TECHTALK: Distance biblestudy


This week has been a crazy one. Not only are we getting ready to have our girls retreat the week after we have our guys retreat, but we have to fit in 11 interviews for our summer interns in two weeks. On top of that we have a minister’s spiritual retreat and a discipleship retreat. WHOA-WA! But we all go through seasons like that when we feel the need…the need for speed. 🙂 (yes I’ve been watching some movies from the 90’s on the weekend) Or perhaps, we feel the need to be in four places at once. Well you can’t do that,but sometimes when you are trying to meet up with girls to plan bible studies and no one can be available at the same time for a physical meeting, you can try an alternative. I present to you Adobe Connect Web conferencing!

This Thursday, myself and 3 other girls all at different locations logged onto a customized weblink. Their video camera’s clicked on and because they aren’t exactly geeky techs like me, I used groupme to call them as a conference call and told them to turn off the volume on their computers. That way we had no echo. (If you don’t use headsets or a conference call, your program will pick up everyone’s microphones and it will echo the entire time and not allow for a meeting. Been there done that ) We met for 1.5 hours going over bible studies for Snowball. They loved it and so did I. They were still able to bethemselves on the webconference. For example, one of the girls was being cheeky and found out that when I was reading from my notes, I was not looking at them on camera. That’s when she proceeded to put a pen in her ear or be goofy. I finally realized that everytime I looked away, they would giggle. I soon found out why. Girls are girls even on web conferences. We had a great time and although it doesn’t been face-to-face, it’s a great alternative if you have to. I paid $14.99 for a month. I thought that was very reasonable.

I didn’t get to take screenshots of our meeting, but I’ll put some from the actual program. You can upload documents and girls can download from withinthe chat. You can create notes that everyone can edit. And you can share your screen with participants. If you needed to show a video or something, that would be very useful. In addition, everyone has a video pod so you can seeeveryone’s face. If you use it, let me know!