Chris Betcher

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...

Geocaching is a great way to combine a bit of fun technological geekery with some good old fashioned go-outside-and-get-some-fresh-air action. I spent an afternoon with Lauren Sayer, who was visiting from Melbourne, using our GPSs, iPhones, Flip Videos and other techy toys and went geocaching around Sydney. If you've never tried it before, geocaching is essentially a treasure hunt where you go looking for a hidden treasure (more correctly known as a geocache) which someone plants and publishes on www.geocaching.com . It's a simple enough concept... once you sign up on the site, you enter your current position and it will tell you what caches are hidden nearby. You then just pick one that sounds interesting, enter the cache coordinates into your GPS and navigate to the hidden treasure. It sounds simple enough, but once you start to allow for the real-world factor it does start to get a shade more complicated. GPS devices will tell you where you are but they have limits as t...