Chris Betcher

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 ...

I don't normally just pass through posts by other folk without commenting, but I really don't know what else I would add to this great post by Karl Fisch . If you can make time to read it you will find it interesting I'm sure.

One of my very favourite writers and thinkers about education is Seymour Papert. I really like his views on the ways in which schools need to change. It cannot be incremental, it as to be revolutionary . I get very frustrated when I hear teachers talk about the way technology can be used to "improve" teaching. It's not about "improving" teaching. The fact is that the model of schooling which we blindly accept as a given is rooted in 19th century methodology, but the world has changed so dramatically that it's not a matter of introducing a few computers and doing the same old things. We have to start doing new things , not old things in new ways. One of Papert's articles likens education to an old fashioned stagecoach, and talks about the ways in which a stagecoach could be improved. Although stagecoaches were an effective means of transportation in their day, as a means of transport they can certainly be improved upon. He muses on the idea of stra...

From an article in the Sun Herald in Australia... seems that at least one school is biting the bullet and going for a radical rethink of school... E-volution of education A 24-HOUR school with no traditional classrooms and where students use mobile phones and laptops to learn is being built in Sydney. Designers of the Catholic school for 1700 pupils say it will keep students interested 'and reduce truancy and behavioural problems. Pupils from kindergarten to year 12 can attend the school- being built at Stanhope Gardens, in Sydney's north-west between 6am and 10pm. They can have access to their work and lesson material at anytime on the Internet and staff will provide online tutorials from 8pm to l0pm The traditional classroom concept will disappear, replaced by "learning spaces", the school will be referred to as a "learning community" and teachers will be known as "learning advisers" said Greg Whitby, executive director of schools in the Parrama...

I've always been a great believer in the Pareto Principle , sometimes more commonly referred to as the 80/20 rule. This principle basically suggests that in any group or organisation there will usually be 20% of the people who produce 80% of the results. This observation generally holds quite true, be it a club, a group, a classroom or even a family... there is always a minority of the people who produce a majority of the results. It may not always be exactly an 80/20 split, but you can pretty much guarantee that the work done by any group will almost never be spread evenly among the workers. Once you understand and accept this fact, a lot of the frustration and annoyance of life starts to go away as you stop worrying about how you're going to get the majority of the people to do more than the minimal amount that the Pareto Principle says they will do. The fact is, they never will. Those people will never do more than the miminum, no matter how we cajole, threaten, or in...

If you are a teacher in a school, this video should be required viewing. † It may just change your view of what you do, and if it doesn't, you should get out of teaching now. If you can't become part of the solution then you are almost certainly part of the problem. Btw, this comes via mscofina's blog , which is most definitely worth a look.

I'm sneaking in this quick blog post as I sit in class supervising some of my kids doing a test. Sorry, a quiz. I have to be careful of what I call it... if I call it a quiz they are ok about it, but if I call it a test, or heaven forbid an 'exam', they go into a little panic. I use Quia as a tool for giving class quizzes, partly to make my job of marking a bit simpler, but mostly because the kids seem to prefer doing a test online rather than on paper. I've been using online methods for testing for quite a few years now, using various methods or creating them including Quia , Hot Potatoes , and even crafting them myself from raw html code hooked up to a sendmail.pl script back in the 'old days' . I'm of the overwhelming opinion that today's students relate to the idea of answering their test questions in an online format. Anyway, I let them do the quiz in an open-book mode. They are free to use the textbook, use Google, use whatever, to answer the...

Wow, I'm amazed.  This podcasting idea is actually working.  The Virtual Staffroom , my little project to try and share the great  technology integration work done by some of Australia's leading teachers is actually working. I got an email today from a guy at the Australian Catholic University in Ballarat, Victoria, asking if he could burn 80 copies of the podcast to CD and give it to a group of pre-service teachers as they train to go out into the classrooms of Australia.  I was blown away.  This is within 48 hours of going live with Anne Baird's Episode 1. And then I just checked the iTunes Store, who are now including the show in their podcast directory.  It's currently ranked number 1 podcast in the Educational Technology section! In fact its also ranked number 10 in the Education section overall. And this is just the beginning!  Bring it on... :-)

Found this lovely quote on the Borderland blog that really sums up what I see as a huge problem with school as it stands... My classroom doesn’t work the way I want it to. In the Age of Accountability, I focus on process, and see product as a secondary concern. I’m an ill-fitting peg, uneasy about participating in what, for me, amounts to a charade - emulating archaic practices designed for kids from bygone eras. Looking at the group I’m with now, thinking about them, and not the generic, bloodless beings called Students, statistical incarnations of demographically catalogued learners, I feel more strongly than ever that I owe each of them more than mere delivery of the curriculum, and concern for where they stand relative to a standard that I don’t endorse. I have lost track of the number of times I've remarked that the dominant content-driven approach to the way we are told to teach is fundamentaly flawed, only to have other teachers respond with "but they have to learn tha...

Yay! Another little project I've been working on lately is The Virtual Staffroom, a podcasting project where I'm trying to create a virtual conversation space for leading teachers to talk about the ways they integrate technology into their classrooms. Episode one launches today with a wonderful conversation with Anne Baird from Wedderburn school in Victoria, Australia. Head on over to www.virtualstaffroom.net and check it out. It should also be available very soon through the Podcast directory of the iTunes Store.

I had the pleasure recently of visiting the Guggenheim Museum in New York. It's an amazing gallery building and my daughter Kate and I enjoyed going through it to see the exhibitions and displays. We both really enjoyed the Jackson Pollock exhibition, No Limits Just Edges. The art of Jackson Pollock, (who just happens to share the same birthday as me) caused quite a stir in Australia in 1973 when the government at the time purchased the infamous Blue Poles for $1.3 million. It was quite a controversy at the time, with the media making all sorts of claims - from "he was drunk at the time' to 'it was painted by monkeys'.  In hindsight, the painting was recently valued at $40 million so it seems Gough's government made a good decision after all. Anyway, if you're an art teacher, or just want your students to have a bit of fun, you might like to check out www.jacksonpollock.org for a bit of interactive online action painting. Hopefully they will realise ...