Cathy Nelson’s Professional Thoughts

As I read through the twitter from last night around 11PM  through until 2PM today, I am shocked and dismayed that another tool has been discovered and shared, that of WIZIQ.  Several of my twitter friends have already played around and experienced it, and yes I did say “played.”  One of my virtual friends has even blogged today about her feeling of giddiness, and  asked that oh so difficult question–do our school kids leave learning with a feeling of giddiness?  All I could feel was “left behind…”  since I went to bed last night, and then all morning focused on my morning worship.  But wait!  I did have a  sense of giddiness this morning.  During worship too, no less.  You see we are going through a series  about how to deal with “hurts, habits, and hang ups,” and I feel blessed to have gotten such a good dose of spiritual  blessings from this message series. While I was serving myself up some “how to’s” from the message, I was hard at work serving in my ministry, which is the music and television production ministry.  There is a team of folks at my church, all volunteers, who  serve the ministry with operating cameras, running sound boards, operating light boards,  capturing audio & video to a computer,  running  PPTs  for worship songs, solos, and sermon notes, and MORE.  We have a quite a team who manage to get everything done with equipment that I sometime say is only working because of band aids and our labor of love.  Today I had to run  all the PPTS  (sermon notes and  music worship) and switch  screens from those notes to appropriate videos when they were called for.  My favorite part of it was my cues to run the videos, b/c Pastor Mike said, “Oh you’ll know when its time, b/c I’ll just walk off the pulpit.”  No sleeping during the sermon for me. 

But I along with my team I attacked the task with a giddyness that was infectious, as we laughed and learned while serving our ministry, our church, and ultimately our Lord. One flaw–I accidentally left the video on our center screen a fraction of a second too long…long enough for the audience to get a glimpse of a DVD menu screen.  OOOPS. My bad. But I know the video that will go to our local cable tv this week will be clean as a whistle and no flaws will show, as that little mess up can be edited right out of the video.

I wander if our students feel the same…will their one little mistake be covered before an audience (their parents, future employers) get the chance to see it?  Will what is presented (and all work is for some kind of presentation–there is a target audience somewhere) be something they can reflect back on and be proud, and be able to say next time I will do this (like time the video so I don’t play it so long we all get to see the menu screen.)  I liken that incident to letting my petticoat or pantylines show.  I gave away a secret of sorts…

Oh well, Pastor Mike assured us today that we did a phenomenal job, and we had four folks join the church today…one a brand new Christian.  Best, I can say I had something to do with it, even though it was JUST in the technical background that no one usually sees or notices.  But we are all supposed to use our gifts to further HIS word. (We had three short videos to play out today, and one solo/ensemble piece with a looping video to run  during their song.)  I had my work cut out for me. But it’s a labor of love, I promise.

So I’ll have to catch up with Wiziq tonight on EdTech Talk.  Or maybe my twitter friends will catch me up.  Either way, I am excited to play with this “new to me” tool too.