Chris Betcher

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...