Chris Betcher

The American education system, or at least the people who like to think they run it, seem rather obsessed with not leaving any child behind. However, it seems that some of them might already have been left behind if this video of Miss Teen USA South Carolina is anything to go by... [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/lj3iNxZ8Dww" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] OK, so I get it now... it's obvious why one fifth on US Americans can't locate the USA on a world map... They don't have maps! Of course! Forget this idea of not leaving any child behind... US schools don't need national standards-based, high-stakes testing. They just need to buy everyone maps! Then they can concentrate on getting all those people from South Africa and The Iraq and those other Asian countries properly educated. WTF?! Seriously though, I have a lot of US American friends, many of them teachers... wonderful, fabulous, dedi...

For a while now, ever since I've been producing The Virtual Staffroom podcast, I've been meaning to blog about the workflow I've developed for producing it. After a lot of trial and error, and making plenty of mistakes, I'd started getting a system happening on the best way to put the podcast together. Then along comes the new GarageBand as part of iLife '08 and all that changed. Normally I don't like it when my systems get disrupted, but in this case I am thrilled about the changes as it reduces the steps needed to make a podcast considerably. Added to that are some configuration changes I made to the way I capture the audio, and I reckon I can now do better quality recordings at much smaller filesizes with far less effort, so it's win-win all round. For anyone that might be interested, here are the tools and the workflow I plan on using from now on to create podcasts. I've got another podcast interview lined up for tomorrow night so I'm excit...

Just noticed that Karl Fisch from The Fischbowl blog has had his "Did You Know?" presentation updated to a newly revised version, thanks to some internet collaboration from Scott McLeod and a guy called XPlane who helped with the Flash animation. Karl originally created this for his own school's use last year and, as it mentions in the presentation, it was originally destined to be shown only to about 150 people.  However, it was shared on Karls' blog, the edublogosphere picked up on it and pretty soon it had been distributed to over 5 million people.  Yes, we live in exponential times.  Watch it.  Use it.  Share it.  Go start some conversations... [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/pMcfrLYDm2U" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] The full story on this presentation can be found here .   Thanks for sharing Karl.

Last year I took part in a very exciting and innovative professional development initiative. I'm referring to the incredible K12 Online Conference. If you were also a participant last year then you'll know how good it was. It you weren't, then for goodness sake, don't miss it this year! This virtual conference is the brainchild of a group of educators (amongst them are Lani Ritter Hall, Darren Kuropatwa, Wes Fryer and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach) and is probably best explained by this short blurb taken from the K12 Online website ... The “K12 Online Conference” is for teachers, administrators and educators around the world interested in the use of Web 2.0 tools in classrooms and professional practice! The 2007 conference is scheduled to be held over two weeks, October 15-19 and October 22-26 of 2007, and will include a preconference keynote during the week of October 8. The conference theme is “Playing with Boundaries.” The presenters at the conference use all sorts of dig...

That old argument about the validity of Wikipedia as a tool for research raised its head again at school this week when our library staff asked that a link to Wikipedia be removed from the "Library Links" section of our school intranet. Naturally, I questioned this and was politely informed that although the library staff think Wikipedia probably has a use, that use was not as a legitimate research tool. They preferred to disassociate the school library from Wikipedia, and only endorse "real" encyclopedias like Britannica and World Book . It seems that real encyclopedias are not free and require a login. To avoid an argument I removed it. (Besides, the kids would still use it anyway whether it was linked from the library links list or not.) But it made me disappointed to realise just how much some of us still don't "get it", to say nothing of how embarrassing it is that I work at a school where the library wants to stick its head in the sand abo...

Betchablog is officially a year old today. I was looking back through some old entries the other day and found the very first post written on the 17th August last year. I suddenly realised that a whole year had passed... Wow, how time flies! So much has changed in that 12 months, I can hardly believe it. It raises the obvious question... "Why blog?" It seems that Betchablog has had 141 posts in 52 weeks, that's almost 3 a week. It takes a reasonable amount of effort to consistently do something that often, so what's the payoff? I get asked about that a lot, and it's usually with the implication that I must just have way too much time on my hands. On the contrary. I have way too little time to do all the things I want or need to do, but somehow through all of that, blogging has become a really integral part of who I am and how I express myself. There is something incredibly therapeutic about committing your vague, intangible thoughts into written words, c...

I've been having a bit of a play with YouTube lately... not just as a consumer of content, but in true spirit of Web 2.0, as a contributor of content. It's a pretty cool site and it's easy to while away the minutes, er, hours, browsing through their stuff. I was really interested to find that Apple's totally rewritten new version of iMovie has built in support for adding videos to YouTube. It is nicely integrated too... as you finish working on your movie (using the new interface, which could be the topic of a whole other blog post), you just select YouTube from the Share menu and iMovie does all the digital origami required to package up your masterpiece into the appropriate formats and compression ratios to send it up to the 'Tube. It's very neat. It prompts you to add the relevant metadata and tags, and does a fairly efficient job of rendering and converting the file, then uploading it. As a test, I edited together this little production last night using...

Yeah, I know this is a little self indulgent, so skip this post if that sort of thing bothers you. I just wanted to share this video of my daughter's singing... She started to blurt out these beautiful songs a couple of years ago and what you see in this video is basically just raw talent. Although she takes some singing lessons now, when this short video was shot (she was only 10) she was singing pretty much on nothing more than her own natural ability. I think I have a right to be fairly proud of her... [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/3bwqY77yAqw#GU5U2spHI_4" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Steve Madsen emailed me a few months ago behalf of the NSW Computer Studies Teachers Association , asking if I'd like to run a workshop at the next CSTA quarterly meeting. He didn't have any particular theme in mind at the time, and indicated that he was happy for me to pick the topic... anything that might be useful to teachers of computing... and he asked that I get back to him with my idea for a workshop. No problem I said. I thought about what might be useful to a group of computing teachers. They would be a tech savvy group, so what could I possibly share with them? As much as it might sound like a buzzword, it seems to me that there is still an awful lot about the whole Web 2.0 phenomenon that many teachers are still trying to get their heads around, so I thought something along those lines might be useful. I didn't want it to be too predictable though, and simply talking about blogs and wikis seemed like just a little too... I don't know... obvious? I star...

You know, there's a good reason that Apple is like it is, and it's largely because of Steve Jobs' leadership. Take this quote from His Steveness in the wake of today's Apple press event... "Is Apple’s goal to overtake the PC in market share?" Jobs said, “Our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world and make products we are proud to sell and recommend to our family and friends. We want to do that at the lowest prices we can. “But there’s some stuff in our industry that we wouldn’t be proud to ship. And we just can’t do it. We can’t ship junk,” said Jobs. “There are thresholds we can’t cross because of who we are. And we think that there’s a very significant slice of the [market] that wants that too. You’ll find that our products are not premium priced. You price out our competitors’ products, and add features that actually make them useful, and they’re the same or actually more expensive. We don’t offer stripped-down, lousy products." You...

You may recall that a little game of tag went around the edublogosphere sometime last year. In this game, many edubloggers were called upon to list five little-known facts about themselves and then tagging the meme on to five more bloggers. It was a fun exercise to help share the love, and a good learning experience in getting to know more about tagging your posts for Technorati. It seems that round two has started... Jo McLeay just tagged me for a similar meme that's floating around the edublogosphere at the moment. Jo posted a list of Eight Random Facts about herself , and tagged eight more bloggers to help pass along the idea, incuding myself. So here goes... I spent 4 years at Art School in the early 80s, and majored in Screenprinting, Photography, Multimedia and Film/Video. In the 80s I was in a band called The Jellybabies and for a few years we played regular gigs in lot of pubs around Sydney . When I was 8 years old, I won the TV Times Sesame Street drawing c...

Back in the day, when data projectors were still somewhat of a novelty, it was probably acceptable to be a little unsure of how to set one up. But these days we are finding them in great demand and although our school techs are still willing to come set it up for teachers if they ask, I think there ought to come a point when we learn to do these things for ourselves. I mean, you don't ask a tech to come set up an regular overheap projector for you, or a TV and DVD player, so why would a data projector be any different? As our classrooms start to depend more and more on a range of "devices", surely we need to know how to use them for ourselves? Anyway, In an attempt to ease the way (and more-or-less gently drop the hint that it's about time some of you figured out how to do this stuff for yourselves) I made this little video that explains the step-by-step process of using a data projector the right way. After adding it to our intranet, I had a copy just sitting on m...

My daughter Kate spotted this rather insightful cartoon in the Sunday paper last week and was quick to show it to me.  She said she thought it was something that might be useful to me in my work with other teachers, so apparently it's not just the cartoon that is insightful...  I think the cartoon is funny, but would be funnier if only it were not so true... How many people do you know who refuse to adapt to newer technology because the "old way" still seems to be so much more efficient? Tags: texting sms cartoon

I think I just experienced one of those "Oh my God" moments when you see a new technology that takes a task you potentially do often and simplifies in a way that you never thought possible. The reason I say that you "potentially" do it often is that these tasks are usually either difficult or time consuming or just plain inconvenient because they involve too many steps, so you tend to avoid them where possible. An example would be sharing what you see on your screen with someone else across a network. Still images aren't too hard, but capturing an animated movie of what you are doing on your screen is tricky and usually requires special software, and then the task of sharing that movie over the Internet usually requires a few more steps, plus the issues of incompatable file formats, Mac/Windows issues, yaddah, yaddah... Too hard! So when I just downloaded and installed Jing from the Jing Project, I was blown away by just how much they have simplified this pr...

Have you ever needed to create an anagram for a word or phrase? An anagram is where you take all the letters in the word or phrase and rearrrange them to form a new word or phrase.  For example, the word "betchaboy" can be rearranged into Hey Bobcat, Tabby Echo, Batch Obey, Ace Thy Bob or Echo by Tab.  I never said they had to make sense, but they might make good names the next time you need an alias for some website login where you don't want to use your real name. Short words are pretty easy to make anagrams from, but the longer they get, the harder it is to come up with something coherent.  Unless you enlist the help of a bit ot technology to help you of course... try heading over to the Internet Anagram Server , type in your name, word or phrase and see what you get. If you come up with anything really good, share it in the comments. Tags: anagram

Someone at work asked me a question today about how to do something, and I thought it was a good question. Sometimes, the definition of a good question is a question I happen to know the answer to, and in this case I did. :-) Although I've written about this topic before, it was a while ago and since the answer might be of use to others I thought I'd respond here in my blog. That way I can just direct my colleague Bernie to the blog to get the answer, plus it might benefit a few others as well. The question was this... "If I see a video on YouTube that would be useful to me, how can I get my own standalone copy?" This would be useful if you needed to show that video somewhere you weren't connected to the Net, or to embed it into a slideshow for example. The videos on YouTube are in Flash Video format, (.flv) and don't play nicely with most other programs such as PowerPoint or Keynote files. (The notable exception is SmartNotebook, which works really...

Do you have as much sense as a Goose? I first read this little piece of writing many years ago and thought it was wonderful... As each goose flaps its wings, it creates an "uplift" for the birds that follow. By flying in a ‘V’ formation, the whole flock adds 71% extra flying range. People who share a sense of community can help each other get where they are going more easily… because they are traveling on the thrust of one another. When a goose falls out of formation, it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of flying alone. It quickly moves back to take advantage of the lifting power of the birds in front. If we have as much sense as geese, we stay in formation with those headed where we want to go. We are willing to accept their help and give our help to others. When the lead goose tires, it drops back into the formation and another goose flies to the point position. It pays to take turns doing the hard tasks. We should respect and protect each other’s unique arrang...

Boy, is my face red... As one who so often espouses the true value of a blog as being its ability to encourage direct discussion and conversation with its readers, I happened to find a couple of stray comments over at Paul Wilkinson's 24 Learning blog that took me by surprise. He and others were noting how difficult is was for them to leave a comment here on Betchablog. Paul, Rachel and an anonymous somebody were all saying how they tried to comment on my recent laptop trolley post but couldn't because this site required them to log in to comment. Oops! Sorry about that. Here's what happened... I was having a heap of comment spam a while back, so I played with the Wordpress settings to make life harder for the spambots. Apparently I made life harder for everyone. I've now turned off the strict security that required a login to leave a comment. After my chat with James Farmer last night on the Virtual Staffroom podcast where he mentioned the new Edublogs featur...

How many educators are actually blogging these days? How big is the edublogosphere? What makes a "good" blog? These are some of the questions being posed by Scott McLeod over at the Dangerously Irrelevant blog. Scott has been trying to do some research into the size and scope of the educational blogosphere, in order to get some feel for just how big it is and how much influence it might have. Scott tries to do this survey twice a year. If you are a blogging educator, you may like to fill in this very brief form to let Scott know about your work for his next count in January 2008. I found his thoughts on Authority and Rank by using Technorati was rather interesting. Tags: blogging , edublogs , internet , rank , authority , education

You read a lot about change and the need for schools to rethink and reinvent themselves for the needs of 21st century learners. It's sometimes frustrating for those of use who really want this change to happen when we feel we have to drag our less eager colleagues along kicking and screaming. It must also be pretty frustrating, threatening, scary, to those who are quite happy with the status quo and are content to leave things just as they are. It's hard to understand why we need to change what we've always done, especially if it's always worked for us in the past. One of the nice aspects of the blogosphere is the way it so easily enables one to stumble upon interesting thoughts written by others. It's especially rewarding when you come across a different thoughts from different places, but that just happen to strike you at the around the same time so that those ideas just bounce off each other, each giving depth to the other. Serendipity I believe it's call...