I love how you can highlight as you’re reading which allows me to boil down the most important parts of the book for later review. Unfortunately, Kindle has made it next to impossible to get these highlights and notes off the device, especially if you’re using the iPad. However, this weekend I came across some instructions on how to take my notes and highlights off the device and it works like a champ. The secret? Evernote.

I downloaded and used Evernote for a few months almost four years ago, but it just never caught on for me. However, in learning how to get my stuff off the Kindle, I think I fell in love with Evernote again.

I’m not going to walk you through the process step by step, but here is the link to Michael Hyatt’s blog where he describes how to do this in detail. Enjoy!

Noah’s Memory Match:

The story of Noah’s ark will be brought to life in your child’s imagination in Noah’s Memory Match. With five levels of difficulty and two games modes your child want to play again and again.

In addition to building memory skills, Noah’s Animal Match builds language skills with the ability to play in both English and Spanish. With high quality voice acting through the entire game, your child will learn the names of animals in both languages.

Features
- Play in English&  Spanish
- 5 Levels of Difficulty
- 2 Game Modes (Classic&  Time)
- Randomized Gameplay with 15 Animals
- Learn Animal Names in English&  Spanish
- Voice Acting Through The Entire Game

This was a first class game developed by Playpen Games, a group of dads who make family friendly games for iOS, Android and Nook Color. If you have a preschooler and one of these devices, you need to download the game. It’s only $.99 which is a fair price for this quality of a game. Titus and I played it at bedtime the day I downloaded it and he LOVED it and laughed and giggled the whole time at all the animals and noises.

Click here to get this game for your iOS device. Click here to visit Playpen Games and see their other games.

When Animoto frist came out, it was an intelligent and simple slideshow creator. You simply upload photos and music and it would create a randomly generated slideshow using amazing transitions that seem to just move with the music. Well, over the years they’ve made adjustments and you can also add video. So, you can turn photos and short video clips into an amazing presentation.

I use Animoto for every child dedication, for many of our baptisms, and promos for many of our events as well as for personal family slideshows and video clips. Below are several videos I’ve made so you can see for yourself.

The great part about Animoto is that it’s so inexpensive. For the dedications, I’ll pay an extra $5 to export the high rez video and it’s absolutely brilliant. Now you even have HD options, which I haven’t tried yet.

Bottom line. For a lot of your video stuff, you don’t need to spend hours learning how to use iMovie or other programs. You’ll save a lot of money… and a lot more time using Animoto to do what you need… and it will probably look better than anything you’ll put together yourself (unless you’re really good and have spent a lot of time learning the tools).

To check out and start using Animoto, click here!