Chris Betcher

Yes, it's meme time again.  A meme , according to wikipedia, "comprises a unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices; such units or elements transmit from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena."  In other words, it's a way to help spread a culture. The blogosphere occasionally sends these memes around as a way to spread this culture of online community... sort of like a "getting to know you" exercise that you might do with students on the first day of class.  A topic is chosen, people respond to it and then pass the meme along to others to contribute to.  By tagging others like this, the meme spreads quickly. I was tagged a couple of days ago in a meme called 7 Things You Don't Need To Know About Me, by a PE teacher in Victoria named Jarrod Robinson , or mrrobbo to those that know him.  He was tagged by Rodd Lucier from Canada, otherwise known as thecleversheep .  (I find it interesting that Rodd...

I was just doing a tidy-up of my hard drive and I found this video that I'd almost forgotten about, so I thought I'd put it up on YouTube so I know where to find it in future. Back in 2006, I spent a yea r teaching in Oakville, Canada, as part of a teaching exchange.  I really enjoyed the whole experience, which was life-changing in many ways.  In fact, I'm back in Toronto at the moment and despite the -24 degree temperatures this really is like my second home. When you go on a teaching exchange you act as somewhat of an ambassador for your country, taking whatever opportunities you can to share some of the culture of your own country with the locals.  So one day, I decided to let my Grade 9 BTT101 class experience the classic Australian taste of Vegemite .  Most Aussie kids grow up with Vegemite , a yeast based spread that usually goes on toast, crumpets and crackers.  Seeing the reaction of non-Aussies makes me realise that it's somewhat of an acquired taste, but it...

It seems so easy to make global connections these days. Tools like Twitter , Skype , podcasts, blogs and even good old fashioned email make it easy to build connections with others. But they also make it easy to overlook the fact that behind each tweet, IM or email there are real people. Although the online world has made us the most connected we have ever been, at the same time the sometimes faceless, disembodied nature of it can also allow us to be quite disconnected if we let it. One of the things I've really enjoyed doing over the last couple of years is to take every opportunity to make real connections with the people behind the avatars. I remember the first time I bumped into Judy O'Connell at a meeting in Sydney... although I knew of HeyJude and had read her blog for a while there was still this sense of "wow... so you ARE real!" when I finally met her. Since then, I try to make a point of meeting other members of my online world in the real world wheneve...

I take a class of kids with some pretty severe learning difficulties once a week to do some computer stuff with them.  A few weeks ago, one of the girls finished her work early and since there was only a few minutes till the bell she asked if she could play Tetris online .  A moment later when I walked by she was playing the game and she was totally awesome at it!  I mean, I was blown away at just how fast and accurate she was...  this is from a student that usually really struggles with many other intellectual tasks. Tetris, although based on a simple concept, is a game that requires a good sense of spatial awareness, timing and multitasking to play well... and this girl was playing really well! I called her regular teacher over and pointed out how good this girl was at the game.  Her teacher had never actually played Tetris before and wasn't quite sure how the game worked, so I asked the student to give her teacher a lesson in how to play it.  It was gre...

One of the many things that continually impresses me about my current school is how consistently we try to expose our students to big thinking and authentic, real-world experience.  It shows in lots of ways, from our focus on employing teachers and support staff that are passionate and committed to being the very best in their fields, to the way we manage to set the bar of expectation as high as possible for our kids.  Many studies confirm that the best way to get kids to excel is to give them great teachers who have high standards and expectations, who know their stuff, who model expertise and passion, and who create situations for our students to shine. This video, which I recorded on my Nokia N95, is the world premiere performance of a piece of music commissioned especially for the school and written by Australian composer Paul Jarman .  It was performed by our students and staff in the main concert hall at the Sydney Opera House. Being new to the school this year, it...

The K12 Online Conference is well and truly over for another year (well, in as much as a virtual, permanently archived conference can ever be "over"), but I thought I'd re-post this presentation I made for it.  It's called I Like Delicious Things and looks at how tagging works in systems like Flickr and Delicious , and how tags can accumulate into complete systems of organisation called folksonomies. I know it's already online at the K12 Online website, but I recently uploaded a slightly bigger, higher res version to Vimeo .  I'm guessing that there are still lots of people who never saw this on the original K12 Online site, so here it is again if you're interested... I Like Delicious Things from Chris Betcher on Vimeo .

You may think it a little indulgent, but every year the Edublog Awards are held to recognise those educators who have somehow managed to use blogs in a way that might be worthy of some acknowledgment. Whilst there will always be those who criticise awards programs as being too elitist, too self-promotional, too biased or too just plain wanky, I think it's great that there is this opportunity for those who are using blogging for educational purposes to get some sort of recognition for it, and also to uncover a whole lot of new blogs and bloggers that may not have been in your feeds. Thankfully, the nomination and voting procedures got a complete overhaul this year that will hopefully see them be a lot fairer and less open to manipulation than in past years. At the risk of sounding self-promotional and wanky, I just wanted to say how surprised I am to have not one, but two nominations this year in the Most Influential Blogpost category . To the folks that proposed the two nominat...

