Chris Betcher

According to this article from Edutopia , the one billionth user connected to the World Wide Web sometime last year. I have no idea how anyone arrives at these sorts of statistics, but it probably doesn't really matter. The point is that it's a big number, and there are lots and lots of people from all over the world who are becoming part of this phenomenon we call the Internet. But in the age of Web 2.0 - the read/write web - I found this paragraph particularly poignant... "The striking thing to me about that milestone is not the enormity of the number, however. More interesting, perhaps, is that the one billionth person to jump onto the Web could just as easily been an eight-year-old kid from Sweden or the South Bronx (or, for that matter, an eighty-year-old from South Africa) who sat down at a computer, opened a browser, and for the first time started connecting to the sum of human knowledge we are collectively building online. Furthermore, that eight-year-old had jus...

movie I found this short movie online and thought it was bloody fantastic. I think it really hits on the issues in education that many schools don't seem to be thinking enough about, or at least if they are thinking about them, they don't seem to be truly committing to do something about them. This ought to be required viewing at everybody's next staff meeting.

Yes, it's almost that time of year again. Yes, on October 5 it will be World Teacher Day . So take a moment and send a quick email to a teacher that made a difference to you or your children. There's nothing quite so lovely as getting a note from a student who tells you that you made a difference to them. I know it's the true reward of the teaching profession. Anyway, I'm looking to also launch a new project I've been working on, and I reckon October 5 could be just the right date to do it. It's a podcasting project where I'm getting the bestest, smartest, most creative teachers I know and sticking a few of them in a Skype conference, recording our conversation and releasing it as a podcast. We'll talk about technology education in particular and what we can do to make school a great experience for the kids we teach. Check it out on www.virtualstaffroom.net , and hopefully by October 5 we will have podcast number 1 up and running! Details for sub...

...but not an idea whose time has come, wrote Victor Hugo. I just read a wonderful post over on the Fischbowl blog about a school ban on the use of certain "electronic devices" in class. The school I'm currently teaching at has just implemented a similar policy... and I think it sucks. I was quite horrified when I heard the "new rule" for the start of the school year at my school here in Canada... "No iPods, Cellphones or other electronic devices in class at any time". I can see little point in introducing rules that clearly cannot be enforced. I approached the vice principal after our first staff meeting and quizzed him about it, pointing out that I felt there were many educationally sound uses of an iPod in class, from class podcast projects to their use as a portable harddrive to some quiet private music to work to without bothering the rest of the class. He nodded sagely and said that of course, if it was for educational purposes it would be ok....

As my reliance on RSS feeds has increased lately I've outgrown my ability, or willingness, to manually keep track of the blogs that I like to follow. From initially wanting to keep up with a small handful of blogs from a few people I know, my needs have now grown to include a much larger number of blogs and feeds that I like to keep up with. Seems that there are lots of folk I know who are now blogging, as well as there being a number of "professional" blogs which I find interesting so the idea of automating the process of tracking them is definitely something I'm interested in. Fortunately every blog comes with the built-in technology for doing exactly this - RSS. RSS (an acronym for Really Simple Syndication) creates a feed using XML which can be read and regularly checked by software designed to do just that. In effect, it's a bit like managing email in that I have a list of blogs and websites that I'vesubscribed to, and the updates appear in my reader ...

Well, the big story on YouTube recently was that of Lonelygirl15, a supposed teenage girl named Bree who was videoblogging her life story on YouTube. I watched a couple of episodes and although it was interesting I couldn't help thinking that it was an overly-slick production for a teenage girl to be making alone in her bedroom. As it turns out, lonelygirl did indeed turn out to be a hoaxygirl, and the whole thing was in fact made up by a couple of screenwriters looking to get some hype... For a while there, Bree was the most popular channel on YouTube. But let me introduce you to some real YouTube videos made by Jo, a friend of mine back in Australia, and I think they are far more interesting than Bree and her made-up adventures. I worked with Jo on a couple of writing projects... at the time, she was head-over-heels in love with a new man in her life. Since then, well, things seem to have gone a bit pear shaped and Jo decided to vent her thoughts as a YouTube videoblog. Jo ...

As a power user on the Windows platform and a quick learner on the Mac platform, there is something about the difference between the two that has always intriuged me. I've noticed it in many forms over the years, but I was reminded of it when I read this rather silly report on the TUAW site... I'm sure the fellow who wrote it had his tongue firmly in his cheek, but if you browse through the comments under the main article you'll find a very interesting thread of discussion has emerged relating to the Mac's little green zoom button. Seems the zoom button is not without its fair share of controversy and a rather passionate, yet civil, debate is raging there about the differences between the way windows (with a small 'w') behave on Windows (with a big 'W') versus the way they behave on the Mac. The basic gist of the discussion is about the subtle difference between the user interfaces of both platforms and the author tries to draw an assertion that the U...

As I write this, I'm downloading updates for Windows in the background. Yes, you read that right. Windows. But wait, aren't I a Mac guy? Yes. Absolutely. But I also teach computing in a mainly Windows environment, and it still makes sense to be able to use those few apps that I need in a classroom situation in their native platform environment, and that means Windows. Although I personally prefer to use Mac versions of most applications, it gets too hard to teach a class about the Windows version of Word when they look up and see my Mac version on the data projector. (Despite the fact that everything is there in both versions, the Mac version has a slightly different IU and a few added features, so it doesn't look identical.) Anyway, I figured the simplest solution would be to just use the Windows apps for those few times when I need them. There is also a proprietary Markbook app that the school uses that is Windows only, and I would like to run that occasionally to...

