Chris Betcher

My school bought a few class sets of laptops recently. The whole point of having laptops instead of another computer lab was so they could be used more flexibly around the school, but the obvious problem was how to store and transport them from room to room. I'd seen classroom laptop trolleys on the market but none of them seemed to be exactly what we were after. The main laptop trolley maker in the Australian market appears to be PC-Locs from Western Australia, and although their products look ok, in my opinion they are hugely overpriced for what they are. For our 15 laptops we would have had to buy their 20 bay model, and at just over $5000 each they seemed outrageously expensive! I'd had a number of conversations with them on the telephone, but they were pretty firm on their pricing and there was no way I was going to pay that sort of money for a few pieces of welded steel and some rubber wheels, so this was a business deal that was clearly never going to happen. I eve...

How many messages do you have in your inbox right now? If your answer was "too many!", you may like to check out this presentation by Merlin Mann from 43 Folders called Inbox Zero. If you get a lot of email, and you sometimes feel like you're drowning in it, then this talk could be for you. Merlin presented this to the guys at Google, who I hear live and breathe email. If these tips are able to help the Google guys better handle their email, then they can probably help you too... Of course, most of the stuff Merlin talks about is just common sense, but remember, the most uncommon thing in the world is common sense. [kml_flashembed movie="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=973149761529535925" width="400" height="326" wmode="transparent" /]

My girlfriend Linda is the ultimate uber-listmaker. She always has a list or three going, which probably explains why she is so organised all the time. Of course, in her role as a consultant she HAS to be organised, so every time she starts to think about a project and how she'll attack it, she starts with a list. And it works really well for her. I'm endlessly inpressed with how much she gets done and how effectively she does it, and I know that a lot of that is due to her ability to create (and use!) lists. I've also noticed that she gets a real sense of achievement as she checks each item off her list. While I can see that lists would help me be better organised, my problem is that even when I write one for myself, I usually lose it before I finish ticking things off. What I need is a list, or better yet a collection of lists, that always reside in the one place, somewhere I won't lose them, that I can get to from nearly anywhere. The web would be perfect. And...

This rather clever video gives an interesting perspective on the application of copyright law.  The makers took small (fair use?) snippets from a whole bunch of different Disney films and mashed them together to explain the way that copyright law applies to different situations.  It's an interesting approach and a good discussion starter.... [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/pUPsfYJONrU" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

I don't often find myself agreeing with Sydney talkback radio host Alan Jones ... I generally find him brash and arrogant, full of sweeping statements that irk me no end, but this piece from his regular video editorial actually makes sense... Download The key thing about it is that teachers who are only in teaching for the money really are in it for the wrong reasons. Of course, having said that, I think it pretty reasonable that teachers ought to be paid in comparable terms to the many other professions out there that do work which contributes far less to the greater good of the world and yet get paid far more. I know that there are probably a few paycheck-driven teachers with 8:00 to 3:00 mentalities, just as there are in every occupation, but as a whole I have never known a more hardworking group of people than teachers. Merit pay sounds like a good idea to me, as long as we can agree on what sorts of things count as being meritorious.

I spent a lovely afternoon in the city yesterday showing My Linda around. We walked around Darling Harbour for quite a while before heading down to the Rocks and Circular Quay. Sydney really is a very pretty city. While we were at Darling Harbour I took this shot. ( click to enlarge ) This photo-panorama is actually a composite of 20 individual photos. Each photo was taken slightly overlapping the previous one, and there were three rows of photos - one across the middle, then a row above and a row below. They were then taken into a wonderful piece of Mac software called Calico , which I think does an incredibly clever job of stitching them all together into a single shot. You don't even need to tell Calico which bits go where... just dump all the photos in and it figures out where the overlaps are. Windows users might like to look at a similar product called Autostitch . technorati tags: sydney , panorama , calico , autostitch

I once worked with a very nice Vice Principal. He was a charming fellow and I enjoyed working with him. In his role as VP however, he was required to be pretty strict with the kids... and he did a great job of it. His role was to uphold the rules and policies of the school and he did it with a certain authoritarian gruffness and bulldog-like tenacity. He seemed to work on the idea that if you repeated the rules often enough then the kids would eventually do the right thing (or at least have no excuse for not knowing what the right thing was!) Every morning, he would get on the school's PA system and reiterate the rules to the kids. And he would always, always, always finish his PA address with the phrase "Have a great day and remember to treat everyone with equity, dignity and respect". It was something of a catchphrase for him. The thing about this approach to repeating the rules so often is that the kids start to just tune out. I asked them one morning in homero...

About six months ago, due to a major change in my own personal situation, I moved back into my mother's house. Fortunately, she lives in a big house and I moved into the downstairs part of it where it is pretty much self contained and self sufficient. I have my own bedroom, loungeroom, bathroom and study area, so things could be a lot worse. What I'm finding fascinating though is just how little time I spend watching TV or listening to the radio these days. In the past 6 months I think I have watched TV about 4 times, and only then because I was completely bored. I don't even have a radio, except the one in my car and I never listen to that. Instead, I have been listening to a lot of podcasts which I subscribe to via the iTunes directory. For entertainment I watch a lot of video blogs, again sourced largely via download through the iTunes directory and viewed using my Mac or my video iPod. I even get regular news and weather reports directly on my 3G mobile phone vi...

This video clip from the Simpsons always makes me laugh. However, I also find it kind of sad because we have all occasionally given tasks to kids that promote a similar attitude to that of the test superviser guy in this clip. Kids are capable of so much, but sometimes we are in such a hurry to just "get to the bottom line" that we underestimate what our students are really capable of. [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/Xl4BMpTHX_s" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] As good teachers, I know we want our kids to undertake rich, deep tasks that are nuanced and subtle; to let them engage in content in meaningful ways that enable them to construct their own connections and learning... and yet in our hurry to get through the syllabus we sometimes want them to "just say slavery", so we can get on to the next thing. (That's right HSC, I'm lookin' at you!) I'm sure we've all been guilt...

In a world where all of us suffer from information overload to some extent, the ability to pick and choose the articles that we find interesting and have them delivered directly to us surely has to be a useful service. That's what RSS does. RSS is a wonderful thing, but I know many people who still don't use it. RSS , or Really Simple Syndication, is a means of subscribing to a webpage, or a blog, or blog comments, or a podcast, or a series of news articles - pretty much anything really - and then every time something on that site changes, a piece of software called a feedreader collects and collates all those changes into one place. You subscribe to whatever you like. It's a little like designing your very own personal newspaper that contains only the articles that interest you. If you think about it a bit like an old style message board or web forum where you have new messages delivered to you via email, RSS is a similar idea. Under these old style systems, you beco...

Do you have kids?  Do you teach kids?  Are you a kid? Teenage Affluenza is a serious disease that is inflicting many of our young people.  World Vision have put together this short video explaining a little about it...  it's about 5 minutes long, but well worth the watch. [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/KFZz6ICzpjI" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] Seriously though, seeing the point made in this video makes one really aware of just how lucky we are in the developed world, and ought to be a wake up call for many of us.