March 2009 Please note that some links may have expired due to the ever-changing nature of the Internet. Let us know if you find anything unexpected or offensive so we can remove or change a link. Youthwork magazine and CCP ltd are not responsible for the content of external sites accessed from youthwork.co.uk Making life easier The Internet is making certain jobs for youth workers a lot quicker - and a lot easier. This month, John Allan explores the web sites that will save you time and allow free up space in your calendar. It's eight in the morning and I'm in my school office, preparing for the weekly prayer breakfast. They'll all be here in a minute. I want some worship music playing in the background, but I don't have time to choose any. No problem – one click and the room fills with sound. Matt Redman, Hillsong and David Crowder. Perfect. What did I do? I just clicked on to Last.fm, selected ‘Worship radio’, and left it playing. And as I do so, it strikes me how much faster I can do these things now, than even a year ago. That's how the Internet should help youth workers: mopping up the background tasks to free us increasingly for the face-to-face job that youth work really is. So this month, let's begin with some websites that can make your tasks a little quicker. Noting things down, for a start – ideas, facts, dates, book titles, people, the whole jumble – reaches warp speed with Luminotes, an electronic notebook where you can link one note to many others and retrieve information in a split second. The method is simple; there's no learning curve. And 30mb of free storage means a lot of notes. We all use Wikipedia to find information quickly, but it gets even quicker with Visual Wikipedia, which adds videos, pictures, maps, charts and links to the encyclopaedia’s pages. It can save hours sifting through Google. (If you do want more, though, it helpfully provides instant links to search engine results. And there's a ‘mind map’ suggesting myriads of closely related subjects you could branch on to. If you're hunting for a topic for a school assembly, this can suggest creative possibilities you'd never have thought of.) Waiting for Powerpoint presentations to download can take years off your life. So PPT Minimizer – which cuts their size radically while preserving quality – is another sanity-preserving time-saver. And if the soundtrack isn't very audible, VLoud has just one purpose: ‘Make any song very, very, very loud.’ Instant volume without fiddling about, brilliant! You want to rip a DVD in one click? Just as easy – first search your conscience and ensure it's legal, then click on bitRipper, and job done. Oh, that school assembly. You want to show a chart showing the distribution of Christians around the world? Then turn it into a bar chart? Then show how the church has grown since Pentecost? Then compare the number of Christians in Africa to the number in America? It could take you months to do the fancy graphics. Or, alternatively, you could create an instant database of the information at Dabble, and then do each of those things with just one click. Like many youth workers, you may have a blog. Wouldn't it be great if you could update it by voice, text or video, straight from your mobile phone? And update Facebook , Twitter and MySpace simultaneously? Well, you can with Utterz. Mind you, Facebook is a slower way of staying in touch with your group members than Blinko, which allows you to do Facebook-type things through your mobile. (Oh, and from your computer, they let you send 30 free texts each day.) With all this suddenly released spare time, you might want to learn a striking new skill to stun and amaze your teenage flock. How about pen spinning – big in Japan (where you can even buy specially designed pens to do tricks), and immediately absorbing to kids, but generally unknown here? There are YouTube videos to get you started; but the greatest source of help, inspiration and advice is the Universal Pen Spinning Board, with its forums for ‘Fundamental Tricks’ ‘Advanced Tricks’ and even ‘Philosophy of Pen-Spinning’. (‘Why does one spin a pen?’ they ask plaintively. ‘Does a pen even exist?’) If you need a gimmick to create instant interest, there you go. Or you could try the more established route of magic and conjuring. It's suddenly become much easier to learn, thanks to the growth of networks, forums and bulletin boards across the Web, connecting experts and newbies, amateurs and professionals. Two of the best are the international Magic Café (with a flourishing forum for Christian magicians) and the British one, Talk Magic, where you can source rare props and tricks which can be bought, borrowed or traded in the UK. Again, you'll find quite a few Christians there (although there's a strong atheist lobby too!). So there we are – prayer breakfast all ready, music happily playing away, youth work ready to start. Now if I can just find a Web app to make the coffee and butter the toast, I'm sorted. John Allan is based at Belmont Chapel, Exeter, UK, and is a regular contributor to Youthwork magazine. Back to main page