Using a Computer to Run your Children's Church Multi-Media
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Would you like to add more multi-media to your children's church without making it to technical or confusing for others to operate? I have begun using various multi-media items to add to our dramas, puppets skits and over all children's church lessons. My problem was by adding sound effects, theme songs, video clips, projected song lyrics and text my tech people could never keep up. They were constantly trying to find tracks on CDs, which were in various CD players, and then switching between DVD players, CD player, computers and VCRs to get everything visible out front. It wasn't a pretty picture. Then I realized that I could put everything inside a PowerPoint presentation. One presentation could allow me to layout and organize song lyrics, announcements, trivia questions, video clips, sound effects, lesson points and review questions. Now, all my tech guys had to do was follow the printed order and advance to the next Power Point slide. Have I mentioned my tech guys are mostly Jr. High or High Schoolers? If you play with any somewhat current version of Power Point (I'm using 2000) you will see that you can add video files, picture files, sound files and also create your own text pages. Here are a couple of tips to make your presentation more user friendly: 1. Make sure you have blank slides between your media elements. I usually have a black slide between each element. That way when your video clip is done, you can advance to a blank slide. Now, your next mouse click will pull up the next media element. 2. Make your video clips full screen. Stretch them out over the entire slide to make them appear full screen on your TV or projector. Also, you'll be prompted to tell Power Point if you want this clip to start automatically. Select YES. This will save your tech guy from wondering what's up with this blank slide. To use video in Power Point, all of your videos must be on your computer. If you make your own videos with a digital video camera you can pretty easily download the video to your computer. For older cameras and VCRs you'll need "RCA" type input connectors on your computer. These look like the connectors on the back of your VCR. You may have to add a graphic card with these inputs or better yet, find a tech nerd (that's me) at your church, he/she'll have exactly what you need and might do it all for you. 3. Give a brief explanation in the NOTES section at the bottom of each slide so your tech guy will know what's happening on that slide. 4. Label or title your slides by clicking next to the small slide that is numbered on the left side of the screen, while in the Outline view. Now type in a name for your slide. Then, at a glance they can see song names, video clips names, sound effects. Now, I rarely want others to see my labels, so highlight the text on your slide, which also shows up on the outline, and change the font color to white. You can still see the label on the outline view, but it blends in with my white background. To hide your label be sure the new font color matches your background color. Another option is moving the label to the back of your text or image boxes and thus hiding it from site. Here's a very basic sample slide show presentation. There are no files attached, just descriptions on where I would put them and how I layout my presentations. You can right-click and down load this presentation and see my notes and descriptions or just click on it and play it on the web and see the general layout. You will have to have Microsoft Power Point to view this. It's not rocket science, but it sure did make things easier for use. Especially because our tech guys don't see things until they arrive for children's church. Kidminister, 2005
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