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...