How awesome is this? LDSMediaTalk posted an article today about the a Scripture Sudoku puzzle in the New Era this month… guess what scripture it uses? Moses 1:39… awesome.

Technology makes it easy to generate these for all the scripture mastery verses, and although I don’t play Sudoku, I know it is great fun and many, many people do! It could be a good way for some students to learn the scripture mastery verses better! Nicely done!

This is the first in a series of posts about using web technologies to augment spiritual education. In this post I would like to being laying out the framework for why technology is so important in the church and how the Lord has been using it to further his work on the earth.

I believe, like Elder Ballard,¹ that God inspires man to invent tools that bring his work forward here on the earth. The Internet is one of the most powerful modern tools out there. I am excited about all that is going on with the web and believe it will continue to have a large impact on the world. More important than that though, I believe web technologies like all other media, are going to have a huge impact on people that will last through the eternities.

The Internet already effects every part of the mission of the church. For years the church has used computers to trance your ancestry. And now, with the rollout of the new family search site, families will be able to collaborate and work efficiently on family history like they never have before! In addition to this there are dozens of other services available on the web to help connect families with their ancestors.

As we look to preaching the Gospel, we need look no further than this month’s Ensign and numerous talks given by the Brethren as of late. Here is a great YouTube clip from Elder Ballard from last year encouraging us as members of the church to join the internet conversation.

There are also dozens of other ways technology is helping missionaries do their work better. I would love to write another series of articles just like this one focused on missionary work.

When it comes to perfecting the saints, there is even more than any other area. As you look at the way the church website has grown, and the ever increasing availability of the words of our leaders across the earth, and often in their own language, it is staggering. And then the tools that people are building to manage our lives and help us keep the things that are most important as a priority are amazing as well. The Perfect the Saints category of this webpage has dozens of examples of services (free in most cases).

The Church Educational System is no less progressive. They have been relentless in moving technology forward on their website. There is a plethura of information for teachers and administrators across the world. In the following essays I would like to explore how the web, and
applications that already exist can be integrated into these religious
classroom, both in institutes and seminaries across to world to
increase the effectivness bringing the gospel into the hearts of those that hear the gospel.

Footnotes:

1. “The Lord, over the centuries, has had a hand in inspiring people to invent tools that facilitate the spreading of the gospel. The Church has adopted and embraced those tools, including print, broadcast media, and the Internet.” [↩]

This is another great idea for keeping your personal history. Gmail has tons of space... and it's free. The search options can't be beat!

Blogger Rafe Needleman uses Gmail to record memories of his young son's life. With the hefty storage, easy accessibility and robust filter and search tools, it's a neat way to be able to quickly pull up that time when your little one met Santa Claus—or yanked your laptop off the table. Of course, with stuff this precious, it's always a good idea to back it up.  

A couple of weeks ago I came across a great new website from Doug Hatch called EQ Idea Exchange (EQIdeaExchange.com).  Doug is a Elder’s quorum president in Silicon Valley and has put together a lot of his resources that help him out in managing his quorum.  I was an Elder’s quorum president in a former life and I have to tell you the resources he has there are awesome!!  Here is the area’s. 

• Quorum Organization
• Presidency Meeting 
• Home Teaching
• Proclaim the Gospel
• Perfect the Saints
• Redeem the dead
• Activities and Service
• Quorum Meetings
• EQ Lessons
• PPI Interviews (This is VERY useful) 
• Visits
• Tools and Tricks
• Other

 

On the heels of yesterday’s post about older conference talk audio, I read this morning a post from LDSWeb guy that the Joseph Smith Manual has audio now for English, and has plans for 11 other languages. Awesome! This could be great for returned missionaries trying to keep up on their languages… or missionaries for that matter…

That reminds me… a couple of weeks ago, I saw that the church had posted the audio for preach my gospel as well… awesome! That means that people can listen to the lessons without a missionary. Might be a good starting place for someone who is not willing to meet with the missionaries quite yet.

I love listening to scriptures/lessons while I run. It is a great way to spend a little time pondering about the eternities!

