Chris Betcher

My daughter once performed at a large choral event where she sung a solo piece. It was the first time she had performed in front of a sizable audience and the first time I had any idea that she had real singing talent. As a father, it was a beautiful thing to see, and I was very proud of her. Naturally, as a proud dad I was there with my video camcorder in hand and taped the entire performance. The event was over two evenings so I also went back the next night and taped it again, then took the two pieces of footage, dumped them into Sony Vegas and made a two-camera montage of the performance. It's still on YouTube if you want a look. Although I was present to see her perform twice, my strongest memory of that event is the video that documents it. I do recall sitting in the hall with the other people and thinking how awesome she sounded live, but what I see on the video has, over time, become the more pervasive memory. Likewise, back in 2004 we did a 3 week trip through Central...

One of the real joys of my current job is that  I get to work with our younger students in the primary school.  Having only ever taught high school, the chance to work with the R-6 kids is just so refreshing.  They are so enthusiastic, so keen and so refreshingly honest.  I've had a great time this term working with all the Junior School kids, but in particular I enjoyed working with Year 3 on some digital storytelling projects, where I suggested to the Year 3 teachers that they try Voicethread as our storytelling tool of choice.  One quick demo and they were all excited by the possibilities.  (And so was I for that matter... although I've used Voicethread a lot for my own personal use, this was the first time I've had the chance to work with students to do something with it) The kids were especially excited by the idea of getting some real feedback from real people in other parts of the world.  If you get a chance, please pop in and leave them a message. You will need to...

It's pretty simple really... When I find websites that interest me, I add them to my delicious bookmarks.  But not only do I add them, I also tag them with keywords that give them some sort of meaning.  This means that that when I need to find them I have some reference points.  Over time, these tags build into enormous library that give a pretty insightful snapshop into the sorts of things that I'm finding interesting.  Beyond that, it even gives a pretty insightful snapshot into my personality, my interests, my passions.  These patterns in the tags can be arranged into "tag clouds" that give a really good visual impression of what are usually much more complex collections of ideas and concepts. So I thought Wordle was an interesting little online app.  Written in Java, Wordle take any text or any del.icio.us feed and turns it into a tag cloud.  A very beautiful, very artistic tag cloud.  Not only does it very quickly analyse the text you feed it, but them gives yo...

UK blogger Terry Freedman wrote a great post on the TechLearning blog called " Oh Sir, you are too kind ". He actually wrote it a while ago now (Sept 07) but I only just stumbled across it... I guess that's one of the great things about blogs, the way they can capture someone's thoughts at a particular point in time and make them available to anyone, even people who stumble across them much later. Terry's basic premise is to ask why we keep putting up with teachers who can't or won't get to grips with ICT in their teaching. He seems to think that it's time to tell teachers that ICT is an important component of being a teacher and that if you can't, won't or don't get yourself up to speed with technology and how it should be used to integrate with student learning then it may be time to find another job. And he suggests that we are being way too nice about accepting this sort of thing, and allowing the laggards to get away with it. He...