Chris Betcher

Time magazine recently announced that the person of the year for 2006 is in fact... me! And you. And all those other bloggers, podcasters, and users of the ever expanding range of Web2.0 tools. Apparently, Time magazine thinks we are having such an impact on the world that we have been collectively recognised as "Person" of the Year. Thank you, thank you very much. When Time produced this issue , they wanted to have a mirror on the cover to reflect back the image of the person holding it. To this end they had a supplier in Minnesota provide them with nearly 7,000,000 pieces of reflective Mylar to stick on the cover. That's a lot of Mylar! (Ironically, the people about whom the article was written are probably more likely to read it online anyway.) Of course, if you happen to own an iSight-enabled Mac, not only do you have obviously better taste than your Windows-toting brethren, but you can take advantage of a very neat little trick that only iSight enabled Macs ca...

This cracked me up. And reminded me yet again of how lucky I am to be a Mac user... If you have eyes like mine, click to enlarge.

Well. It seems I've been tagged! A friend and fellow edublogger from Montreal, Sharon Peters , tagged me as part of a little game where she was tagged by another edublogger, Chris Harbeck who in turn was tagged by Karl Fisch , who in turn... well you get the idea. The game is to tag five people in the blogosphere, get them to share five little-known facts about themselves, and then pass it on to five other bloggers to do the same. Of course I wouldn't normally condone these online pyramid schemes, but this is different since it's obviously designed to spread only within the educational blogosphere and - importantly - to get people used to the idea of tagging their posts! In that sense, it's a great idea as so many people are completely clueless when it comes to using tags. So, here are five things that you may not have known about me... Number 1 - I am clueless when it comes to using tags. That's right. Clueless. Oh, I understand the concept of tagging, and I ...

I'm a Porsche 911! You have a classic style, but you're up-to-date with the latest technology. You're ambitious, competitive, and you love to win. Performance, precision, and prestige - you're one of the elite,and you know it. Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz. Thanks Simon for putting me onto this.

I've been reading Thomas Friedman's book "The World Is Flat" and have been finding it a compelling and interesting read. I think he has really clearly identified and explained the trends and convergences that have brought us to what is arguably one of the most important inflexion points in world history. If you get a chance to read the book I suggest you do so. In the meantime, you might like to have a look at this video ( http://mitworld.mit.edu/play/264/ ) of Friedman giving a speech to a group of students and staff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In this talk he gives an excellent overview of the book and explains some of its key ideas. The speech lasts about 75 minutes in total and its the sort of thing you need to really sit and watch in its entirety, but well worth it. Maybe watch it instead of TV one night...

There's a lot of talk in the music industry about how to protect music from copyright infringement and illegal use. Record companies as a whole were fairly slow to give in to the whole music download idea because they see it as a threat to their empires... for years the record companies had an exclusive stronghold on the production and distribution of music. As the world has gotten flatter and the gap between an idea in a musician's head and the release of that musical idea to a waiting public has gotten smaller, cheaper and easier, the role of the record company has shrunk in importance. So as we've witnessed the rise of digital music across the Internet, we've also seen the record companies fight tooth and nail to hang on their ivory towers. They've used their legal muscle to crush filesharing services like Napster and Morpheus, while others such as Limewire have so far somehow managed to avoid being taken down. The reasoning goes that if people are allowed to...

In the cult classic radio play, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams talked about a fictitious technology company called the Sirius Cybernetics Coorporation, a company who products were so bad that… "O ne is blinded to the fundamental uselessness of their products by the sense of achievement one feels in getting them to work at all. In other words, their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws. " Does that sound familiar?  Ever tried to do battle with a substandard software application?  Or a fundamentally flawed Operating System? Or some new gadget that was designed by geeky engineers but is incomprehensibly difficult to operate for the average user?  And yet why do we just accept these devices and this software? …"One is blinded to the fundamental uselessness of their products by the sense of achievement one feels in getting them to work at all".  Such a poignant statement! By the way, it's quite astoun...

