Mobile

As a worship leader, over time, I’ve developed a great workflow using iPhone and iPad apps. What we are able do with apps as worship leaders today would have been unthinkable even five years ago. Tuners, metronomes, multitrack recording, service planning – all of it available literally in the palm of your hand thanks to your phone and some great developers.

From the early days of dial-up internet to the first cell phones commercially offered, communication methods and tools have drastically changed over the last twenty years. For churches, cumbersome analog systems (that’s fancy-talk for pen and paper) were the only option before personal and business computing emerged. Now

Church tech decisions can be overwhelming, and best practices can vary depending on church size, budget, and mission. Here are a few quick tips to get started.

A little after the New Year celebrations ended, I attended the Consumer Electronic Show (CES). This was my third time attending this annual trade show and exhibition, this time as an exhibitor with the Dutch company IamProgrez. Even though I was acting in a different role, I still came away with refreshing insights into the future several areas of consumer electronics. While there were no churches represented in any of the products or services I saw at the show, I did come away with some takeaways for those in the church tech space who deal with church and community technologies.

Whether you're a parent or you work in youth ministry, keeping kids safe while they use technology has become an increasingly large task to accomplish. From Xbox Live, to iPhones, to Animal Jam, to Facebook and Snapchat--the possibilities for a child under 18 to get themselves in trouble is relatively easy. That's why when I hear of software to help us parents and youth workers keep kids safe, I listen. KidGuard reached out to me to share their software options for monitoring kids on their devices and beyond. They also have a grant available for qualifying nonprofits through the end of 2016.

It's that time of year again where many of us will not only be giving gifts, but unwrapping a few of our own. And as with many of the last few years, some of these gifts will be of the connected variety. Connectivity is an amazing gift to give and receive during the holiday, however it's not one which comes without a few hiccups along the way.

We are less than five years from the next decade and everything that could be posed for technology's influence on the 2020s is fair game to be pitched. From driver-less automobiles, to Artificial Intelligence (AI) as school teachers, we tend to dream a lot bigger than what actually happens - while also underestimating what impacts smaller ripples might incur (this is similar to a Bill Gates quote).

As a mom of four school-aged kids between the ages of seven and thirteen, navigating and regulating screen time consumption at four different levels requires NASA-grade determination and persistence to say the least. Between the oldest who'd like to play 24 hours a day of XBox Live, to the youngest who'd like to watch SpongeBob from the moment she gets home from school until I pull the remote from her death grip, let's just say screen time is not my favorite thing to police. I know I'm not alone.