Chris Betcher

I'm a big fan of Leo Laporte.  Leo is best known these days for running the TWiT network (This Week in Tech), a podcasting empire that publishes more than a dozen excellent tech podcasts like MacBreak Weekly , This Week in Tech , This Week in Google , FLOSS Weekly , Windows Weekly , Net@Night and quite a few others, but he comes from a background in traditional radio and TV media. Leo has a wonderful, easy-to-listen-to manner, has his finger on the pulse of the tech industry better than anyone I know, and is always covering the latest, most interesting stories in tech.  It's easy to stay current with the latest tech goings-on just by listening to one (or more) of his podcasts. I listen to at least three of them reguarly, and others when I have more time... my drive to work just wouldn't be the same without Leo! This clip is a recording of a live stream from a talk given by Leo to the Online News Association Conference in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago.  It goes ...

I hope you've all been following the K12 Online Conference this year. There have been some fabulous presentations coming out of this year's event and, as usual, there has been a diverse collection of topics and ideas with something for everyone. You can check out the entire conference at k12online.ning.com I had the privilege of being able to contribute to the conference again this year with a presentation called Ways of Working. I must admit that it deviated a bit from my original submission idea, which was to create a movie that followed the processes used by three different students as they responded to a task from their teacher. I was planning on looking how each of the three students used the web and social technologies to take a slightly different approach to dealing with the set task. As so often happens, the intention of what I wanted to do was quickly drowned out by the time and resources I actually had to make it happen, so the presentation morphed into what you se...

In the past six days I've received six emails from various companies asking me if I'd please be so kind as to promote their services, talk about their products or otherwise just mention their wares in a blog post.  This is not a new thing - I've been getting more and more of these requests over the past 12 months - but the frequency of them has been increasing to the point where it now sometimes averages one a day.  In a weird sort of way, I guess this is an indication of some level of "success" in the blogosphere. But to anyone considering asking me to be a schill for your wares, can I save you all some time?  The answer is no. This is a blog, not a brothel. Look, I'm sure your products and services are fabulous, and I have no doubt that someone, somewhere may be interested in them.  I even kind of admire the fact that you "get" the power of new/social media enough to take the initiative of asking regular people like me to spruik the benefits of you...

Crossposted on the Adobe Education Leaders blog ( http://blogs.adobe.com/educationleaders/ ) I remember the first time I saw Photoshop . I think it must have been about 1993 or so, when I got a free copy that came with a scanner purchased by my school. It must have been a "lite" version of Photoshop because I seem to recall that it didn't support layers. Even so, I really enjoyed playing with it, and I ended up installing it on all the computers in the school computer lab (license? what license?) and I started teaching the kids how to create stuff with it. They just blew me away with what they could do with it, even without layers! It was around the same time that I stumbled across an unused copy of Aldus Pagemaker in an out-of-the-way cupboard, and I convinced the school principal that we should use it to do the school yearbook; his agreement to my suggestion saw me suddenly escalated to head of the yearbook committee, a job that rolled on for many years and many issues ...

Yes, it's that time of year again! The annual Edublog Awards are in full swing, and after a few weeks of people making nominations for various blogs, tweets, wikis and social networks across a really broad range of categories, I'm extremely honoured to have had not one, but two of my online projects - Betchablog and The Virtual Staffroom - mentioned for an "Eddie" this year. These awards (which are great to be considered for, but hopefully not to be taken too seriously!) aim to highlight and recognise some of the great work taking place in the online educational sphere.  Education is certainly one sector that seems to have really embraced the use of blogging as a tool for reflection, sharing, helping others and generally assisting teachers and students to "find their voice".  I know that I've personally found the act of blogging to be critical in helping me "think out loud", processing ideas in a public space where they can be exposed to the...

Over the last year or so, I've been invited to present at a number of conferences, including a couple of keynotes.  It's been an enriching experience, and one I enjoy immensely, although I do always end up feeling like I'm "a mile wide and and inch deep", to coin a well-worn phrase.  I feel like I know quite a bit about a lot, but not a lot about anything. Despite the fact that I like to dabble in lots of stuff, I'm not sure I'm really a master of any of it. This afternoon, I was asked to run some workshops for another Sydney school, to talk with some of their staff as they prepare to launch on a journey of 1:1 student computing next year.  I took a workshop session with a small group for an hour, then presented a keynote to the whole staff for 45 minutes, followed by facilitating some planning and goal setting with a small group of teachers. I took an approach with today's sessions that I rarely do... I prepared nothing in advance.  Normally when I pr...