In 1976, when I was a school student in Grade 8, we had a wonderful science teacher who had a part-time job at night running the mainframes at Macquarie University. He managed to obtain an old Fortran punchcard machine that he brought to school and taught us to program with, and every day he would take our punched cards to the university with him and run our simulations late at night (Remember how much money computer time used to cost back then?) As a science project, our whole class walked up the nearest busy traffic light near the school and we counted cars as they went through all the various possible turn options at the intersection. We took all this raw data back to school, punched it onto the Fortran cards to adjust the timing of the lights to make them more efficient. Each day our teacher would come back to class with reams and reams of dot-matrix computer printouts showing graphs of the traffic flow numbers. We would get our groups' printout, analyse it, work out ways to im...

PowerPoint cops a lot of flak sometimes. People often use it in a way that is overdone, hackneyed, clichéd, uncreative and just plain boring. You'll often hear the phrase "death by PowerPoint", as presenters try to wear you down with slide after boring slide of bulleted points and flying text effects. Although PowerPoint is still seen by some teachers as a useful tool for education, it's relevance in a Web 2.0 world seems to be on the decline and I've heard a number of disparaging comments about poor old PowerPoint recently suggesting that it's time in the educational sun is well and truly over. I can understand why any teacher who has been teaching with with technology for a while might be sick of PowerPoint. They've no doubt sat through dozens, even hundreds, of PowerPoint presentations over the years. Many of these have been peppered with flying text that swoops across the page letter by letter while making swooshing sounds, or seeing slides that r...

Back in the day, when data projectors were still somewhat of a novelty, it was probably acceptable to be a little unsure of how to set one up.  But these days we are finding them in great demand and although our school techs are still willing to come set it up for teachers if they ask, I think there ought to come a point when we learn to do these things for ourselves.  I mean, you don't ask a tech to come set up an regular overheap projector for you, or a TV and DVD player, so why would a data projector be any different?  As our classrooms start to depend more and more on a range of "devices", surely we need to know how to use them for ourselves? Anyway, In an attempt to ease the way (and more-or-less gently drop the hint that it's about time some of you figured out how to do this stuff for yourselves) I made this little video that explains the step-by-step process of using a data projector the right way.  After adding it to our intranet, I had a copy just sitting on...

Dear Mr Gates, Is it OK if I call you Bill? I feel like I know you so well, I've been using your company's products for so many years now. I can't say that I was there from the beginning, but I did start using Windows way back at version 3.0. (I'm told that's probably a good thing, since Windows 1.0 and 2.0 were a bit of a joke apparently.) But since Windows 3.0 I've been right there with you man! I went through Windows 3.1, then WfW (remember that one? OMG, what were you thinking?) Windows 95 came along at about the same time as my daughter was born, in fact the hospital where she was born gave away a free copy of Windows 95 to every child born that special August day when you went on stage to the sound of the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up"! My daughter was born a few days too early and I missed out (I've not forgiven her for that yet Bill) but hey, what a brilliant piece of marketing! And not at all tacky, like some people said it w...

Ah, I love this stuff... Edublogs just keeps getting better and better, thanks to the efforts of James Farmer. First we had a server upgrade a few weeks back and we got all sorts of extra goodies included for adding media files to posts - stuff like Youtube, Flash, Flickr and even video players. We also got a bunch of cool extras like the synthetic voice podcasting plugin from Talkr, and a new backend interface with many more options. The static pages can now be nested to form a hierarchical site structure as well as the regular blog structure, which could be very useful. Then 2 weeks ago James added a bunch of new CSS templates to the list of possible look'n'feel options, all with much tighter integration for the new plugins. Now, I log on to find yet more new goodies in here... a poll option! I've been having a play with the poll tool - appropriately called Democracy - and as you can see on the left, it works just fine. It's a pretty naff question right now, but ...

I'm sitting at the official Toronto launch of Windows Vista, the theme of which is "A Brand New Day". If ever I saw someone totally miss the point of what technology means for education, it's the guy speaking right now from the Toronto District School Board, Jey Jamarararmasomething. When asked what he thought was the best things about Window Vista, and what he thought were the most important new features of Vista, he said that it will help manage the students who bring USB keys between home and school, and it will engage them in learning better because they seem to like the "wow factor" of the new interface. Now there's a couple of great educationally sound reasons for implementing new technology... not! Where was the conversation about enabling a more connected learning environment? Where was the talk about enabling deeper, better quality learning through the use of technology? We then had a guy from Microsoft showing a demo of Vista, and we got ...

