Chris Betcher

One of the runaway success stories of Australian television is a subversive comedy show called The Chaser's War on Everything . This very funny show takes constant potshots at every conceivable social and political norm, often drawing attention to the many stupid and inconsistent things we do. During 2007 the show aired every Wednesday night on ABC TV, and was also podcast via www.abc.net.au/chaser My son Alex is a huge fan of the Chaser, and one of his favourite sketches was one in which the show's host, Chris Taylor, rants about how annoying those waiters are that interrupt your meal to ask you if you'd like any cracked pepper. The sketch goes on to look at a variety of interesting situations in which a pepper-toting waiter might interrupt to offer his wares... if you've not seen it, here is the clip... [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/n1rxixtXt8A" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] So the other da...

[kml_flashembed movie="http://voicethread.com/book.swf?b=37147" width="480" height="360" wmode="transparent" /] It's Voicethread.  It's live. It's interactive. Don't be shy.  ;-)

I love this photo... Unless you've been walking around with your fingers in your ears and loudly singing "lalalala!" it's been hard to avoid noticing Apple's amazing renaissance. Not so many years ago it was hard to imagine that Apple had any real long term future at all, but things have certainly turned around since Steve came back. Apple's growth is quite phenomenal at the moment. It's hard to know exactly why this is happening, but it undeniably is. Whether you attribute it to the iPod's viral " halo effect ", the effective and very funny " I'm a Mac, I'm a PC " advertisements, the sheer style and beauty of the new Macs , the frenzy that was whipped up by the release of the iPhone , the drawcard success of Leopard , or just the exodus away from Windows following the disaster of Vista , there is no denying that the Mac platform is enjoying enormous growth at the moment. Recent statistics claim that Mac sales are grow...

Last night Linda and I went in to the Sydney Carols in the Domain Christmas concert.  All this southern hemisphere Christmas-without-snow was causing some mental disconnect for Linda so she was having a bit of trouble getting into the spirit ot the season... seems that the carols has gone some way to helping alleviate that.  (And Sydney really does know how to throw a great outdoor event.) For those that live on the top half of the planet, here are a few photos to show you what an Aussie Christmas looks like... [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/JU_C2cb255w" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

My friend Anne Baird blogged today about her insights regarding the use of Creative Commons as a form of managing the usage rights to creative works such as music, pictures, video or writing. For many people, the only law they have ever heard of in regard to using the work of others is copyright law, and this is usually interpreted as "you cannot use this!" That's not exactly correct of course... copyright means "you cannot use this without asking my permission". Unfortunately the process of getting that permission is usually not so simple, so for most people the choice is to not use the work at all, or to use it illegally. Enter the world of Creative Commons. Creative Commons, or CC for short, was launched in 2001 and is a licensing model for defining how an artistic or intellectual work may (or may not) be used. It sits in that void between the restrictive copyright model and the free-for-all that is the Public Domain. Too often people assume that ...

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/Dp4qe3Ishhw#" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] Coming soon. This little girl. And millions more like her. Curious. Smart. And not afraid of technology. Let me rephrase that... Not only is she just "not afraid" of technology, she will expect to grow up in a world where technology comes in the form of easy-to-use devices that just work seamlessly to let her do things. She represents a generation of children for whom access to such technology is as basic as access to air, food and water. Look at her as she plays with this device... she didn't read an instruction manual, she isn't waiting for a training session in how to use it. As she grows up she won't necessarily know or care how these things works, only that they lets her do the things she wants to do. She interacts with technology but probably doesn't even think of it as interacting with technology. ...

Is this an example of a world gone mad, or what? A 10-year-old Florida girl faces felony weapons charges after bringing a small steak knife to school to cut up her lunch, according to a report on WFTV.com. School officials say the Ocala 5th grader had brought a piece of steak for her lunch, and had brought a steak knife. According to the report, a couple of teachers took the utensil and called authorities, who arrested the girl and took her to the county’s juvenile assessment center. "She did not use it inappropriately. She did not threaten anyone with it. She didn't pull it out and brandish it. Nothing of that nature," explained Marion County School Spokesman Kevin Christian, who added that it made no difference what the knife was being used for, they had no choice but to call police." Anytime there's a weapon on campus, yes, we have to report it and we aggressively report it because we don't want to take any chances, regardless," Christian said.The gi...