There is a cliche that ones hears a lot in education about the need for teachers to not be a "sage on the stage", but rather a "guide on the side". The main idea behind these two cute terms is to denounce the role of a teacher as being a "sage"; the font of all knowledge in a classroom, someone who stands in front of the empty-headed students and tells them everything they need to know. We decry this idea of a sage, and quite rightly too. In a post-Google world, the notion that anybody - including a teacher - could still be the source of all information and wisdom is pretty ridiculous. Likewise, the other half of this expression implies that the more proper role of a teacher is that of being a "guide" for students. Someone who goes along on the journey with students as a partner in learning. As my good friend Tony Butler would say, it's about creating a "big brother, little brother" relationship with students rather than a ...

You may have noticed that it's been a bit quiet here on the blog lately. I've not been writing here as much as usual and I've really missed it! There have been a couple of reasons for this little sabbatical, but the most significant one was the book project I've been working on with Mal Lee. For almost a year now (OMG, has it really been that long?!) Mal and I have been writing a book together about the use of interactive whiteboards for education. It's been a huge project, partly because it's been a lot to write - nearly 60,000 words - but mostly because it's been an absolute journey of learning for me as we've written it. I'm pleased to say that the finished manuscript finally went to the publishers this week! In case you're interested, here's a little bit of background into the book... Mal Lee is an ex school principal and he provided a lot of the insights around the management, funding and leadership aspects of implementing IWBs effec...

One gem of wisdom I've quoted a number of times on this blog is from a speech given by professor Seymour Papert, and it goes like this... "The model that says learn while you’re at school, while you’re young, the skills that you will apply during your lifetime is no longer tenable. The skills that you can learn when you’re at school will not be applicable. They will be obsolete by the time you get into the workplace and need them, except for one skill. The one really competitive skill is the skill of being able to learn. It is the skill of being able not to give the right answer to questions about what you were taught in school, but to make the right response to situations that are outside the scope of what you were taught in school. We need to produce people who know how to act when they’re faced with situations for which they were not specifically prepared." What I really like about that quote is the idea that it's not the specific content of what we teach that rea...

Imagine this scenario... you are suddenly diagnosed with a life threatening disease, something very dangerous but quite curable if you have the right information about how to do so.  Your doctor knows that there is an answer to your serious problem, but cannot recall what drug is required to treat it.  He remembers reading something about it a long time ago, but can no longer recall the exact name of the drug. He reaches towards the mouse on his computer, and begins to click a link that will take him to the online medical directory where he will find the answer he needs to cure your condition. "Stop!", you declare.  "That's cheating!  If you can't remember the name of that drug without looking it up, then what sort of doctor are you?  I want you to just remember it without looking it up." Of course, I imagine that if this situation were real you would be only too happy for the doctor to do whatever was required to find the cure for your disease.  You wouldn...

I recently worked with our Year 4 teachers to get their kids blogging for the first time. I'd suggested blogging as a good activity for these students as a way to get them writing and reading more, as well as being for a potentially more authentic audience.  The teachers involved were a little apprehensive at first but quickly warmed to the idea and were quite keen to give it a go, especially as I said I  would work closely with them to get our blogging project off the ground... this was the first time we had tried to use blogs with the students so I was very keen to see it succeed of course. As you may have read in a previous post, we managed to be hit with numerous technical hurdles as Edublogs recovered from a series of password resets, something the kids found annoying and tedious but also that they took very well.  The teachers of the students were a little confused that blogging was so complicated ("why do we need to reset our passwords every time we try to use the ...

If you've not taken part in it before, put the K12 Online Conference in your calendar. Run as a virtual conference, K12 Online is an annual two week long professional development event for educators around the world, where the conference "sessions" are offered in the form of digital presentations - podcasts, vidcasts, digital sories, etc. This year's event is based on the theme "Amplifying Possibilities" and will kick off with a pre-conference keynote address in the week starting October 13. Over the next two weeks, October 21 - 31, there will be a regular stream of virtual presentations released in four different strands.  These 20 minute presentations have been selected from a number of submissions that teachers all over the world put forward, and were chosen using a blind peer review process. This year, I was fortunate enough to have my proposal selected for the conference, something I'm very excited about! The session is called " I Like Deli...

A while back, I went geocaching with my daughter Kate.  We spent quite a while hunting for an elusive cache not far from where we live but we thoroughly enjoyed the experience of being outdoors in the sunshine, using GPS technology to have a bit of real world fun. In fact we enjoyed it so much that after we signed the cache's logbook and returned to the car to drive home, Kate asked if we could place our own cache some time for other people to find. What a great idea.  I've been wanting to place a cache of my own for a while, but Katie was the impetus I needed to actually do it.  So, no time like the present, we took a detour on the way home and went via the local Dollar Store, picked out a suitable plastic container, a handful of inexpensive trinkets to include inside it, and a small notebook to use as the logbook... all this for less that $20 (and it could have been much less if we weren't being extravagant with the trinkets) We went home, printed out the official geoc...