I am a techie for most of the day, and I can tell you first hand the REAL pain that I have seen when people lose their data. There have long been some PC backup options out there, but today online backup startup Mozy released an automated backup solution for the Mac! Mac users worldwide rejoice!

Of course, any good service costs money, but this one is pretty good with an UNLIMITED plan for only $4.95/mo. I don’t know anyone that wouldn’t pay that to retrieve their pictures/video’s/documents/etc! Think of all that family history LOST!

At the end of last year I lost a hard drive with the first 6 years of our marriage on it… all the pictures… all the video’s… gone. I thought that because I was a techie, I could get them off… well, there was no retrieving this failure… learn from my example!

I highly recommend that you find a backup solution of some type of you don’t have one yet. They also offer the same for PC’s of course!

A post on the LDSTech Forum today suggested that we archive the talks from conference from pre-1997. That got me thinking. That in itself would really be awesome… but imagine if we could not only archive those but index them to point to specific spots in the audio with quotes about specific topics… especially oft quoted talks…

Keep an eye on that thread…

So I have long been in search of a program to mark up the web. I love to read online and have even gone as far as creating my own copy of the scriptures in a wiki form, but it never seems to get it all there for me. Well, Diigo get’s pretty close for me, and it has nice social features as well…

Scripture Study

Diigo allows has four basic functions that I think are useful in scripture study.

• Bookmarking
• Highlighting
• Commenting
• Tagging (for organizing your bookmarks and comments)

Social Features

Diigo also allows you to make your highlights/comments public. If you do, then anyone that goes to this page with the Diigo Toolbar installed will see your annotations and be able to comment on them.

In addition to this, you can also create public and private groups where you can collaborate on resources. This could be fun for a family to collaborate on a talk someone is preparing, or a class to work on a lesson. Because it is different some students (think seminary/institute) will be more apt to play with it. You could do a class project annotating resources from the church’s amazing resources! Here is a clip from this month’s First Presidency Message from President Monson:

In addition to this there is a nice dashboard that allows you to see new annotations in a group.

LDS Groups

I was suprised this morning when I couldn’t find any LDS groups to join… so I created one: LDS Study and Resources Group. Upon further analysis… it appears the search engine is broken. I still can’t find my group in search, or any other LDS groups… hmmm… Any other Diigo users out there? Come and join… perhaps we could make a LDS Tech group for technologies that we are working on. Good for commenting online with stuff… What do you think?

I am just touching on some of the functionality of Diigo… there is a lot of extra tools and widget’s. Good Web 2.0 technology! What other uses can you forsee?

This is GREAT!  He talks a bit about why we should use the internet to preach the gospel and the awesome new JesusChrist.lds.org website.

So couple of days ago I posted about a new Google Chat client that I have embedded on my blog.  First off, it has been great fun to interact with all sorts of people that I normally wouldn’t get the chance to chat with!  A lot of you just entered to see if worked, but never said anything.  But I did have some good conversations. 

This morning I received a chat invitation from a Philippe Dewost, a young guy from France, who was reading a popular post from from my Educational Technology blog from about a year ago: “8 Ways to use Camera Phones in Education.“  Philippe is a the guy behind, or at least a part of a cool program called Qipit that I thought might be of use to some of you out there. 

Functionality

Basically it allows users to take a pictures of notes/whiteboards/etc. and email them to a service that converts them over to PDF.  It actually works pretty good.  It takes out all the ugly from the picture and makes a pretty good copy of what ever you are seeing (but it does have to be large). 

Cons

• Multiple pages is somewhat hard.  You can do it by attaching multiple pictures to an e-mail, but that is difficult on a phone.  From what I can see there is no way to edit it once it has been sent and combine pictures together.
• 100 page limit… okay, this really probably isn’t an issue for most people, but there is a limit.
• Still new… there might be others…

Church Uses

For me the main use would be for seminary or Sunday School classes.  When I taught seminary I would often write/brainstorm on the board with the students.  I took pictures with my phone, but then I had to get them off.  This would allow me to send them to myself and even share them with those that weren’t there. 

Could be a good way to share a bit of Sunday School with someone that couldn’t make it to church…

What other uses can you think of?  There is a Facebook group devoted Qipit too…