A few posts ago I mentioned that both Betchablog and The Virtual Staffroom had been nominated for Eddies, or Edublog Awards . As the voting processes started for the awards, there was apparently quite a bit of blog-love being shown for certain nominees in the form of multiple votes, automated voting, group voting, etc. It got to the point where the organisers had to first of all manually delete suspicious voting activity such as in the form of huge numbers of votes all coming from the same network address in a short period of time, and eventually had to completely limit the voting system to a single vote per IP address. No doubt this was the result of some very enthusiastic voting by students in class ("OK kids, your teacher has been nominated for an award so go to this url and click the button for me"). Finally, the opportunity to see the progress of the results was shut off completely as well. It's a shame the voting had to be nobbled in this way as it really rui...

Just in case you've not seen it, you might like to check out the latest "in plain English" video just released by Lee Lefever from the Commoncraft Show .  Simply called "Blogs in Plain English", this is another excellent short video presentation explaining in very straightforward and easy to understand terms exactly what a blog is, what makes them special, and how to use one.  Good stuff! [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/NN2I1pWXjXI" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] Lee is gaining quite a reputation for his videos, including Wikis in Plain English , RSS in Plain English ,  Social Networking in Plain English and Social Bookmarking in Plain English .  The guy has a knack for taking concepts that are generally poorly understood by most people and making them easy to understand by explaining them in, well, plain English.

While catching up on my Tweets tonight I noticed one from @shareski (and swooned over by @speters !) pointing out that Twitter made a cameo appearance on CSI, as shown in the video below... It's always interesting to see a less mainstream technology such as Twitter showing up in a very mainstream place like a top rating TV show... it's sort of like being a teenager and seeing your dad wearing the same brand of clothing as you... You just sort of get the feeling that he's only doing it to appear cool... It seems to me that seeing Twitter on CSI signals a recognition of that technology, sort of the two ends of the long tail coming face to face for a moment. It's like reading a novel where the main character is a webdesigner or a podcaster, rather than a lawyer or an accountant. I've never watched CSI so I don't know who they two characters are, but I really liked the exchange between them in this scene where they are looking through the victim's Twitter page ...

Just wanted to share this Voicethread that some of my students did (there are still more kids to add their voices yet). In my Year 7 art class we were looking at the work of contemporary Australian aboriginal artist Sally Morgan, and the students had to examine a painting called My Grandmother's Country. We had quite a long discussion about it in class and looked at some of the symbolism used in the painting. The students then had to write a response to the work. In the past, this task is usually done purely as a text-only task... it gets discussed in class and they then do the writing at home. I thought I'd try using Voicethread instead, because it allowed them to access the artwork from home, to zoom in to see detail, and to hear me re-explain what they needed to do with it. (I know, I know, YOUR students never forget anything you tell them in class, but mine sometimes do). They were a bit shy about leaving voice comments at first, so instead they wrote a written respons...

Wow...  I looked in my email today and there was a note saying that Betchablog has been nominated for a 2007 Edublog Award in the category of Best Teacher Blog . I think there are probably a whole lot of teacher blogs that are a whole lot better than anything I could do, but I've still had a big smile on my face all afternoon! Of course, you can't take yourself too seriously (especially with something as potentially vacuous as your own blog!) but it certainly is a very nice feeling to be at least nominated for an Edublog Award .  As I've said several times, the real reason I write this blog is for myself as a way to "think out loud", so to think that someone else would have taken the trouble to nominate it to even be considered is very humbling, especially when I look at the impressive company I'm sharing the list with! Thanks whoever did it! And just to top it off, it seems that the Virtual Staffroom Podcast has been nominated for Best Educational Use of Au...

Blogging started for me as a way to document a year living overseas , and although many serious bloggers sneer at the idea of using a blog for something as lowly as a simple travel diary, I found it a wonderful jumpoff point into the wider world of blogging. Not only do I now have a permanent record of a wonderful year in Canada, but that blog got me into the habit of writing regularly. And really, getting into a habit is an important part of the whole blogging experience. I guess, I'm writing this now because I hadn't written a post for a few days and I was starting to think that I needed to! Not for you. For me. This blogging thing has become an integral part of who I am, and when I go for a few days without writing it just doesn't feel right. But the habit is not just about writing, it's about thinking. It's about engaging with ideas that you read on other blogs, or through listening to podcasts, or even from trawling through Twitter posts. It's about...

