A Little Nerd Fun ... and Perhaps a Good Tool

As you noticed in last week's bulletin, we have added a couple of "QR codes." QR codes are simply textual information encoded in a graphic form that certain devices, like smartphones, can use to decode back into the original textual information. For example, the following code can be read by smartphones to navigate the phone's browser to our church website:

We added two codes last week. The first is the one above, pointing to the church website. This is on the back of the bulletin and is mainly intended for visitors to be able to quickly get to our website to find out more about us.

The second code we added was to an online version of the sermon notes. That makes it possible to follow along with the sermon points and passages on your mobile phone, if you so choose. This will not become our only way of having notes - we will always have the insert for handwritten notes.

With the growing popularity of tablet computers, these notes could become even more useful than on smartphones.

These notes can also be used to follow along if listening to the sermon online sometime after the sermon was originally given. That helps those who couldn't attend a particular Sunday, people who live away from the area, or those who want to go over the sermon a second time.

We are still experimenting with the format of these notes, and we could use your feedback. Please let me know how the notes could be formatted better to assist (rather than distract from) the teaching.

At present, we don't have any way to take personal notes along with the given notes. We could get there technologically, but they would be quite difficult to manage with the small keyboards on smartphones. Tablets, however, might make it worth the effort. Again, we need your feedback on how to make these notes the most useful.

OK, so it's a little bit of geek fun, but there is real potential to use the technology in a positive way to enhance how we learn and apply God's Word.