May 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 Communicate John Allan looks at the websites that will keep you in touch and save you time, whether it’s blogging your youth groups activities or making your PowerPoints more creative. Phew! It’s over. I’m writing this at the end of a crowded, hectic term in which I’ve been juggling dozens of balls simultaneously: youth group at church, three CU groups at school, Internet radio group, weekly youth prayer breakfasts, not to mention adult stuff too, and it has made one thing very clear to me again…Youth work is all about communication. When you’re trying to run so much programme that you don’t have time to communicate information to the people at the heart of it, or take time out just to hang about with them, you’re definitely doing too much. Your youth work is only as good as its quality of communication. So its vital that we tell people what we’re doing, give them plenty of warning of upcoming events, keep prayer partners in touch, and still find time to tune in sensitively to individuals. It all takes time. Fortunately, these days - you can do a bit of it electronically. For example, we had a school mission this term. I wanted to keep praying friends informed day by day. So nothing was easier than starting a temporary blog and typing in updates several times a day. I used blog.co.uk, which is very simple, but there are many other alternatives such as Posterous, where you don’t even have to sign up, but simply e-mail in anything you want to put online: photos, videos, text, even music files. Or there's Tumblr, which we’ve mentioned before - check out our Upper Fifth site for how you can use it to enhance teaching on any subject! Or my old worship one for ways of helping people enhance their quiet time with music! That site depends heavily on YouTube, and if you’re using the videos there, you may be interested in a whole range of tools that can make their stuff more useful to you. TubePopper is one, where you can personalize your movies of youth group events with captions, speech bubbles and the like. Or TubeChop, which allows you to share just the precise part of a video you need, without the boring two-minute preamble or the unfortunate obscene bit two minutes in. (Splicd does the same thing, so you can choose which method you find more convenient.) Subyo is another place where it’s even easier to add in subtitles (great for a music demo video where you want people to learn the words as they listen). Kicklight is even more versatile; allowing you to doctor video clips by adding subtitles, graphics and links to other sites. You can see the advantages create a five-minute teaching talk by pointing a video camera at yourself (or even a decent webcam), and then add value to the whole thing by using the subtitling to emphasise your main points or to include key quotations. Add diagrams as graphics to bring your teaching alive, and add links so that people can follow up your teaching by clicking on useful follow-up sites. Quick, easy... and brilliant communication. No wonder Overlay.tv has seized upon the same idea too, so look at them both and see which you prefer. But maybe communication online isn’t your problem, you just want to do brilliant presentations from your computer. Can’t afford PowerPoint? Or bored by the sameness of it all? MakeUseOf has a brilliant comparative chart of six different leading presentation packages (yes, they’re free) although I must admit one of them doesn’t seem to be working as I write. (They include Toufee, which helps you make fabulous Flash movie presentations from your own photos or YouTube clips, and upload them to a website or blog without breaking sweat.) If you want to stick with PowerPointnt, read Microsoft’s own article on creating better presentations. The twelve tips on offer generally make sense and contain helpful links to further training resources too. (But take them with a pinch of salt, since they also try to get you using PowerPoint as Microsoft thinks you should use it use master slides to save time – which is absolute and utter heresy in my opinion). You want some themes, templates and backgrounds for your presentations? About 20,000 would do you, and you want them all for free? Wow, you’re a tough customer, but fortunately I can help. Presentations ETC will keep even you busy for half an hour. And for a few minutes beyond that I may have mentioned him before, but PowerPoint guru Geetesh Bajaj has a massive template collection, growing by the month, at his ever-increasing Indezine site. Please, lets never use one of those tired Microsoft stock designs again. You have no excuses left. Communication - that’s what its all about. So lets do it well! John Allan is based at Belmont Chapel, Exeter, UK, and is a regular contributor to Youthwork magazine. Back to main page