Ruth+Manlandro+-+Essay

**//Organizing your RCIA Team with a WIKI//**
I have been involved in education and Catholic education for the past 10 years. During 2012 I was introduced to Digital Discipleship Boot Camp, which incorporates technology into your ministry. Being a technology teacher I was instantly intrigued. I approached this with wonder and awe as to utilizing technologies that I knew for regular classes and how I can utilize them with my current ministry work.

When working with the technologies presented I decided to do my capstone project on “Organizing your RCIA team with a WIKI.” I have used wiki’s for different topics but never for my ministry, RCIA. The idea was to do away with the numerous weekly emails of information and materials and have the items in one place. I am on the Cathedral Parish RCIA team and I work with a team that varies in age from 40’s to 70’s. The main means of communication was email from the team leader. The problem with this was that he didn’t send all the information to all team members.

Work began with the Director of Religious Education to develop the WIKI and items that would be on it. The items included: Google calendar of events, meetings, etc, Pages with information on the different stages of RCIA, and Page with a schedule of lessons, topics, and resources for Catechists. The WIKI was presented to the team on August 25th at the beginning of the year meeting. All team members were taught how to use and signed up as members and asked to navigate through the wiki for a look at the resources.

There has been one drawback to the WIKI and that is a few of the older Catechists are not open to using the WIKI for the information. Some of them prefer to continue using multiple emails to receive the information they need. Many of the Catechists have expressed an interest in one for the RCIA participants as way to disperse information and have more collaboration with the participants.

One of the interesting things about working with DDBC I have found the use of NETs for students and administrators. I have utilized these standards in a parochial classroom but did not think to apply them to my ministry. I now look at the NETs as a standard for technology utilization in my RCIA ministry.