I just watched the most amazing documentary on the 9/11 attacks from 5 years ago. It was just called, simply, 9/11 . It was on TV last night, and had a bunch of footage that I'd never seen before. Considering the huge amount of press coverage that the attacks got when they first happened, and how well documented the events have been since then, I was surprised to find that there was still such a large chunk of footage that I'd never ever seen before. The documentary was made by two French filmmakers that were actually making a doco about a young firefighter who had just joined the FDNY. They'd been following this guy around, fimling and getting to know the other fireys for a few months and had been taking their cameras out on shoots to local fires, etc. They just happened to tag along when the guys were called out to attend an unknown event on the morning on 9/11, not really knowing what they were in for. Turns out that one of the filmmakers got caught up in the foyer ...

What on earth is going on back in Australia?? First I awoke the other day to the news that Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, was killed. I'm amazed at the response here in Canada and the USA. I can understand the outpouring of emotion back home is Australia, since Stevo was a well known and mostly well liked bloke who did good things to promote the environment and wildlife. Despite the way Irwin often came across as just a bit too over-the-top, he was absolutely passionate about what he did and that showed through. Even if he got on your nerves a bit, he was still the real deal... a genuine Aussie bloke that was just excited about life. Such a shame to lose him like that. It has been amazing though to see the way that his death has been mourned and reported here in North America though. I had no idea he was so well known and loved by so many people outside Australia. There have been endless news stories about the incident since it happened, and current affairs feature were still ...

I want to see if this works. It's a voice recording made in GCast , a web based podcasting tool. Since Edublogs don't appear to support podcasting, I'm curious about ways to create/store an audio file somewhere and then link to it from inside the blog post. What intrigues me about GCast is that you can create the recording for free using a telephone. Just call the phone number provided and enter your PIN, then record you message. Hmmm, interesting. What can we do with that idea? The dial in number is US based, but I suppose you could always Skype it. Otherwise just record locally with Audacity and upload the audio file to GCast as usual. It's not technically a podcast if you just link to it like this, as there is no RSS feed involved, but it still has possibilities.

With all the hype about Web 2.0 in the classroom, I have been very keen to explore the use of blogs as a learning tool and have been busy reading lots of articles and blogs, listening to podcasts, etc, trying to absorb lots of ideas on how this might be best done. I don't think anyone really has any clear strategies about edublogging... a handful of teachers are just trying out different ideas and I guess the most effective uses will just bubble their way to the top eventually. In the meantime, I decided to set each of my students up with a learnerblogs account and attempt to create some sort of blogging ecosystem in the classroom. Of course, I hope they expand and link to idea way outside of just the classroom, but it's a start. I'll let you know how it goes.

I've just been playing with a very cool piece of software for the Mac. Or is it a piece of software for Windows? Actually, it's kind of both. Crossover is based on the work of the WINE project - a curiously-named self-iterative anagram that stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. WINE has long been used in the Linux community as a means of getting Windows programs to run under Linux. When I first looked at it several years ago it was still very raw and new and difficult to use. However, in the last few years, WINE (and in fact Linux too) has come a very long way. Linux development moves forward at an amazing pace and the last few distributions I looked at were very impressive indeed. Back to Crossover. Although it's still only in Public Beta, Crossover runs as an application on either the Mac or Linux platforms and it allows genuine Windows applications to be run natively on either of those OSes. Not emulated. Natively. That means you can take a Windows program and ...

My daughter Kate and I went to the Sherway Gardens shopping mall in Toronto on Saturday morning to check out the opening of the new Apple Store . Apple Stores are somewhat of a novelty for me, since we don't actually have any in Australia. (What's the story SJ? Aussies want Macs too, you know!) Since living in Canada I have visted the store at Yorkdale Mall in Toronto, where I bought my MacBook Pro, as well as the store in Galeria Mall in Cambridge Boston, where I had to buy a replacement power adapter for the one I left in a hotel in Sydney, Nova Scotia. (I eventually got that power adapter back btw). I also visited the very cool and funky Apple Store in Fifth Avenue, New York City when I was there last month. These stores all do basically the same thing - let you try and buy the whole range of Apple products. The funny thing is that the product range for Apple is quite finite. The do a couple models of MacBooks, a couple of desktop models, and about 7 different iPods. ...

The release of Google's new " Google Apps for your Domain " program is an interesting business move, and I can see more clearly now how Google is making inroads into territory that has traditionally belonged to Microsoft. GAfyD offers email, calendar, chat and a webpage designer - all for free - but enables organisations to rebadge these apps with their own domain and graphics. All you need to do is edit the MX records for any domain you might own, telling it to reroute the mail requests through to Google's Gmail servers. End result is the abilty to have yourname@yourdomain.com become a defacto Gmail service. Same goes for the calendar and chat... runs in your own domain but is hosted by Google. My first thought was to register for my school... the thought of having 1000 student email accounts hosted offsite, with 2Gb of storage space each, complete with calendar, webspace and chat, all at no cost, seemed to good of an option to pass up. So I registered, changed ...