I've just spent the last little while playing with some of the new themes that Edublogs has just installed, and there are some very interesting ones in there.  Some are very minimal and others are just way over the top, but it's good to have a few extra choices.  I especially like the way that most of the new ones seem to have a range of options for customisation of fonts, colours and page width.  I'm a big fan of simplicity - hence the previous theme I'd been using - but there were times when even I thought it looked just a bit too spartan in its design. One of the blog template design trends that I don't like is narrow text columns.  I've always preferred text width to be specified in terms of percentage not pixels, allowing the window size to scale gracefully.  Many templates still use pixel-based width definitions, so narrowing the options down to those that scale nicely was pretty easy.  Then I looked at the options for each template, played with the variou...

This is pretty cool. Go visit www.geogreeting.com and type in a phrase or word... it then spells out the phrase using letters made of satellite-imaged buildings that are shaped like the letters. Spell with Flickr does a similar thing, but made up of letters found in Flickr photographs. Nice. Thanks to Judy 'Connell for putting me onto this.

In a recent speech delivered by Senator Helen Coonan, I was impressed by some of what she said about the changing nature of the world. Coonan is Australia's Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (yeah, we like to give 'em broad portfolios down in Australia) Her speech was entitled "An Integration Plan for Digital Migrants", and although there didn't seem to to be a lot of action points for a "plan" as such, I found it an interesting speech. Of course, a lot of her talk will sound quite familiar to many of us who live in the educational blogosphere, but it's good (and unfortunately somewhat unusual) to hear insights like these coming from the political world. Among other things, Coonan said... Digital immigrants are, on the whole, outpaced by the hoards of digital natives who do not see technology as technology but as an appendage. It’s not technology to the teens – it’s routine, it’s run-of-the-mill, it’s life. They don’...

There was a time, not so long ago, when it was simply uneconomical to think in terms of small production runs. Indeed, the term "economy-of-scale" alludes to the notion that it's cheaper to produce a lot of something because the price per unit is reduced the more you produce. This economy-of-scale idea has been especially true in the printing business, where most of overall price for printing something was tied up in the initial setup costs of creating the artwork, producing the plates and setting the presses up for the print run. Of course it doesn't just apply to the printing process... cars, furniture, food and most other things are cheaper to produce (per unit) if you make a lot of them, but the printing industry is a great example. When I was at art school in the 80s, I did a lot of screen printing, and this was again a classic example of the way scale affected production cost. About 97% of the time and money required to produce a screened image was consumed ...

I have a great deal of respect for Steve Jobs. As one of the founders of Apple Computer, Next Computer and Pixar Studios, I think he's a pretty amazing guy and his impact on the world via his contributions to the computer industry are huge. If you're interested to hear what advice a guy like Steve Jobs might give a young school leaver when it comes to life and success, then you might enjoy watching this video of Steve giving the commencement speech at Stanford University last year. In it he offers his thoughts about what matters most in life and what success really means. [youtube]D1R-jKKp3NA[/youtube] What I thought was interesting is that he was not saying the things that "the system" promotes, namely go to school, get a good education, get a good job and work hard for the rest of your life. Instead he talks about diversity of learning experiences - connecting the dots, as he calls it - and how learning should be for life, in areas that fascinate you, about thing...

This just made me laugh...

A mate put me onto the great mashup of GWB doing U2... very clever I thought... [youtube]4kKN92DASn0[/youtube] Thanks for pointing me to it Simon.

I admit it. I'm terrible at staying focused. Especially when you put me in front of a computer, I find it easy to get distracted by the million and one things that can distract a computer user... emails coming in constantly, IM messages bleeping at me every few minutes, RSS feeds constantly updating and all the other services that tend to bombard one with "stuff". Sometimes, especially when I need to write, it would be good to just shut it all out for a while and resist the temptation to answer that email, respond to that IM or browse that RSS feed. I suppose I COULD try to use a bit of self discipline and just ignore these things, but where's the fun in that? I COULD turn off all that stuff and just shut it out, but it's too tempting to need a distraction from what I should be doing... and that's the problem in the first place. So I thought this piece of software looked interesting... it's called WriteRoom , and basically turns your fandangled, geewhi...

