Tag: Technology

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Maryknoll Essay Contest Asks Students How to Spread the Gospel Digitally

iMission Logo
Maryknoll's iMission Logo

The Maryknoll Society wants students to think about how they would use social networking and digital media to spread the Good News. The theme of this year’s essay contest is “iMission,” and students in grades 6-12 could win up to $1000 by submitting a 500-750 word essay before December 1, 2010.

This is a great way for students to think about being witnesses to the message of Jesus Christ. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, instant messaging or texting, today’s digital media makes mass communication fast and easy. I’ll be interested in seeing how my eighth graders can take these tools and orient them toward spreading the gospel.

For more details about how to enter, see Maryknoll Essay Contest Rules.

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Bring Catholic TV News to Your Classroom

NewsbreakYou may be familiar with classroom news podcasts like CNN’s Student News, but what you might not realize is that the Archdiocese of Boston produces a similar show each week for Catholics called Newsbreak. Each episode is around five minutes long, a perfect length for showing to students in grades 6-12. New episodes air twice weekly, on Tuesdays and Fridays, providing Catholic teachers with an excellent way to help their students keep on top of what’s happening in the Church.

As the CatholicTV website explains,

Newsbreak is hosted by Kevin Nelson who researches and reports on Catholic news from all over the nation and the world. Videos are posted at CatholicTV.com each week and include video footage from Rome Reports, a news agency which specializes in coverage of the Pope and the Vatican.

News segments at CatholicTV.com focus on anything from violence in the Middle East, to charitable work, or even abortion. In its news pieces, CatholicTV also keeps viewers up to date on various calls to action from Catholic Bishops and the Pope through its privileged relationship with Centro Vaticano Television (CTV). CatholicTV receives video footage of Vatican and Papal events for Catholic Newsbreak from CTV.

Teachers can accesss Newsbreak in several ways:

  • The show can be watched in your web browser by visiting CatholicTV.com
  • Newsbreak is also available via video podcast through iTunes.
  • There’s even a CatholicTV iPhone app that brings the latest episodes right to your phone, iPod Touch or iPad.
  • Or, you can let Catholic School Chronicle make life easy for you. Just click on the “Launch the Player” button on the right sidebar of this page to bring up the CatholicTV video player, which gives you instant access to all of CatholicTV’s programming, including Newsbreak.

It’s extremely important that we Catholic educators keep up with current Catholic news. Ours is a living faith, not an ancient relic, and it is our responsibility to know what’s happening in Catholicism so we can share it with our students.

I like to make Friday’s Religion class come alive via multimedia, so I play the latest Newsbreak video, along with Lifeteen’s Sunday Sunday Sunday and Catholic Movie Review podcasts. Then we discuss some aspect of one or the other of the shows and connect it to whatever we’ve been studying in class that week.

I’d love to hear how you could use Newsbreak in your classroom. Why don’t you leave a comment below to share your ideas with other readers?

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Advice for Catholic School Web Site Design

Web IconAbout fourteen years ago, my eighth grade class and I created the first Catholic school website in our diocese. It was 1996, and I paid $50 for a web page editor and spent hours trying to make menu frames work while my students wrote content. We were very proud of that site, and of the fact that we were the first school with a web page. Never mind that it was hosted for free on a domain that had nothing to do with our school’s name, or that we didn’t know the first thing about web design; like so many other Catholic school endeavors, we worked with our limited resources to create the best product we could. That particular web site lasted for several years, until our development director took the burden of maintaining the site off of my shoulders.

Today, web sites are too important to schools to be designed by a geeky teacher and his students. Catholic schools hire professional web designers or rely on parent volunteers with web design experience. Enter Lance Johnson and Adam Fairholm, the creative minds behind Catholic School Web Design, a web site dedicated to bringing useful web design information to Catholic schools. Though it’s only been around for three months, CSWD has already produced over a dozen helpful articles for Catholic school webmasters, including the following:

If you’re a Catholic school administrator, development director or web designer, pay CSWD a visit and subscribe to the RSS feed. You can also follow them on Twitter, too.

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A Catholic Teacher Issues a Challenge

What is the biggest challenge you see facing Catholic education today? In the following interview excerpt, Alan Grant of Sts. Peter and Paul School in Lower Hutt, New Zealand, issues a call to active evangelization by Catholic schools:

Alan Grant

I guess the biggest challenge that I’d like to pose to those involved in Catholic schools in particular is we need to work out where the Church can find young people and connect with young people. Traditionally I think we’ve been quite lucky that people have come to the Church and the Church has therefore had that opportunity to connect; now, I think it’s more a case of the Church needing to find these young people and find ways to connect with them. I think young people have that desire still, I don’t think that’s changed, and obviously what the Catholic Church is and has to offer is as rich now and as needed now as it has ever been; but I think there’s less opportunity for connection now, and the Church, I think, has to take the initiative and make those connections. We need to take the Church and take it to young people, encourage young people and give young people opportunities to engage with the Church.

How can we as Catholic educators respond to that challenge? Are we making connections with our students? Are we reaching them where they are at? For instance, how many of our schools have a Facebook page? A Twitter account? Are we communicating via text messaging? These new technologies define the world in which our students live and breath each day.

I disagree with Grant that there’s less opportunity for connection now, but I think he’s dead on about the Church needing to be more proactive with young people. What do you think?

Here’s the full interview:

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St. Patrick’s Day Video Feature of the Week

St. Patrick
St. Patrick

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, this week’s video is a retelling of St. Patrick’s life from the adorable series Give Up Yer Aul Sins. Cathal Gaffney directed this short which takes recordings of school children telling Bible and saint stories and animates them in a documentary style. This one of the cutest films I’ve ever seen, and rightly deserved the Oscar nomination it received.

You might consider recording your own students telling stories of the saints and then setting their narrations to pictures using iMovie, Windows Movie Maker, or some other video editing software.

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Find Catholics on Twitter via Fr. Roderick

Fr. Roderick Vonhögen of SQPN fame has published a very comprehensive list of Catholics on Twitter. He’s divided the list into several categories:

  • Popes, bishops and dioceses
  • Priests
  • Deacons
  • Seminarians
  • Religious
  • Catholic Media Personalities
  • Podcasters
  • Catholic bands
  • Other Catholics
  • Resources
  • Organizations
  • Commercial
Fr. Roderick Vonhögen
Fr. Roderick Vonhögen

I’d love to help him add to his list by giving him links to all the Catholic teachers on Twitter. If you’re a Catholic teacher and you Tweet, leave a comment below with your Twitter name and I’ll send the list to Fr. Roderick.

You can find me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/nsenger. If you’re not on Twitter, and you don’t know what all the fuss is about, check out the video at the end of this article.

P.S. I was a bit chagrined to find that Fr. Roderick and I are using the same WordPress theme, but what can I say, I guess great minds think alike!

Twitter in Plain English

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o