Chris Betcher

While catching up on my Tweets tonight I noticed one from @shareski (and swooned over by @speters !) pointing out that Twitter made a cameo appearance on CSI, as shown in the video below... It's always interesting to see a less mainstream technology such as Twitter showing up in a very mainstream place like a top rating TV show... it's sort of like being a teenager and seeing your dad wearing the same brand of clothing as you... You just sort of get the feeling that he's only doing it to appear cool... It seems to me that seeing Twitter on CSI signals a recognition of that technology, sort of the two ends of the long tail coming face to face for a moment. It's like reading a novel where the main character is a webdesigner or a podcaster, rather than a lawyer or an accountant. I've never watched CSI so I don't know who they two characters are, but I really liked the exchange between them in this scene where they are looking through the victim's Twitter page ...

Just wanted to share this Voicethread that some of my students did (there are still more kids to add their voices yet). In my Year 7 art class we were looking at the work of contemporary Australian aboriginal artist Sally Morgan, and the students had to examine a painting called My Grandmother's Country. We had quite a long discussion about it in class and looked at some of the symbolism used in the painting. The students then had to write a response to the work. In the past, this task is usually done purely as a text-only task... it gets discussed in class and they then do the writing at home. I thought I'd try using Voicethread instead, because it allowed them to access the artwork from home, to zoom in to see detail, and to hear me re-explain what they needed to do with it. (I know, I know, YOUR students never forget anything you tell them in class, but mine sometimes do). They were a bit shy about leaving voice comments at first, so instead they wrote a written respons...

Wow...  I looked in my email today and there was a note saying that Betchablog has been nominated for a 2007 Edublog Award in the category of Best Teacher Blog . I think there are probably a whole lot of teacher blogs that are a whole lot better than anything I could do, but I've still had a big smile on my face all afternoon! Of course, you can't take yourself too seriously (especially with something as potentially vacuous as your own blog!) but it certainly is a very nice feeling to be at least nominated for an Edublog Award .  As I've said several times, the real reason I write this blog is for myself as a way to "think out loud", so to think that someone else would have taken the trouble to nominate it to even be considered is very humbling, especially when I look at the impressive company I'm sharing the list with! Thanks whoever did it! And just to top it off, it seems that the Virtual Staffroom Podcast has been nominated for Best Educational Use of Au...

Blogging started for me as a way to document a year living overseas , and although many serious bloggers sneer at the idea of using a blog for something as lowly as a simple travel diary, I found it a wonderful jumpoff point into the wider world of blogging. Not only do I now have a permanent record of a wonderful year in Canada, but that blog got me into the habit of writing regularly. And really, getting into a habit is an important part of the whole blogging experience. I guess, I'm writing this now because I hadn't written a post for a few days and I was starting to think that I needed to! Not for you. For me. This blogging thing has become an integral part of who I am, and when I go for a few days without writing it just doesn't feel right. But the habit is not just about writing, it's about thinking. It's about engaging with ideas that you read on other blogs, or through listening to podcasts, or even from trawling through Twitter posts. It's about...

Twitter was down for a while today. In order to feed the Twitter addiction, @shareski started a group Skype chat and started to drag people into it, who in turn started to drag more people into it. Pretty soon we had our very own pseudo-Twitter going, as everyone continued adding people into the chat space until there must have about 50 people in the room... easily the biggest Skype chat I've had. Twitter eventually came back up, and a huge collective global sigh of relief was breathed. Still, the Skywitter chat was a fun experiment. As Vicki Davis observed... "It is like an Elvis impersonator -- not the real thing but close enough when the real one is dead." That comment made my day. :-) Tags: twitter , skype , pln

I'm sitting in class at the moment with a group of Year 10 students as they do the NSW Board of Studies exam for computing skills. For those that don't know , the Year 10 Computer Skills Test , or CST10, is a NSW government initiative to introduce standardised testing across the state to measure the ability of our 15 and 16 year old kids to confidently use computers. Every school in NSW has been required over the last few years to ensure that technology skills are integrated - or at least included - as part of the standard curriculum delivery. Our school (and I imagine most schools) have taken an approach where we have looked at the skills indicators (the specific list of computing skills that need to be assessed) and shared them out amongst the various key learning areas according to what we think are the most likely candidates to cover them in an integrated way. So, for example, our science classes try to include database use, maths integrates spreadsheets, word processin...