Ah, parent-teacher night. That wonderful night that comes around every so often where you get to meet all the parents of all the kids you really don't need to see. You know, the kid who's getting straight As, has an 85+ average, always does their homework, works well and contributes to everything, and their parents always turn up to the interview asking "So, how's he doing?" Of course the kids who are nearly failing the course, the ones with 15 absent days and who never handed in that last assessment task... how come the parents of those kids never seem to turn up? If I was a cynic I'd think there might be some sort of correlation between the two. I'm sitting here at parent-teacher night right now. Alone. Next appointment not for another 25 minutes. I mean, I'm not a Math or English teacher. Fortunately I'm getting a wifi signal, so I thought I'd drop a quick blog post on here... But what jumped out at me the most during the report wr...

Just lately I've noticed that I seem to be coming up with workarounds for problems, just so I can get my job done. In the past few days I've had to rethink a lesson because the school network won't support a particular action, or I've had to switch plans midstream because the software I'd been planning to use does not run properly, or I've had to change my original idea for a lesson because there is no power outlet where I need it, or I've had to modify an assessment task because the tools that I have been promised are not available... and the list goes on. I've had conversations recently with other teachers who tell me that they cannot do things with their classes because their school system has filters that prohibit them from using certain software or accessing certain sites. These teachers are "making do" with less than they'd like because "the system" is not able to provide what they need. It's occurred to me how much of...

Following on from the success of the "When Night Falls" Skypecast that concluded the recent K12 Online Conference, I offered to run a similar Skypecast for members of the Australian OzTeachers group. If you have an interest in education, you might like to drop in to say g'day. It starts at 10:00am Saturday morning (AEST), or 6:00pm Friday evening (US EST). You'll have to do the math for other timezones. https://skypecasts.skype.com/skypecasts/skypecast/detailed.html?id_talk=52950 Update:  It was quite a success and about 30 people showed up.  Keep your eye out for the next one, which we will do as a conference rather than a Skypecast I think...

I bit the bullet and bought an extra Gb of RAM for my Macbook Pro yesterday, bringing it up to its maximum memory capacity of 2Gb. It's a pretty fast laptop anyway, but I was finding that when I had a lot of big programs open, and particularly when I was running Windows using Parallels, it would occasionally have a bit of lag when switching between running apps. Not any more... The extra gig makes a big difference to the way that non-Universal apps run. Apparently there is a fair bit of memory overhead required for Rosetta (Apple's built-in emulation layer that enables applications written for the PowerPC chip to run on the new Intel-based Macs), and even with the Macbook Pro's standard gigabyte of RAM it works the machine hard to run Rosetta apps such as Office and Photoshop. For anyone using a new Macbook or Macbook Pro, I'd suggest seriously thinking about adding that extra gig. I'd say it's definitely worth it, although you ought to shop around as the af...

Kudos to James Farmer, who runs the Edublogs service. He has outdone himself. The server was upgraded last week and the new functionality is fabulous. We can now easily embed Flash, Director, YouTube, Google Video, and iFilm files directly into blog posts, which is a greatly appreciated feature. As well as that, he has installed additional Wordpress plug-ins which enable us to do a heap of cool stuff, like the "listen to podcast" option through Talkr, and a link to easily add photos directly from your Flickr account, like so. Thanks James for continuing to make Edublogs (and I'm hoping Learnerblogs too!) better all the time. By the way, all this funky Web 2.0 spelling of words like Flickr, Talkr, Frappr, etc is making me wonder if I should start spelling my own last name as Betchr?

Even though I'm just outside Toronto, Canada, I just a fun little chat with a Year 7 class at a school in country Victoria, Australia. Anne Baird is a teacher from this Victorian school. Anne and I have been exchanging a few emails and Skype calls recently to share some blog and wiki ideas. Anne noticed I was online and buzzed me to ask if I'd like to talk to her Year 7 kids. I said yes, and the rest was easy. From my place in Canada, she was able to have my voice and video image magically appear on the board in a little school in country Victoria, and then Ms Baird and her kids were able to chat to me about life in Canada. We spoke for about 25 minutes, and the kids asked me a bunch of questions about Canada, what it was like, the weather, the food, the people, and so on. Then my daughter - who is in Year 6 here in Canada walked past the computer so I put her on for a chat. Kate told them about school here, what it was like to live in a different country and so on... Her...