I really like Edublogs .  James is a great guy, and the service he has put together is pretty awesome most of the time.  So awesome in fact that I recommend it highly to any teachers who want to try blogging with their students.  It has all the cool features, plugins and themes, as well as just being a really good blogging service. When it works. Just lately, Edublogs seems to have been plagued with problems, with the recent need for multiple password resets, general system slowness and, today, a period of maintenance that saw it become unavailable for over an hour.  Normally, I wouldn't complain... after all it's a free service and I don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth, but it went down smack in the middle of a Year 4 class that were finally looking forward to blogging after spending the last few periods trying to recover from those random password resets!  Last lesson we finally got all the kids logged in with new passwords, got them to change their passwords to...

My daughter Kate, of whom I am incredibly proud, took part this morning in the 2008 Tournament of Minds . She was part of her school's entry into the annual event, which is run as an activity for the kids in the school's gifted and talented program. The performance by the students was quite amazing.  For those of you unfamiliar with the Tournament of Minds event, the students are given a scenario to which they must respond.  This response is typically done in the form of a dramatic stageplay, but getting to the point of performing that stage play requires a huge amount of cross curricula learning to take place.  There is lots of behind the scenes research, teamwork, collaboration, literacy and creativity.  Teams must write, direct and produce the act, create all the props, and meet strict guidelines as to allowed times, materials and so on. The scenario this year was that a famous author (chosen from a list of possible authors) had lost their memory. To try and reinstate the au...

It's August 31st, so here's wishing you Happy Blog Day 2008! Got a blog? Want to take part? You can find more info at the official Blog Day website , where you'll find the full story about what it's all about. Essentially, here's what you do... Find 5 Blogs that you find interesting. Notify the 5 bloggers that you are recommending them as part of BlogDay 2008 Write a short description of the Blogs and place a link to the recommended Blogs Post the BlogDay Post (on August 31st) and Add the BlogDay tag using this link: http://technorati.com/tag/BlogDay2008 and a link to the BlogDay web site. http://danielfelice.com - I used to teach Daniel back in the late 90s. He was an amazing kid, super smart and very web savvy. I know I learned lots more from Daniel than he ever learned from me! He currently lives in Ireland with his partner, works in the technology business, and is always looking for new ways to monetise his blogging. http://lindajoh.wordpress.co...

I did post a version of this about a year ago, but my mate Bryn Jones from Perth recently revamped the "10 Things that make a Difference" list.  He recently added an 11th thing, and it's a pretty good list, so I thought I'd repost it here for your consideration. So, for what it's worth, here are 11 Things that seem to make a difference in helping teachers get up to speed with using ICT. 1. Emotional Support If you look at how teachers are using technology in schools, it ought to be pretty clear that some really “click” with it and some don’t. In fact, if you look at statistics, about 75% are just doing it because they feel they have to, and about 16% are downright obstinate about not doing it. It’s incredibly threatening to these people if they feel they are being forced to adopt technologies and work practices they really don’t understand. I found it fascinating that the number one things that teachers need in order to integrate ICT is emotional support. Sometime...

The school at which I teach, PLC Sydney , was in the news this morning regarding a recent assessment task conducted by one of our Year 9 English classes. The article from the Sydney Morning Herald talks about how this class is pushing the "open book exam" concept into allowing students to use resources that take them beyond the boundaries of the classroom and enable them to draw on outside sources - the web, other books, their own personal networks - using whatever tools they choose - mobile phones, computers, iPods, PDAs, etc - in order to be assessed on their learning. I actually had a meeting with their teacher, Deirdre Coleman, about this idea the other day and we discussed at length some of the pros and cons, what sort of tasks were best suited to this approach, where the boundaries lay between cheating and resourcefulness and so on. While the SMH article is mostly accurate in its reporting, some of the value judgments that appear from reading between the lines are a...

I've been talking to a lot of teachers lately about copyright, Creative Commons and how we might deal with the issues that arise when we want to use other peoples' images and media and remix them into something new and creative. The restrictive thinking of traditional copyright has become an anachronism in the digital age. It just doesn't serve us well any more. The example I've been citing is the one I heard Larry Lessig mention, and that's the story of how when land owners were once given title to their land, the title of ownership used to be phrased in language that essentially said they owned not only the parcel of land, but all the ground below it to the center of the earth and all the sky above it to the heavens. It was a nice romantic concept, this idea that you owned not just the surface of the land but the infinite column of space that extended above it. Well, it was a nice romantic concept until the airplane was invented, that is. As more aircraft st...