Chris Betcher

I'm sitting in one of our school computer labs at the moment supervising students working on the computers. We open our labs for lunchtime a few days a week so the students can use the computers, presumably to catch up on "work". And what do these kids - our teenage digital natives - do when the get unrestricted free access to the school computers? Just looking around the room right now and seeing what they're up to reveals the following... more than half of them are working on their Bebo pages, a few are looking through their MySpace accounts and a couple seem to be just browsing through websites for song lyrics and anime cartoons. There are two kids checking their email, using Yahoo!Mail and Hotmail, and one is browsing through a collection of digital photos she took at the school swimming carnival last Friday. Oh, and one had a Publisher document open that looked vaguely like it could have been a school task, but I could be wrong. It may have been a party i...

This is too funny... Unless you've been living under a rock, you probably noticed that YouTube has become quite the phenomenon over the last year. If you've spent anytime at all browsing YouTube, you've probably seen some of the more popular videos stored there... It's amazing the way they tend to bubble up to the top in popularity. It seems that the Barenaked Ladies have been watching YouTube too. Barenaked Ladies are a Canadian band based in Toronto and I must confess to have become particularly fond of their music when I lived there. I think they are very clever, both lyrically and conceptually, and I really enjoy their insightful wit. BNL's latest video clip is a real testament to this cleverness. They contacted many of the "stars" of YouTube - the Evolution of Dance guy, the two guys from Diet Coke and Mentos experiment, Where the Hell is Matt, and even Geriatric1927 among others. They managed to get these people to lip-sync to their latest s...

My school has recently created a new teaching space. We were short of classrooms, and the idea was hatched to enclose an open undercroft area and turn it into a classroom. It was a great idea, and a really good lateral thinking solution. When I first saw the new room, the thing that I loved immediately about it was that the whole back wall was entirely made of glass doors, effectively giving an open view of the classroom to the outside and the outside in. Although it didn't open up onto some beautiful view, it did mean that the people walking past the room were able to see in, making the activity in that room far more transparent, if you'll excuse the pun. On closer inspection, I was amazed that the room - a new classroom created in early 2007 - had not been wired for data points, had not been fitted with wifi, had not had a provision for an interactive whiteboard or a ceiling mounted data projector. The furniture that had been ordered for the room consisted of single desk...

My apologies for the long delay between blog posts... things have been a bit upside down in my world lately as I deal with a little more change than I can comfortably get my head around. Speaking of change, I can always rely on Karl Fisch's blog to link me up with amazing resources that make it just so obvious why the world is changing and why our schools must start to embrace that change. The more I see of the schools I have worked in, the more I worry about just how much we don't "get it", and how dangerously irrelevant we are becoming to the digital generation. This video in particular just gave me goosebumps when I saw it... [youtube]6gmP4nk0EOE[/youtube]