Twitter was down for a while today. In order to feed the Twitter addiction, @shareski started a group Skype chat and started to drag people into it, who in turn started to drag more people into it. Pretty soon we had our very own pseudo-Twitter going, as everyone continued adding people into the chat space until there must have about 50 people in the room... easily the biggest Skype chat I've had. Twitter eventually came back up, and a huge collective global sigh of relief was breathed. Still, the Skywitter chat was a fun experiment. As Vicki Davis observed... "It is like an Elvis impersonator -- not the real thing but close enough when the real one is dead." That comment made my day. :-) Tags: twitter , skype , pln

I'm sitting in class at the moment with a group of Year 10 students as they do the NSW Board of Studies exam for computing skills. For those that don't know , the Year 10 Computer Skills Test , or CST10, is a NSW government initiative to introduce standardised testing across the state to measure the ability of our 15 and 16 year old kids to confidently use computers. Every school in NSW has been required over the last few years to ensure that technology skills are integrated - or at least included - as part of the standard curriculum delivery. Our school (and I imagine most schools) have taken an approach where we have looked at the skills indicators (the specific list of computing skills that need to be assessed) and shared them out amongst the various key learning areas according to what we think are the most likely candidates to cover them in an integrated way. So, for example, our science classes try to include database use, maths integrates spreadsheets, word processin...

I had the good fortune to attend a talk this evening by Greg Whitby , the Executive Director of Education for the Catholic Education Parramatta Diocese . Greg was the special guest of the Australian College of Educators , and was speaking to a cosy little group of teachers at St Cath's Waverly. Greg is one of those larger-than-life characters that has some fairly strong ideas about how education should look for the 21st Century, and I was pretty keen to hear him talk since I'd read quite a few articles about him. His views on school reform and his somewhat radical ideas on redesigning schools are aligned with a lot of my own thinking. The talk focussed around a few key areas, among them the need for schools to reinvent themselves or to become dangerously irrelevant to our students, the need for teachers to engage in ongoing professional learning for themselves in order to truly embrace the notion of being a lifelong learner, and the way in which technology is simply an ampl...

Thanks to my Montreal mate, Sharon Peters for pointing me to this hilarious video highlighting the side effects of Halo 3.   I laughed and laughed... not that I would be obsessive, or anything like that, but I did find this very funny.  ;-) [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/ZOkF0McZKIw" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

For a bit of voyeuristic fun, you might like to take a peek at one, or all, of these sites... Twittervision , Flickrvision and Wikipediavision . There is a strange fascination watching them do their thing. All of these sites tap into the Google Maps API . I mentioned in a previous post about Twitter how an API (Application Programming Interface) can be used to give programmers backdoor access to a particular web app, enabling them to connect into them with another service or application that may or may not have ever been deigned to do so. Think of apps which have open APIs as Lego blocks that can be easily joined together, where the output of one app can be seamlessly plugged into the input of another, so that they talk to each and share data very nicely. Google Maps in particular have had plenty of interesting uses made of their very open API, and these three examples show you that in action. By using the data coming out of Twitter (the Tweets being made by people), or Flickr (th...

I was invited by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach to contribute some thoughts to a session at the Texas Tech Forum today in Austin TX. It was very nice to be asked, especially when I found that I was in the company of such respected educators as Terry Freedman and Emily Kornblut. The topic for conversation was Virtual Communities for Professional Development and Growth , where all three of us had been invited to share a few minutes talking about how we use virtual networks to support our own learning. Unfortunately, my audio stream was largely unusable and we had to abandon it before I really got started. Seems that the trans-Pacific bandwidth gods were not smiling this morning (or was it David Jakes using all the bandwidth in the next room playing with Google Earth? Hmm, we'll never know) Nevertheless, here's the brief outline of what I would have said, or something very much like it... If you accept that Learning is a Conversation , and that some of the most powerful learning can ta...