We had a staff meeting yesterday and I couldn't get over how much of it was just "administrivia"... Stuff that could have been just as easily done using email. You know the sort of thing... "this event is taking pace at such and such a time. That event requires people to do XYZ. The deadline for so and so is on some particular date..." I was trying to figure out why we bother holding meetings to tell people stuff that could be done so much more effectively and efficiently using email or other electronic means. Then they have it in writing. They can refer to it at anytime. And we don't waste an hour waffling on about this stuff when we could actually be doing something constructive. For a few brief minutes a colleague gave an excellent SMARTBoard demonstration and the rest of the staff were actually engaged and interested. Then it was back to the usual stuff that goes on in most staff meetings in most schools I've ever worked in. Dates, events, bla...

Here's a link to another fine post by Will Richardson from his Weblogg-ed blog. I feel the same frustrations that Will is talking about, and I think he raises some excellent thought-provoking points. I find it interesting that Will's post arrived in my feedreader at about the same time that I received this beautifully written post by one of my students on her class blog. I asked the kids to write me a short piece on the topic of Communication... I told them they could interpret that pretty much any way they liked, I was just interested to see what they might come up with. I was blown away when I read Michelle's post. I'd encourage you to take a moment to read it, and please, if you can, leave her a comment.

I made a little video the other day. It was just a simple time lapse movie of my students carving a pumpkin for Halloween. Nothing really tricky. You can see it here if you like... [youtube]Lbl9U_Jm-Yo[/youtube] What's interesting to me about it however, is the speed and simplicity with which I was able to publish it to the web. I've put plenty of stuff online before, including videos, but it always involved creating an html page, embedding the video using code, uploading to a server using FTP, yaddah, yaddah... the process usually took a fair bit of time, some specialised software, a place to upload to, having the correct ports open on the network, lots of messing around, and a hat with a propeller on top. Thanks to Web 2.o technologies I was able to upload the video directly to YouTube, which took care of all the compression, rendering, hosting and other technogeek stuff, and it was online within minutes. I then posted a link to it to the class blog so the students cou...

I was exchanging a few emails with a colleague the other day, and he proposed an interesting question... "...imagine that when you go to your school tomorrow, somehow all curriculum (not admin) computers, peripherals and multimedia devices had disappeared - vaporised! Could quality teaching and learning still occur in your classroom? If not, specifically why not? I have heard it said a lot (that we need some serious changes in education) and it never fails to be a crowd pleaser and draw an enthusiastic response. But do we really? Is a good teacher in 2006 really that different a species to a good teacher from 20 years ago? Or 30, or 40 or 50 years ago?" Interesting question. I recall Seymour Papert proposing a similar question in one of his books, where he suggested that if you had a time machine whereby you could go back to the late 1800s, pick up a teacher, a doctor and an engineer and bring them back to the 21st century, how well could they function? Papert sugges...

A teaching colleague in Australia asked a question on a mailing list the other day about ways to incorporate ICT into the teaching of literacy and numeracy for her students. She received a rather sensible suggestion (from a teacher/librarian) that her own school's teacher/librarian should be able to help her with such a request. That seems sensible... after all aren't librarians supposed to be trained in the use of literacy resources? Don't librarians deal with information-based resources on a daily basis? And don't most of our information-based resources come in a digital format these days? Logically then, wouldn't a librarian be the best person to speak to if one wanted to some assistance with the use of ICT for assisting literacy? So the suggestion was made. "Ask your friendly teacher/librarian. They should be able to help you." The answer came back... "Our teacher/librarian is not really into ICT" "Not really into ICT?" Sorr...

