Chris Betcher

Fellow blogger Judy O'Connell (from the HeyJude blog) recently started working at a large Marist school in Sydney, and she was kind enough to share some insights about her new school on her blog recently. St Josephs Hunters Hill is not just "a Marist school", but is really THE Marist school. It is the flagship school for the brothers here in Sydney and has quite the reputation for providing a quality educational experience. For anyone who may not know, Marist schools were founded by Marcellin Champagnat in the early 1800s, a Frenchman who saw a specific need for boys' education and proceeded to set up schools to meet that need. I read Judy's post with interest as I attended a Marist school as a kid. I also spent 8 years teaching in a Marist school. So as an ex-Marist boy I can personally vouch for both the strength and the gentleness of the Marist way of doing things. Because the Marists have a particular devotion to Jesus's mother, Mary, there is a pe...

Towards the end of last year I received a request from a teaching colleague about providing a bit of technical assistance for one of her students with a video project. The student, whom I will simply refer to as Joanna, was studying the HSC Extension 2 English course and had set herself a fairly grandiose goal for a movie project. Ext2 English is a very demanding course, and Joanna had elected to create an elaborate video as part of the package of material she was submitting for assessment. Joanna's goals for the movie were considerable. She had a number of special effects in mind to help tell the story she wanted to tell, but she had very little actual experience in movie making. Some of the effects she was proposing were very sophisticated, with visions of a very dreamlike sequence and some unusual effects... effects that were far beyond those available in entry level video editing software. She came to me to ask for some advice about the best tools to use and how she could ...

One of the new year's resolutions that Linda and I made for 2008 is to try and be a little kinder to the planet; whether that be to walk and cycle more instead of driving, to buy products that are more environmentally friendly, or to make an effort to generate less waste... even small changes may help the planet. If we can encourage a few others to do the same, it may help even more. There are plenty of great stories about the Power of One... the effect that one person can have if the ripples from their actions spread far enough to influence others. One of the great Power of One stories is that of Earth Hour . Earth Day started in Sydney last year with an idea that if we simply turned our lights off for one hour the overall effects could be substantial. Of course, it was a symbolic gesture more than anything else, but on 31 March 2007, 2.2 million people and 2100 Sydney businesses turned off their lights for one hour - Earth Hour. During this single hour, the collective effort o...

The Education Network Australia , or Edna for short, recently did a little survey of why people blog (or don't blog) as part of their eLearning Insights series. They did it on their Vox Pop service, a rather neat little web app that enables people to record an audio grab directly to a widgety thing on the page, a little like Evoca or Voicethread . This sort of technology is neat because you can embed audio into a page without the need for special software and there is no messing about with uploading files, etc. How very Web 2.0... Anyway, they were asking people to respond to the question " Do you blog? Why or why not? " I left a comment on the service, but I was also quite intrigued to hear everyone else's responses to the question. Those who blogged regularly seemed to focus on the idea of community, collaboration, conversation and the whole idea of "wisdom of crowds" thinking. I thought the responses of those who didn't blog were rather intere...

Having taught high school for basically all of my teaching career, I've just started working with the little kids in a R-12 school. (The R stands for Reception, and is the grade before Kindergarten) It's great working with the littlies, they are so cute! I team taught with another teacher today for the Grade 2 computer lesson and although they only did some pretty basic word processing stuff today I was impressed with just how capable some of these young students are with technology. I even had one of the students, a delightful young lady all of about seven years old, solve a password problem that had me, the teacher and the IT Director stumped. She remembered the login name and an arcane 6 character password which had not been used since before the Christmas holidays - about seven weeks ago. Pretty clever I thought. (Don't even get me started on why our kinder age kids are required to have a strong, secure password that changes every 90 days... they play Kidpix and...