Amazing (adjective) astonishing, astounding, surprising, stunning, staggering, shocking, startling, stupefying, breathtaking; awesome, awe-inspiring, sensational, remarkable, spectacular, stupendous, phenomenal, extraordinary, incredible, unbelievable; informal mind-blowing, jaw-dropping Sometimes I find myself dealing with people in circumstances that are completely unconnected, but which seem to have some kind of bizarre synchronicity that causes them to mirror each other. The other day, I found myself in one of these situations... Firstly, I was asked by a colleague to help edit some video footage from a recent school trip.  I don't mind helping with such requests because I quite enjoy the process of video editing, so I attached the camera to my MacBook Pro, sucked the footage onto the hard drive and began dragging clips together in iMovie. My colleague looked on as I dragged clips around the timeline, clearly never having seen non-linear video editing before, and, with a littl...

I was browsing through some old files this week and I stumbled across this wonderful piece of video that brought back some great memories for me. It's just over 10 years old and is an interview with a group of students I taught back then, just after they had been awarded third place in the 1998 AT&T Virtual Classroom Contest. The Virtual Classroom Contest , for anyone that remembers it, was an amazing web-based global collaboration project that linked kids from across the world together. Over 300 schools took part each year, forming 100 teams made up of three different schools that had to be located on three different continents. The project ran for over eight months, starting with the use of forums and email to debate and discuss ideas for a theme, and then a massive collaborative push to turn their ideas into reality. We were fortunate to be teamed up with two other amazingly dedicated schools - Percy Julian Middle School in Oak Park, Illinois, and Fuwa Junior High School...

At the recent ULearn Conference in Christchurch, New Zealand, I was asked (along with many other educators, I hasten to add!) to be part of the EdTalks series. Naturally, I was thrilled to have been asked and readily agreed, although I must admit that in the flurry of preparation for ULearn I really didn't think about it very much until I got to Christchurch. Sitting in the foyer of the Chistchurch Conference Centre, quite by accident, I bumped into Matt Tippen, one of the brains behind EdTalks, who said "Oh, so you're Chris Betcher. Are you ready to record your talk?" I wasn't, but I did it anyway, and essentially just made it up as I went along. EdTalks is a project of CORE Education , a leading New Zealand educational consulting and training organisation, and is described on their website as "a growing collection of videos featuring New Zealand and International educators talking about learning. EDtalks is CORE's contribution to your professional le...

The following post was originally written as a reponse to a thread about interactive whiteboards on the www.iwbrevolution.com Ning.  One of the thread participants there made a statement about needing to see IWBs used in new ways. I'm interested (read desperate) to see the revolutionary value adding aspects. I have an IWB, I love using my IWB, but I need to grasp the ideas and strategies that move people to describe it as a 'revolution' in learning. Show me an idea that is actually new!!! While I appreciate where he's coming from, I think the question is somewhat flawed. In responded to the post, I found myself "thinking out loud" about the value propsition of interactive whiteboards.  For what it may be worth, here's the post. As always, your thoughts and feedback are welcome in the comments... --- I used to own a mobile phone, an iPod, a digital camera, a video camera, a GPS, and a voicerecorder, and I often carried many of them with me at any given mom...

There are moments when I really like my iPhone, yet others that frustrate the heck out of me. I finally got one a couple of months ago when my carrier, 3 Mobile , finally got the iPhone, long after nearly every other Australian mobile telco. This surprised me, since 3 Mobile were the first carrier to bring 3G services to the Australian marketplace about 8 years ago, so I was expecting that when the iPhone 3G was released in Australia that 3 Mobile would be one of the first to carry it. Not so. Until the iPhone, I was a relatively happy user of a Nokia N95 8Gb . As phones go, the N95 was a pretty impressive piece of hardware... it did a lot of things well, including an excellent 5MP camera, decent voice recorder, VGA quality video, GPS and the ability to install a reasonably impressive number of third party apps - nothing like the thousands of apps in Apple's AppStore - but it had quite a few that I found useful, including Gravity , and excellent Twitter client, and Geocache Navi...

So here I am in Christchurch, New Zealand for Ulearn 09, certainly one of the biggest Ed Tech conferences in NZ, and probably one of the biggest in the southern hemisphere I would think. It's a education conference that I've wanted to attend for the last few years, having only ever heard good things about it, but for whatever reason I just haven't been able to get here for it. This year was different, and after hearing how good it was from my work colleague, @sirchriss , I was very keen to get here. Fortunately, a number of Australian educators were sponsored to attend the event this year and I was lucky enough to have my presentation submissions accepted, so here I am. It really is a beautiful part of the world, and Christchurch is a very attractive city. The conference itself is quite large, with close to 2000 delegates, 400+ workshops and presentations, 150 support staff and over 60 vendors. The logistical effort to plan and host a conference of this scale is signific...

