Chris Betcher

Ok, I must admit I'm impressed by Microsoft's new table-like project called Surface, which Bill G has been showing off lately. It's a multitouch capable computer that works in a table form factor. There are some obvious uses of it, like restaurants, casinos, etc where transactions take place largely on a table. I don't know how commercially successful it will be but I think it's a pretty cool technology! Watch the video and check it out for yourself...  I particularly like the way it interacts with devices like digital cameras and PDAs.  I presume those devices would have to have some form of wireless interconnectivity such as Bluetooth or Wifi?  Very cool though! [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/5yJ3x9XNFK8" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

I blogged recently about my effort to raise funds for MS research by taking part in the MS Walk and Fun Run here in Sydney. Thanks to a great deal of support from friends, family and workmates I've managed to raise a decent amount of money for this great cause. The people from MS Australia rang me recently to ask if I'd be prepared to do an interview with the local newspaper to help promote the event and naturally I said yes. So one of the journos from my local paper rang me at work the other day to ask a few questions, and organise a photographer to come by my house. The angle I suggested to the journo was that I was really impressed by the online tools provided by MS Australia, such as the fundraising websites that are created when you register for the event, and that one of the reasons I have been able to raise as much as I have was due to the connections and tools that the Internet enables. I pointed out that many of my friends and aquaintances from the Blogosphere h...

My Linda sent me an email today with a wonderful quote from Eric Hoffer about the nature of learning... "In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists." It's so true. As educators we talk a lot about the importance of being a lifelong learner, but to actually BE a lifelong learner is sometimes tough. It means accepting that what you don't know far outweighs what you do know; it requires the mental muscle to always be curious and asking questions about the world and how it works; and it means being mature enough to regularly put your ego aside and freely admit that you really don't know the answer to most things. Funnily enough, the group of people that I often see struggling with this idea more than most are teachers. We seem to espouse the lifelong learning ideal, but many of us still like to always be in control and feel like we at the top of the food chain wh...

There is obviously a great deal of interest among teachers regarding the possible educational uses of online video sharing sites such as YouTube and Google Video . Tons of new copycat services are popping up all over the web, with cryptic Web2.o names like iFilm , Viddler , Viddyou , Umundo and even the unambiguously named TeacherTube . It's clear that the use of short video snippets is proving very popular with lots of people. I attended a workshop a few years ago where I heard a talk by Hall Davidson . If you've not heard of Hall Davidson before he is the guy behind United Streaming , which I understand has since been acquired by Discovery Learning. Hall was really pushing this notion of giving teachers and kids access to short, sharp, to-the-point video clips in order to engage the learner and effectively impart a specific concept. He proposed that video was an exceptionally powerful medium, but that we don't need to sit a class in front of a TV to watch a full 60...

I like this cartoon. It reminded me of that old story about an infinite number of monkeys tapping away on an infinite number of typewriters, and how they would eventually rewrite all the great works of Shakespearian literature. Infinity is a big number. Someone, somewhere, is bound to write something worthwhile eventually. A little bit like the blogosphere perhaps. technorati tags: blogging

You might think that your world of browsing the web begins and ends with that little blue "e" logo on your desktop, but you might be surprised at just how many other (better?) alternatives exist out there. Over the years I've probably had a play with just about every web browser I can lay my hands on, but I thought it might be interesting to talk about some of the others. Browser life began in 1992 with the granddaddy of them all, Mosiac. However, after the famous "browser wars" between Netscape and Microsoft many years ago, it seemed like Internet Explorer was destined to be the only browsing kid on the block. Of course, for the alternative thinkers amongst us, there were some notable options like the wonderful Opera browser which just got better and better with every version, but for all intents and purposes it appeared that Microsoft had won the browser battle with the ubiquitous Internet Explorer . Was it a better browser? Probably not. Like so many tec...

If there was ever a doubt that the tools of Web 2.o are dramatically simplifying the way we can embed digital technologies into our classrooms, let me point you towards a neat little project run by a couple of amazing teachers who decided to dabble with the possibilities of a wiki. This wonderful piece of web collaboration was put together by Neil D'Aguiar from Richard Challoner Secondary School in New Maiden, Surrey, UK, and Simon O'Carroll from Holy Trinity Catholic High School in Oakville, Ontario, Canada. It's a great example of how something as simple as a wiki can be used to develop a sophisticated web project that works simply and easily across the boundaries of time and place. The site can be found at flatplanet.wikispaces.com . I first met Simon when I was on a teacher exchange to Canada during 2006. We shared a workroom (and occasionally chicken wings) and became quite good mates. As a teacher of Religion, Simon was a relative newbie to the integration of te...

