Presentation: Using Technology Effectively in a Bible Study
Last weekend, I was invited by Houston’s First Baptist Church to give a presentation on “Using Technology Effectively in a Bible Study” at their Midnight Madness event. This is an annual training event for leadership and is intended to equip Bible study leaders to be effective. There were lots of interesting sessions and if I wasn’t presenting I would have definitely wanted to attend a few sessions.
Preparing for this session was a good learning process. Although I already had a rough idea for some content, based on my own experience using technology in a Bible study, I needed to polish up some areas and dive in a bit deeper with researching tools and technologies. I found some interesting tools along the way and was able to frame the the session around answering the “how” and “why” questions. The attendees to my two sessions were varied in their experience and comfort level with using online technologies so I had to be accommodating to that. Overall, I am glad I volunteered to give the talk and am thankful for the opportunity to have served the church.
I decided to use Google Slides and a Chromecast for the presentation. One reason I thought the Chromecast would be good is because I wanted to demo a few apps on my Android smartphone throughout the presentation and switching between casting from my laptop for Google Slides and my Nexus 5 (Cast Screen) is seamless and clean. Something I found along the way was that I could open speaker notes when casting a Google Slides presentation which allowed me to see my notes, slides and a timer. This allowed me to have two “views” which I didn’t think was possible with Chromecast but it turns out to be perfect for a presentation.
I covered these areas of use for technology:
- Communication
- Sign-Up Tools
- Podcasts
- Websites
- Misc Tools
Here is my slide deck: