Chris Betcher

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 ...

In the leadup to the release of Apple's iPhone there was a great deal of talk about the device, mainly on MacBreak Weekly and the Apple Phone Show ... both excellent podcasts that set a real benchmark for quality when it comes to the podcasting medium. There was tons of pontificating and prognosticating about the iPhone, and how it would change the cell phone market forever. All that aside, one of the theories I heard over and over was that most people never actually tap into the full capabilities of their cell phone, with a huge majority of people using their phone just to make phone calls. Imagine that! The idea that most people never really explore their phone's capabilities really hit home to me the other day at a conference when I saw a demonstration of a video made by a guy from footage he had very proudly taken with his phone. It was a few shots edited together with some music under it, and I asked the question at the end "Did you edit that on your phone?...

The other day, a colleague on a mailing list asked for some background info on EPS graphic files. It seems her school wanted something professionally printed and the printer asked that the artwork be provided in EPS format. Thanks to the ubiquity of the web, we are mostly only exposed to the more common web graphic formats like JPEG and GIF files these days, so some of the more exotic types like EPS are not as well understood as they could be. For what it's worth, here is my reply... Ah, EPS files! A thing of beauty and a joy forever! For anyone who works with graphics Encapsulated Post Script, or EPS files, are the holy grail of image formats. They are the ideal format for storing original artwork, although they are generally pretty useless for actually applying that artwork to a final format. By that I mean that most final applications for graphics, whether it be the web or printed documents, cannot use EPS files natively. But for a way of storing the original artwork, EPS ...

Something that has been bothering me a lot lately are the constant wails I hear from some teachers about plagiarism. Obviously, plagiarism is a bad thing and we need to help kids learn that it's not appropriate, but I keep seeing incidences of plagiarism lately that I find very hard to blame the kids for. One has to wonder that if kids are blatantly copying and pasting large chunks of stuff into their assignments then perhaps we need to think about how we can be smarter as teachers by asking better questions in the first place, and create tasks that are simply not so plagiarisable to start with. Just to clarify, when I talk about plagiarism I'm referring to the idea of kids copying slabs of information out of textbooks without thought, or of kids copying work directly from their classmates, or of kids using wording and information from books without citing their sources. The issue of citation is a slightly different issue and I'm not so concerned with that one... that...