Here is a wonderful article by Dale Spender that I found in the Sydney Morning Herald this week.  It talks about the changes taking place in our schools and while Spender's work has always been unashamedly pro technology for education, it's nice to see a piece like this being printed in the mainstream media.  We certainly need to be having this discussion. The full article can be found here , but here is a snippet.. Contrast this with the confident "digital natives" who are now the students in our schools. These are the children of the information age for whom the screen, not the page, comes first. Far from being passive recipients of existing knowledge, digi-kids have learnt by doing - by trial and error, and problem solving. It is not the right answer that they want; it is the right question they are after as they fearlessly try any of the new gadgets or applications. They are completely at ease with computers and the internet, and with accessing, creating and distr...

You probably know about Single-touch screens.  If you have ever used a SmartBoard, Tablet PC or any other sort of touch sensitive device you will probably have noticed that you can only have a single point of contact.  If you try and draw on a SmartBoard in two places at once, it takes an average of the two locations and draws the line halfway between the two contact points.  Getting used to writing on a SmartBoard without touching the screen is a bit disconcerting at first but most people pretty quickly adapt. Likewise, the reason that you can't write on a Tablet PC with just your finger and why it requires a stylus pen is that it's really the only way to give the screen a single contact point, allowing you to interact with the panel using the stylus tip while having it ignore the rest of your hand resting on the screen while you write.  Basically, most of the touch devices we are familiar with will tolerate a single point of contact only. So what we really need to move forwar...

Yes, it's yet another made-up word from the wonderful world of Web 2.0... Moblogging. Moblogging, or mobile blogging, is all about being able to take photos on your mobile phone and blog them directly to a blogging service without the need to go via a computer as such. I bought a new Sony Ericsson K610i mobile phone recently and was quite excited to find not only a good quality camera that took a decent photo, but also an option in the photo gallery menu that said "Blog this". Naturally it didn't take me long to have a play with it and I can now snap a photo with the phone, and with a single menu selection it will resize the photo and upload to a blog in one fell swoop! Unfortunately, it doesn't let you specify which blogging service you use so I can't set it to upload to this blog, but it does do a fairly seamless job of going to a Blogger account. The very first time you send a photo off into cyberspace, it automatically creates a new blog account on Blog...

  If you've been involved in education circles for any length of time, you would no doubt be aware of the work of Jamie Mackenzie.  Jamie is probably best known as the creator of the Webquest concept, but also does a lot of great work with higher order thinking, and the use of deep questions to deal with complexity and encourage kids to really think.  I was fortunate to be invited to attend a two day CEO workshop with Jamie Mackenzie over the last couple of days and I found it really worthwhile.  Like a lot of good information, you find yourself marvelling at the sheer simplicity of his ideas but still wondering why you've never thought of this stuff yourself.  It was great to meet the guy in person after having heard and read so much about his work over the years. His workshops focussed on the use of deep questions to encourage deep thinking, with some great hands-on examples of using primary sources of information to investigate suppositional questions about interesting top...

I've taken up running lately. That might not sound very impressive to you, but as a childhood asthmatic who could never even run 100 metres without falling in a heap, the fact that I can now run for over 5km (and improving all the time) is a big deal for me. I don't know what happened over the last few years, but my asthma just sort of got better and now I can do all sorts of things that I was never really able to do before... I like it! Of course, technology has played a big part in keeping me motivated too. Since I discovered the joy of the Nike+iPod combination I've found it much easier to stay focussed and motivated about running. For those that don't know about this little gem of technology, the Nike+ kit comprises of a sensor that goes in or on your shoe and a receiver that connects to your ipod Nano. The sensor contains an accelerometer which detects your footsteps, reports them wirelessly to the receiver which then calculates your statistics as you run. ...

When I started teaching at a girls' school after many years teaching boys, I was surprised when one of the students came up to me one day and said "Sir, has anyone ever told you that you look like Russell Crowe?" In fact, at that point in my life, nobody ever had. In fact, it had never really even crossed my mind that I looked like anyone at all. Over the next few months at the school however, I heard the "has anyone ever told you that you look like Russell Crowe?" comment quite a few times. I had never really considered it. Funnily enough, over the next year or so I started to hear the same comment from people outside the school as well, which was odd because in my previous 40-something years of life, no one had ever said it to me. It wasn't until I arrived in Canada during the year of my teaching exchange that one of the neighbours said to me one day "Do you know who you look like?"... "Russell Crowe!" that I started to wonder if ...