One of the interesting concepts I've read about is The Long Tail . It's a phenomonon I'd noticed and had kinda thought about but had never really heard it explained in such an obvious way. The term was coined by Chris Anderson from Wired magazine. One of the interpretations of the Long Tail basically refers to the notion that if lots of people are able to publish content to a small specialised audience that is so niche and so targeted then the collective sum of all these small publications will start to eat into the audience share of the mainstream media publications. If you map this phenomenon as a graph of the popularity of various publications versus the number of actual publications, then the graph looks like the diagram here... a chart that has a small number of publications with relatively high levels of popularity on the left, and a large number of publications with low levels of popularity as you move to the left... giving the shape of the "long tail". ...

Flash is an amazing authoring environment, able to combine both artistic creativity and sophisticated mathematical programming skills. At it simplest, Flash let you draw stuff using a rather clever use of vector graphics that can scale gracefully to any resolution, and it also has incredible depth that lets those wanted to challenge their skills to explore the world of Actionscripting to bring high levels of interactivity to the objects it creates. One great example of this dual personality that Flash has is shown in this amazing animated page I discovered while browsing Michael Cridland's class blog site . Check it out... sure, it's purely entertainment value but it's very cool. Of course, for a more corporate use of Flash, you can't go past Inside the House , a wonderful virtual tour of the Sydney Opera House. Although this site has been around for a few years now, I think it's a good use of Flash that goes beyond just using Flash for entertainment value and ...

This is pretty cool. Jump over to MyHeritage.com and you can submit a photo of your face and have their system try to run a facial features analysis to find other people who look like you. I'm not sure exactly how accurate it is, but it's a lot of fun. Thanks to Samanatha and Lauren in my Grade 10 class for the heads-up about this. I wasn't too sure how accurate these were... So I tried again...

This ad for Sony is pretty amazing. here . What I thought was most amazing is that those balls are real... not computer generated. You can watch the "making of" video at their website. Pretty cool!

I was a bit horrified at a message I received through my school email account today. It was an internal memo basically saying that we were not to use Wikipedia with the students because it was far too unreliable. This pessimistic view of Wikipedia was in stark contrast to an excellent podcast I listened to only the day before, titled Introducing Web 2.0 by Tim Wilson . Tim is an educator who is really passionate about the potential of Web 2.0, and has a much more positive outlook on Wikipedia as a learning resource. I for one don't agree with most of the criticism leveled at Wikipedia, and would like to think that as a staff we could have had some sort of professional discourse about this issue before we throw the baby out with the bathwater and just say don't use it. Just like we expect our students to critically assess the resources we place in front of them, I think we also need to critically assess our use of resources like Wikipedia rather than just declare it "...

If you're interested to see where the current participants of the K12 Online Conference are in fact participating from, you might like to look at this map . As David said in this keynote, I am here and now and you are there and then.  And it really doesn't matter in the slightest.  Gotta love that.

I've just been watching David Warlick's excellent keynote address for the K12 Online Conference . (which I'm sure most of you teachers will be taking part in, right?) He raises some excellent points and coined a few new phrases... I particularly liked the idea of being "derailed", and the notion that the side trips can often be more powerful an experience than the actual main trip, or what he calls "the rails". Having him explain this from the platform of his local railway station was a nice touch. :-) If you haven't seen it, go watch it and then contribute to the excellent wiki space that David has set up for us. But he also mentioned the term Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants, a term first coined by Marc Prensky I believe. The concept here is that the kids coming through our schools now are Digital Natives - they were born into a world where they don't know what it's like not to "be digital", as Negroponte would say. U...

They've been out for a little while now, but just in case you haven't seen the three new Mac ads, they are worth a look.  Very, very funny. You can see them all at http://www.apple.com/getamac/ 

It's always nice to find useful software that's free. The open source movement has had a major influence in enabling software makers to build great apps and get them out there for people to use, usually at no charge. Free is good. What's more unusual is to find free software from the big names, like Microsoft. A few notable exceptions have emerged from the Microsoft stable over the last few years though, such as Producer , Photostory and even Sharepoint , which have actually been quite good. The latest cool freebie is a thing called Paint.Net , developed by a group of student programmers who did an internship at Microsoft and developed a fresh new image editing tool using Microsoft's .NET framework. Microsoft is not a big player in the image editing area, and doesn't have a significant product in that space. They've obviously given a challenge to these young programmers to develop something for image editing and the result is supposed to be amazing. Check ...