You Can Do It Too!

It’s a gray, drizzly Saturday morning, but the children of the Danbury Connecticut Ward aren’t in their pajamas watching cartoons or playing video games. They’re busy making videos of their own. And their videos will help thousands of people learn about the Book of Mormon! It all started when their bishop had a great idea. Bishop Summerhays is a media expert who teaches children from many countries how to use technology to create positive messages. Why not teach the children in his ward the same thing? Now the children, joined by children from the Newtown Ward, are sitting at five long tables in the Primary room. Stacks of construction paper and poster board, pens, and scissors are on the tables. Each group will be making an animated video of a different Book of Mormon story:

Grant’s wife Augusta noted at the time, “I am glad that I live in this age when every day — almost every hour — brings us some new inventions.”

Sputnik, the first Earth-orbiting satellite launched by Russia in 1957, inspired the development of satellite networks positioned well above the earth. The first United States broadcast over Telstar 1 in 1962 featured clips from a baseball game in Chicago, a news conference by President John F. Kennedy and a concert from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. 

“We are not breathlessly smitten by the Internet, nor are we in any way underestimating its possibilities,” said Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, Church leader, in a 1997 speech. “We are just moving steadily, and we think wisely, to use it along with every other way we know to communicate with each other.” 

According to sociologist William F. Ogburn, the family – under the pressures of urbanization and industrialization – was stripped of many of its traditional functions until its only remaining functions were psychological: "to socialize children and to provide emotional sustenance and support for family members."