Glo is the newest digital bible study tool from Zondervan. Glo is a inexpensive highly visual bible study tool for the masses. This tool does not have the depth of Greek / Hebrew tools, concordances, and commentaries that many preachers, teachers, and pastors want. However for the regular church member or small group leader this is a phenomenal resource.
The Spiritual Home Base and use of Lenses are brilliant breakthroughs for a digital tool.
The Spiritual Home Base tracks and reports your progress of what you have read, watched, experienced, as well as how much time you've spent in Glo.
The Lenses allow you do drill down in to content using a tagging system. Just think of this as very powerful topical and timeline search. To to BibleGlo.com to see more.
The only downfall I have seen with Glo is only avaliable on the Windows Operating Systems. And I'm waiting to see how well their share and socialize functions work. Haven't seen much in their tutorial and demos.
Coming in at a very modest price tag of $50, Glo is a great bible study software!
For those who don't know Logos Bible Software is the power house of Bible Software Packages. Although I have read many mixed reviews of the changes that have been made in version 4, Logos is still the most comprehensive and powerful software on the market. Logos has recently added a iPhone/iPod app. In a society that is on the go, it is very important to have access to your bible tools where ever you are.
The biggest downfall with Logos software is it's price tag. You are easily going to spend $1000 to get one of their robust packages.
During Christmas they are running a 25% discount code: DECKTHEHALLS
If you were thinking of purchasing Logos Bible Software, take advantage of this discount!
This week I'm going to feature some different bible study tools / packages. Before I do, what software packages are you use?
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This October, YouVersion Live will give you a brand new way to interact with live events like church services, conferences, and more. Want to know how you’ll be able to use it?
Join us for a live webinar: Wednesday, September 23 at 2:00-3:00 PM CDT at http://www.youversion.com/live
LifeChurch.tv Pastor, Innovation Leader Bobby Gruenewald and Digerati Pastor Terry Storch will guide you through YouVersion Live and show you how this free new tool can work in your environment.
• What will it look like to use this in a church service or other live experience?
• As a communicator, how can I use it to help people get more out of my message?
• How will people find a live experience?
• What will it take to set up an experience ahead of time?
• How likely is it that people around me will be able to use it?
Get answers to these questions and have a chance to ask your own during this free webinar. To join us, just go to http://www.youversion.com/live on Wednesday, September 23 at 2:00 CDT. Hope to see you there!
The YouVersion team
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So mark it on your calendars!
YouVersion Live looks amazing. Check out this ChurchCrunch Exclusive of YouVersion Live with Tony Steward.
YouVersion Live Exclusive from John on Vimeo.
I've seen some companies try to push this, but Granger Community Church is the first place I've seen adopt them.
Check out Tim Steven's and Mark Beeson's blog posts on why they added them.
I never have cash on me. If it wasn't for online giving with automatic withdraw, I'm not sure I would give on a regular basis. I know that's bad coming from a Pastor, but it's true.
Do you think online giving and giving kiosks detract from the worship aspect of giving/offering/tithing?
THE NINES - On 9/9/09 Leadership Network and Caltayst is having a conference from 9:09a CDT and will be approximately 9 hours. Each speaker will have 9mins to communicate one thing, idea or principle to you.
THE FORUM - presented by LifeChurch.tv, Southeastern University, and 316 Network on Sept 10-11th looks to be a very high quality, high impact leadership conference.
You will want to check both of these out, and why not, they are FREE!
Has your church?
If you need to fax a file or document and you don't have a fax machine. Check out faxZERO. It's Free!
Food Tidings is a perfect website for your church's food ministry. Set up a schedule for a new mother and let people sign up for the day they will cook for them. They can put what they are cooking that way people will not get the same meal twice.
Check it out!
I was a big support of jott when it came out [see previous posts]. However, they have slowly transition from having all of their features for free a year or so ago to offering no features for free today. Not smart...
So I have been looking for other free solutions and along came Dial2Do.
And it kicks the snot out of jott. Not only does it have all features that jott has, but it also can read your calendar, email, weather, news feeds to you. All commanded by your voice! Sick! And did I mention it's FREE!
Check it out.
Check out the second genereation of Kindle's over at PCWorld.
Amazon is now selling it.
I know I'm late in the game, but Google announced that Google Notebook will go away in the future.
I suggest using Evernote as a solution. Evernote is very easy to capture things off of the web and then add your ideas. You can journal and much much more. Also Evernote has an Google Notebook import for those who don't want to re-enter anything. Very cool! And it's free. (They have premium edition that gives you more features and better experience, but the free account is fine for basic capturing functions)
Here how Evernote works...
I believe it is very important in ministry to get your ideas out of your head and on to paper or a electronic document of some sort. So develop some system and stick to it!
Check out how simple it is...
... best of all, it's FREE!
Introducing ChurchMetrics from ChurchMetrics on Vimeo.
To get this to happen it's very important that your subject line is interesting and intriguing. EmailTrainer.com writes a great article on how to do this.
Here are his tips:
- Short phrases
- Immediate benefits
- Value words
- Emotional appeal
- Specific value propositions
My day job has undergone some significant changes, changes which have kicked into overdrive in the last two weeks. The biggest challenge is staying on top of all of the numerous little tasks that I'm juggling.
There are a few web-tools that we've written about before that deserve another nod for the role they're playing in helping me keep my head above water.
RTM is a to-do list program, but with all the bells and whistles you could hope for in a to-do list. Offline access via Google Gears, playing nicely with Blackberry, iPhone, Twitter, and others, and email access to add tasks, make this pretty handy. In addition to keeping current tasks in front of me, I'm also appreciating the ability to set a to-do for a few months from now and then forget it.
Sure, the usefullness of a to-do list program is not exclusive to RTM, but the accessibility (and paperlessness - have I mentioned that I hate paper?) continues to make this a favorite.
2. Google Calendar/iGoogle: A calendar is obviously critical. My calendar of choice is still Google Calendar. I keep my events in separate categories (separate "Calendars" in GCal) so I have some color-coding. This grouping also lets me publish select aspects of my calendar publically (embedded on a website), or share directly with colleagues and family.
I lump iGoogle in here because I can display my calendar, email, to-do list, and a few other goodies into a single dash board.
In the day-to-day busyness, my family is not getting the time it deserves. As a result, I'm guarding weekends, especially Saturdays. If you're busy - and if you're in ministry then you probably are - you owe it to your family and self to guard some time, defend it at all costs.. Take a Sabbath. If the weekend is the pennacle of your work week, guard some other time.
Image citation: blhphotography, “you are way too close” blhphotographys’s Photostream. 29 May 2007. 7 Sep 2008
Windows' users, check out Google's new web browser called 'Google Chrome'. They claim it's simpler and faster than other browsers. Like most Google stuff, it's FREE!
Let us know what you think!
Open It
Open IT Online allows you to open your documents and images online without the need of any software to be installed.
Open IT Online is easy to setup and allows to choose, among different online services, which one you want to use for each type of file supported.
Every time you will get the "Open with..." dialog within Firefox (i.e., after a click on a link to a document/spreadsheet/presentation), you will see the size of the file you are going to open and you will have the possibility to choose which online service to use.