I was in a staff meeting at school last week where we were given a presentation outlining 10 common myths about copyright. I thought it not a bad summary of what many teachers just assume to be true. Ironically, I'm reproducing it below basically word for word as it was presented to me, but I'm told on good authority that the original creator has authorised its use for reposting. The other thing I really would have liked to have had included in the conversation was a little more talk about what the alternatives are. It's one thing to talk about what you can't do legally, but unless you provide a list of workable alternatives, simply making "though shalt not" pronouncements is a bit pointless. Copyright has a place, but in a digital world that place is changing dramatically. There is an obvious tension between the inputs and the outputs of copyright... if you are a content creator, you want the output of your work to be protected so others don't simpl...

I wonder if Karl Fisch knew what he was starting when he made the original "Did You Know?" PowerPoint file for his staff at Arapahoe High School back in early 2007.  Fisch just wanted to share a few thoughts about a fast changing world with his fellow teachers, but by posting a copy to his blog it got picked up by others who found it fascinating, it went completely viral, has been made into several versions, has been remixed and modified many times, and its many incarnations have now been viewed many millions of times on YouTube and other online video sites.  All of this really speaks about the power of the web to help spread ideas... In case you haven't seen it here is version 4.0, the latest incarnation of "Did You Know?" Nice work Karl. Technorati Tags: karlfisch , didyouknow

I'm in Auckland at the moment for the first New Zealand National IWB Conference .  As some of you may know, I co-authored a book a while back with Mal Lee that was all about IWBs and interactive technology in general, and I learned a fair bit about whiteboards and their various uses in the process of writing that book. I've presented at the last three Australian IWB conferences, another in Napier earlier this year, and now this one in Auckland.  Plus, since the book came out I get asked quite a lot to run IWB workshops for schools, where I get to I talk to lots of teachers about the things they do with their IWBs.  (Actually I've always talked to lots of teachers about their IWB use, but I think I ask much better questions these days).  All of this has given me - I think - a reasonable perspective on the current state of IWB use, so I just thought I'd blog a couple of reflections about it. When I first saw an interactive whiteboard, I really wasn't very impressed w...

There was an interesting story in today's news about Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's outburst at an iPhone-carrying Microsoft employee. Apparently, Ballmer was addressing a company gathering when the employee pulled his iPhone out to take a picture of him. Ballmer went nuts. He grabbed the phone, ridiculed the employee publicly, then pretended to stomp on the device. You can read the full story over on Engadget. There is even an alleged photo taken as Ballmer reached for the device. Ballmer is an interesting character. Certainly there is plenty of evidence on YouTube of his over-the-top antics as he revs up Microsofties with his ranting and raving, screaming and yelling. And who could forget his chant of "Developers! Developers! Developers!" at a gathering of software developers, as he tried to make the point that Microsoft's success was partly due to its army of, well, developers. It's even spawned a remix version. Even back on the very early days ...

I've been in a few conference presentations lately where the topic of geocaching has come up.  Usually, the presenter asks the question "who knows about geocaching?" and about three hands go up.  The presenter then tries to give a quick explanation about it for those who haven't heard about it - "it's like a treasure hunt", or "it's a game where people hide things for others to find", or other similar explanations.  While these summaries are mostly accurate, they don't really give enough information and many people seem interested to know more about it. Thanks to a long involvement with 4WDing, I've been playing with GPS and digital mapping for a while now, and I've done quite a bit of geocaching over the last few years, including placing our own .  When I started I was using a Garmin GPS V , a great little GPS that can basically do it all - multiple datum switching, realtime path tracking, waypoint extrapolation - you name it, ...

I'm finally back home from a fantastic week in San Jose at the Adobe Summer Institute.  The Summer Institute is a 5 day conference/workshop event run by Adobe's Education division for members of their global Adobe Education Leaders program .  I was inducted into the AEL program last year but was unable to attend the 2008 event in San Francisco. This year I was determined to attend the San Jose event and I'm really glad I went. When you do in fact know a fair bit about technology and how to use it, it becomes harder to find professional development experiences that challenge and extend you. One of the reasons I was so keen to attend the Summer Institute was that I felt it would push me to learn more and build on some of the knowledge I already have.  Having been a Photoshop user for many years, and spending many hours inside programs like InDesign (and PageMaker before that) and having taught Flash and Dreamweaver to students, I've always been quite immersed in Adobe...