This Article is printed in the March 2011 edition of the Adventist Messenger.
In the last issue (click to view Five Free Online Tools for Ministry Part 1), I began sharing five extremely useful and powerful online tools that can help you more effectively manage your work, church, ministry and life in 2011. And, the best part about these online resources is that they are all absolutely free. In Part One of this article, I featured two of the five tools: Google Docs and Dropbox. Here are the remaining three: Facebook, Bible Gateway and Picnik.
Facebook:
I am confident that most of you have heard of the social networking website called Facebook (http://www.facebook.com). What you may not know is that as of February 2011, Facebook has approximately 600 million active users, more than 6 million page views per minute (37.4 trillion per year), 2.5 billion images uploaded every month, and 46.2 years of YouTube videos watched on Facebook each day.
Personally I am not a huge fan of a few things about Facebook, one being the many hours of time people waste on it. However, it is obvious that Facebook is very popular. And it does provide an excellent resource for connecting with people and sharing information online.
One of Facebook’s features is the ability to create “pages” and “groups”. In order to create a page or group, you first need to be a registered Facebook user.
The finer details of pages and groups are beyond the scope of this article, but I will say that they both provide the ability to connect, share and even collaborate on a topic or idea with other Facebook users. Overall each allow the administrator to send mass emails and publish news/information to it’s connected members. Groups provide a few options that pages don’t: event inbox messaging and the ability to restrict access.
By creating Facebook groups and pages, churches can do things like send out event reminders, share photos, present and answer questions about God, share related websites or video links, or respond to prayer requests, just to mention a few.
BibleGateway.com
BibleGateway.com (http://www.biblegateway.com) is currently owned by Zondervan and is a free online service for reading and researching Scripture.
Whether you want to look up a Bible passage, search a keyword or topic, Bible Gateway makes it easy and quick. With a searchable online Bible in over 100 versions and 50 languages, there are plenty of translations to choose from and compare. Also available online are multiple bible reading plans that send a daily email with a link to your daily Scripture reading, six English versions of the Bible in audio, Bible dictionaries and devotional content.
I use Bible Gateway to read and compare texts when preparing sermons or devotionals each week. Another thing I enjoy about Bible Gateway is the mobile Bible Gateway version which provides a mobile-friendly web experience on my iphone.
Picnik
A question that many people ask me is, “How do I crop and resize my photos for email?” Well, the first thing I ask in response is, “What operating system are you using?” Their answer to that question has a lot to do with my response.
On Microsoft Windows you could use ImageResizer or Paint, on Mac OS X, you could use Preview or iphoto. And of course there is the over priced and extremely complicated Adobe Photoshop.
Well, last on our list of great free online tools will solve the problem of image editing and what operating system you do or don’t have. Picnik (http://www.picnik.com) is a free online photo editing service purchased last year by Google. No registration or download is required to start using it. Picnik works through your computers web browser on any operating system (Mac, Windows, and Linux).
Picnik allows you to grab your photos from many online photo storage sites like Flickr and Facebook or upload directly from your computer. Once a photo is loaded into the online system, you can crop, resize, and rotate your photos in real-time. Also, fix blemishes and change colour with the help of special effects and advanced controls.
Picnik is a great service to resize photos for your church website or to do some touch-ups and adjustments for the church newsletter.
There are, of course, many other online tools that are both very useful and free. Don’t be afraid to explore them and discover how they might benefit you. And always be prepared that new, better resources may arise overnight and change how we do things hopefully with even greater efficiency and ease.
