Yesterday I gave a lesson in church. It was unlike any lesson I'd ever given. It wasn't groundbreaking; it wasn't controversial. It was basic, really. We showed teachers how to better utilize the technology that's available to us to help teach their students.
We talked about laptops, iPhones, and iPads.
Of course, all this isn't new--it's actually been around for a while. In our church we have a library that's stocked with materials--mostly the same materials that have been around for decades. I photographed a wall full of posters showing scenes from the Bible and other scriptures. Any lesson can be enhanced with a poster. The opposite wall contains VHS tapes. It's the late twentieth-century version of posters.
And we replaced almost everything in that library with an iPhone and a cable.
We demonstrated how to plug the cable into the TV and the phone then pulled up one of dozens (maybe hundreds...) of videos at our disposal. Every picture in the library is online and I'll bet every show in the VHS library is online, too.
I can't imagine how much it cost to stock the library and keep it current over the years. Ours is one of thousands of churches with the same library materials. It's got to be millions of dollars and cost the lives of millions of trees. Now with the internet, some cable, and some metal connections, those days are now gone.
As we taught the lesson, it hit me how things have changed in such a short period of time. I'd be a rich man if I could look into the future and see what the church library will look like in ten years. I'm sure it will require a lot fewer trees to stock it.
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