Tech Tips for Catholics

If you’re like me you probably have a hard time managing the barrage of information hurled at you via Twitter, Facebook, and every other web2.0 social media platform. And even though it’s estimated that we only use a small portion of our brain capacity, let’s face reality: there is just not enough brain cells to remember everything we want. So while there are lots of tools to help us keep a reference of things (Evernote, NoteScraps, spiral notebooks, stickies, etc.), I find that many people have a hard time keeping in their mind the things that really matter to them. As a Catholic, it’s important to me to leave at least a little bit of room in my brain for things related to my faith. That’s why I use Evernote as an external memory, which allows me to free up my memory for other things.

Still, I need some way to get all of the Catholic goodness into my brain. Let’s say I want to memorize scripture, or quotes from the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Or say I want to remember all the incredible things that Padre Pio said. The best way to remember something is by repetition (though language experts might disagree with that) and for repetition and memorization, the best tool possible is the old flash card. But since this is a tech site, let’s talk about a tech version of the flash card that can help all Catholic tech heads: FlashcardExchange.

FlashcardExchange.com boasts “over 400,000 people” that use their “web-based flashcard program to absorb information efficiently and permanently.” Users create sets of flash cards, tag them, and then make them available for others to use and download. There are literally thousands of flash card sets for just about every possible subject. There’s already a tag for Catholic card sets that lists nearly fifty flash decks. The quality of the lists will vary, but it’s very easy to create and share your own.

You can use these decks directly on their website in a study mode or you can download them directly to your iPhone or iPod Touch with the $4.99 (as of this writing) app called Mental Case. It will let you sync any deck in FlashcardExchange to your device. The service is free and very reliable. I have been using it for over a year to learn Spanish but it can certainly be used to beef up one’s Catholic knowledge.

Here are some ideas on how you could use FlashcardExchange:

• Memorize scriptures related to the defense of the Eucharist
• Memorize Catholic terminology
• Learn phrases of the Mass in Latin
• Memorize passages from the Catechism of the Catholic Church related to Catholic Social Teaching

Because you can create your own decks, the possibilities are endless. So get out there and start creating some Flash cards for your fellow Catholics. Remember to use the ‘catholic’ tag so they’re easy to find. Get studying today!