I've become quite a fan of Twitter, although I'll readily admit I never really "got it" to start with. However, as I mentioned in a previous post, and also in a recent tutorial video, Twitter makes a lot more sense once you add a group of people to your network. Having a likeminded group of fellow Twits from which to tap into some collective wisdom turns Twitter from a curious plaything into a rather amazing personal learning environment. Twitter has an open API (Application Programming Interface), which mean that programmers who can think of interesting ways to mash the basic Twitter feed into another service are able to tap into the guts of Twitter in order to get it to power their own apps. There are a number of interesting tools/toys that hang off the Twitter API, from useful local clients like Twitterific , Twitterroo , Snitter , Spaz and Twitterbox , to fun implementations like Twittervision and Twittervision 3D . And just to show how circular life is, I...

On one of the several mailing lists I subscribe to, I saw a question from a network manager in another school asking for advice in dealing with some mistreatment of computer equipment by students. His proposed solution was to install webcams in the computer rooms and to stream their output to a server where it could be recorder and monitored. This person was asking for suggestions or advice from anyone else who had gone down this path. It's not a path I particularly like... I don't mean for this reply to become a lengthy diatribe (or worse yet, a cranky rant), but I think this approach is totally going down the wrong path and it's something I feel strongly about. I see many in school IT management who seem to be taking the path of constant surveillance and security over the harder-to-do but better-in-the-long-run approach of teaching students appropriate behaviour with technology in the first place. I see it happening with the way school lockdown their computers with com...

While trolling through some old files today I happened upon this video of some Lego robotics projects done by my Year 10 students about five years ago. I recall that their task was to build a sort of merry-go-round device that conformed to a few specific requirements. From memory it had to have provision for two "seats", and when a start button was pressed it had to rotate around align the first of these seats with a loading platform, pause, and then rotate to align the second seat. Once both seats were "loaded", it had to pause, then start rotating slowly, then get faster, until it reached top speed and did a specified number of rotations. Once these were complete if had to slow down again to a stop, aligning the first seat, then pausing again and finally aligning the second seat. Here's the video...[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/eYUOfaFEJF8" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] It was an ...

As an existing customer of 3 , Australia's first 3G mobile phone network, and an avid user of Skype , I was interested to see this new product just about to be released here in Australia. It's a 3G/Wifi enabled phone that lets you make free Skype-to-Skype calls over wireless LANs. Given that I spend all day at work, and all my time at home bathed in the radiant glow of wifi, the ability to make free calls is pretty attractive. I'm assuming that it reverts back to a standard GSM phone when you wander off the grid, and switches back to wifi when you get back into a wifi zone. I need to read the fine print of course, but it's an intriguing idea. While it's not exactly an iPhone (far from it) it certainly looks interesting and suggests that the already competitive mobile phone business is about to get a whole lot more heated in the next 12 months. There's been no word from Apple as to when the iPhone might land in Australia, so this push by Skype and 3 might...

I occasionally feel a little guilty. Although I am very much committed to the idea that technology should be integrated, no, more than that, embedded, into what happens in a classroom on a day-to-day basis, the truth is that I have spent many years teaching computing as a discipline in its own right. And I have to keep telling myself that that's ok, that there are still many kids who have a deep interest in technology for the sake of technology and find the very nature of computing highly engaging as a stand alone topic. So I'm cool with that. It's ok to be a geek. I believe one mark of a good teacher is to be able to take complex ideas and simplify them without making them simple. For example, there are a couple of concepts in the realm of computing that are not really all that hard to understand but can be very hard to explain. Binary numbers can be one. Vector graphics another. So I was really impressed when I saw VectorMagic , a somewhat geeky (yet very cool) web ...

I really like iTunes. It's a wonderful piece of software that just works as expected and does it's job really well. I've been asked to talk at the PowerUp conference on the Gold Coast this weekend and was given an open opportunity to talk about whatever I wanted. Although I think the Web 2.0 story is the one most people still need to hear, the general feeling was that there were already plenty of people talking about web 2.0 stuff, so something a bit different would be good. (Besides, my other session will be about web 2.0 stuff anyway, looking at tools for collaboration) I'm a bit wary of being caught out without Internet access when I present... I've been in situations before where I was told there would be access, where there was access, where I should have been able to get access, but for whatever reason the firewall gods were not smiling upon me and I had none. I don't expect that to be the case this weekend, and of course I plan to present it live......