I had the good fortune to attend a talk this evening by Greg Whitby , the Executive Director of Education for the Catholic Education Parramatta Diocese . Greg was the special guest of the Australian College of Educators , and was speaking to a cosy little group of teachers at St Cath's Waverly. Greg is one of those larger-than-life characters that has some fairly strong ideas about how education should look for the 21st Century, and I was pretty keen to hear him talk since I'd read quite a few articles about him. His views on school reform and his somewhat radical ideas on redesigning schools are aligned with a lot of my own thinking. The talk focussed around a few key areas, among them the need for schools to reinvent themselves or to become dangerously irrelevant to our students, the need for teachers to engage in ongoing professional learning for themselves in order to truly embrace the notion of being a lifelong learner, and the way in which technology is simply an ampl...

Thanks to my Montreal mate, Sharon Peters for pointing me to this hilarious video highlighting the side effects of Halo 3.   I laughed and laughed... not that I would be obsessive, or anything like that, but I did find this very funny.  ;-) [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/ZOkF0McZKIw" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

For a bit of voyeuristic fun, you might like to take a peek at one, or all, of these sites... Twittervision , Flickrvision and Wikipediavision . There is a strange fascination watching them do their thing. All of these sites tap into the Google Maps API . I mentioned in a previous post about Twitter how an API (Application Programming Interface) can be used to give programmers backdoor access to a particular web app, enabling them to connect into them with another service or application that may or may not have ever been deigned to do so. Think of apps which have open APIs as Lego blocks that can be easily joined together, where the output of one app can be seamlessly plugged into the input of another, so that they talk to each and share data very nicely. Google Maps in particular have had plenty of interesting uses made of their very open API, and these three examples show you that in action. By using the data coming out of Twitter (the Tweets being made by people), or Flickr (th...

I was invited by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach to contribute some thoughts to a session at the Texas Tech Forum today in Austin TX. It was very nice to be asked, especially when I found that I was in the company of such respected educators as Terry Freedman and Emily Kornblut. The topic for conversation was Virtual Communities for Professional Development and Growth , where all three of us had been invited to share a few minutes talking about how we use virtual networks to support our own learning. Unfortunately, my audio stream was largely unusable and we had to abandon it before I really got started. Seems that the trans-Pacific bandwidth gods were not smiling this morning (or was it David Jakes using all the bandwidth in the next room playing with Google Earth? Hmm, we'll never know) Nevertheless, here's the brief outline of what I would have said, or something very much like it... If you accept that Learning is a Conversation , and that some of the most powerful learning can ta...

I've become quite a fan of Twitter, although I'll readily admit I never really "got it" to start with. However, as I mentioned in a previous post, and also in a recent tutorial video, Twitter makes a lot more sense once you add a group of people to your network. Having a likeminded group of fellow Twits from which to tap into some collective wisdom turns Twitter from a curious plaything into a rather amazing personal learning environment. Twitter has an open API (Application Programming Interface), which mean that programmers who can think of interesting ways to mash the basic Twitter feed into another service are able to tap into the guts of Twitter in order to get it to power their own apps. There are a number of interesting tools/toys that hang off the Twitter API, from useful local clients like Twitterific , Twitterroo , Snitter , Spaz and Twitterbox , to fun implementations like Twittervision and Twittervision 3D . And just to show how circular life is, I...

On one of the several mailing lists I subscribe to, I saw a question from a network manager in another school asking for advice in dealing with some mistreatment of computer equipment by students. His proposed solution was to install webcams in the computer rooms and to stream their output to a server where it could be recorder and monitored. This person was asking for suggestions or advice from anyone else who had gone down this path. It's not a path I particularly like... I don't mean for this reply to become a lengthy diatribe (or worse yet, a cranky rant), but I think this approach is totally going down the wrong path and it's something I feel strongly about. I see many in school IT management who seem to be taking the path of constant surveillance and security over the harder-to-do but better-in-the-long-run approach of teaching students appropriate behaviour with technology in the first place. I see it happening with the way school lockdown their computers with com...

While trolling through some old files today I happened upon this video of some Lego robotics projects done by my Year 10 students about five years ago. I recall that their task was to build a sort of merry-go-round device that conformed to a few specific requirements. From memory it had to have provision for two "seats", and when a start button was pressed it had to rotate around align the first of these seats with a loading platform, pause, and then rotate to align the second seat. Once both seats were "loaded", it had to pause, then start rotating slowly, then get faster, until it reached top speed and did a specified number of rotations. Once these were complete if had to slow down again to a stop, aligning the first seat, then pausing again and finally aligning the second seat. Here's the video...[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/eYUOfaFEJF8" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] It was an ...