I've been trying to make a screencast of Skype conversation. And I thought it would be pretty simple. But as so often happens, there are technical issues to overcome that can make things so much trickier than you first thought they would be. I've done quite a bit of screen capturing before, usually for short training videos on how to do certain software tasks. In fact I made a CD for a commercial training organisation a few years back that had over 80 tutorial screencasts on it made with Capture Cam Pro , so I figured I knew how to do this stuff. I've also been using Jing lately to make short screencasts on tech tips for our school network users. I think that screencasting is a great way to learn (and teach) this sort of practical, "show me" sort of stuff. Atomic Learning is another excellent resource based on this idea. So I wanted to make a couple of screencasts to demonstrate how to use the features of Skype. I'd been using Snapz Pro X on the M...

Twitter is a really interesting bit of software. When I first heard about it on MacBreak Weekly I thought it sounded pretty interesting although it still didn't really make a lot of sense to me. Being naturally curious I headed over to the Twitter website and signed up for an account. After having a play with it for a while, it seemed to make even less sense so I gradually lost interest in it and moved on to other diversions. I've now changed my mind about it. Twitter is a way cool tool! How to explain it? Twitter is designed as a sort of cross-hybrid tool that merges email, SMS, instant messaging and waving your arms around trying to get attention. It is aimed at answering the very simple question - "What are you doing?" You simply type your response to that question in no more than 140 characters and send your current activity, thought, question, mood or state of mind out into the Cloud that is the Internet. My first thought about Twitter was the same as m...

I was chatting to one of our foreign language teachers at school and talking about some of the new Web 2.0 technologies that could be useful in a language classroom. We looked at how blogs could be used, and how to incorporate audio files into things. I suggested using Evoca , which integrates really nicely into Blogger . The idea of getting students to use Evoca to record their voice and then publish to a blog in only three clicks was pretty cool, but it lacked a simple way for the teacher to respond via voice as well. Then we looked at VoiceThread , and what a cool tool it is. I had heard a lot about it but not really played with it until Jess McCulloch mentioned it again in a recent Virtual Staffroom episode . Intrigued, I just had to check it out. It does look very neat, and as long as kids have bandwidth and a microphone I can imagine some very useful ways to integrate it into the classroom. Here is a little sample I made from a couple of photos I had on my hard drive... ple...

Another fascinating video made by Michael Wesch from Kansas State University. Michael was responsible for the very viral " The Machine (Us)ing Us " which clearly made the point about the folksonomic nature of Web 2.0 and how the techniques of tagging and aggregating are causing us to rethink the way we look at information. This new video was made by getting his class to create and conduct a survey on issues of relevance to them. They used Google Docs to create a collaborative document in which they gathered and refined ideas about questions, issues and concerns they had about the way their education was structured. Once the survey was designed they collected and collated the data to arrive at some of the statistics you see presented in this video. Interestingly, the video itself was shot in a single 75 minute lesson. I found it quite compelling.  I was also struck by the quote from McLuhan talking about the "information scarce" mentality of the 19th century mo...

I mentioned in a previous post that the average cell phone these days can do SO much more than most people ever discover. This revelation struck me when I saw someone demonstrating a video clip they made from footage taken on their phone's camera. What this person didn't realise was that some phones can not only shoot the footage, but can also edit it as well. I won't repeat the list of stuff that can be done - you can go read the other post if you really want to know more - but I was surprised at just how simple it is to throw a short clip together. To put the theory to the test, I went to watch my kids play tennis today and took some footage with my phone. (Well, mainly of my daughter... my son kept telling me to go away. Fathers can be so embarrasing!) I shot 6 or 7 clips, then used the phone's editing software, called VideoDJ, to trim each one, add titles and transitions, place the clips in order, and render a final movie. I could have added music in the back...

The Fireside chat took place this morning for the K12 Online Conference. There was a good roll-up of attendees via the Elluminate platform, topping out at one point at about 110 people. David Warlick was on hand to answer some questions from the group, and people were firing questions at him at a rapid pace. The chat stream was like a fast-flowing river, with comment after comment after comment streaming up the screen. Sometimes I wonder how effective these really large chat streams are, as it's so hard to have a deep discussion let alone a coherent conversation! As someone noted in the chat, it was like being ADD on steroids. However, the opportunity to connect with a worldwide group of educators and engaging in discussion and conversation about things that we think matter was wonderful. David did well to field the diverse (and sometimes quite difficult!) questions from members of the group. I even got to throw a question to David myself. Virtual environments like this are ...