Chris Betcher

As we celebrate Christmas and 2010 draws to a close, here's a little video to make you smile. Special Christmas wishes to everyone who has been part of my world for the last 12 months.  It's been a wonderful year, full of learning, fun, travel, meeting interesting people, connecting with my network, and sharing ideas with each other.  I've had the good fortune to do some travelling this year and met many wonderful folk in person that I've only ever known online, as well as meeting a whole of great new people, and that's been a real highlight for me.  You know who you are, and I feel so much richer for it.  Thanks!   I feel like 2010 has been an amazing year of connecting with others, and it's been incredibly rewarding on many levels.  To everyone who has left comments on the blog, connected via Twitter or Facebook or Skype or email or the many other ways we have of being connected (including face to face of course!), thank you... those connections mean a gr...

I know this rather personal post is out of character for this blog, but I felt I wanted to post it anyway...  I hope you don't mind. My grandmother died this week. The funeral was today, and it was a tough day to get through.  I was brave on the outside because my mum needed me to be, but on the inside, I cried a lot. I really loved my Nanna Brown. She was an extraordinary woman who, at nearly 98, lived through most of the past century.  I had never really stopped to think about it, but when I looked at the list of world events she'd lived through it was astonishing.  I know we talk a lot about change, and the pace of change, and how important it is to deal with the changing world we live in, but in my nan's lifetime she lived through both World Wars, as well as an assortment of other wars and a Great Depression. She was just over 1 year old when the first transatlantic flight was made, 15 years old when Penicillin was discovered, 24 when construc...

It’s that time of year when I start to get a lot of teachers at school asking me for assistance with creating an end of year slideshow of photographs of their classes, often with an intention to create a DVD that can be sent home as a memento of the year. It’s a lovely idea, and I encourage it.  The kids love it, and it’s a lovely way to finish the year. To assist with this, I thought I’d offer a few tips and suggestions on making slideshows... Start by gathering all the photos you intend to include into a single folder.  It’s much easier if all your assets are already gathered in one place before you begin working with them. Use a piece of software well suited to the task.  Although PowerPoint is often suggested, it’s a bit of a dog when it comes to putting these types of presentations together.  PowerPoint is the right tool for slideware presentations, but it’s actually not very good at doing “slideshows” with music.  The end product of PowerPoint is, well...

Towards the end of the 20 minute video I made for K12 Online, Teaching Kids To Think Using Scratch , I very briefly mentioned two other things that I would have liked to say more about but simply didn't have enough time in the time allowed. The first thing was the use of Scratch on the iPad and the iPhone.  I mentioned that there was a Scratch iOS app, but didn't have time to elaborate.  Since then, a few people contacted me about this app and wanted to know more, telling me that the couldn't find it in the Apple App Store.  The reason you can't find it is unfortunately quite simple... it's been removed from the App Store and is no longer available so unless you got a copy of it prior to it being removed, you're out of luck I'm afraid. So if you missed out, sorry... but if it's any consolation, the Scratch app only allowed you to browse the Scratch website and then execute existing Scratch projects.  You couldn't actually manipulate code or use it as...

At the 2010 ULearn conference I was asked to participate in a Pecha Kucha event.  A Pecha Kucha is a way of giving a presentation with 20 supporting slides, where each slide is automatically timed to show for only 20 seconds.  This leads to a presentation of exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds.  Despite being one of the shortest presentations I've given, this was certainly one of the hardest to put together, just in terms of working out the timing and figuring out what to say in those 20 blocks of 20 seconds.  It sounds easy, but it certainly took a while to get it together. Here is the summary of what the talk was about… "As a gifted polymath, Leonardo da Vinci stands out as the prototypical lifelong learner. Curious, inventive, creative... All the things we would love our students to be. But how well would da Vinci have survived in today’s typical classroom?  If Leonardo was a student in a school today would he have achieved to the same degree?" And here are the ...

Great video. Great message. I must read this book. Where Good Ideas Come From, by Steven Johnson.

After leaving Shanghai the other day I traveled south to Hanoi, Vietnam.  My Sydney school has an "arrangement" with a Vietnamese school here.  The school is called the Vietnam Australia School , or VAS Hanoi, and the arrangement is that as well as the school offering a standard Vietnamese curriculum it also offers a scaled down and modified Australian curriculum focusing on English and Commerce.  This Australian component is taught by native English-speaking teachers, using courseware and textbooks developed by staff back at PLC Sydney, and the goal is to get the kids leaving school with qualifications in two languages and two countries.  I've been keen to get to VAS for a while to see what it's all about, so when I asked my principal for permission to attend Learning 2.010 in Shanghai he suggested that I drop into VAS Hanoi on the way home and do some training and support for the staff here. So for the past few days I've been at the school, seeing how it operat...

Chinese people, as a general rule, have dark hair.  As a race of people, they also tend to not be quite as tall as some other races of people.  And you could be forgiven for thinking that most Chinese people adhere to fairly strict diets because they tend to be fairly slim in build. Now before you accuse me of making racist remarks, I'm simply making an observation on what I've seen.  And apparently the Chinese people themselves would concur with these observations because whenever they see a westerner (or "big nose" as they call us) who is tall, heavily built or has non-black hair, they tend to stare and talk.  Because I'm fairly tall, in some cases I even had some of the Shanghai locals come up and ask to have their photo taken with me, such is their interest in these strange "big nose" visitors. So you can imagine the attention we drew when myself, Wes Fryer , Gail Lovely and Melinda Alford decided to spend a day of sightseeing in Suzhou , ( 苏州市 ) a...

I think I can safely say I've just been to one of the best conferences I've ever attended.  It was well run, well organised and I believe provided content that was highly relevant to all the participants.  The irony is that the day before it all started, it was completely unorganised and had virtually no content planned at all.  I'm talking about the Learning 2.010 Conference held last week at Concordia International School in Shanghai, China. I think it's really important to draw a clear distinction between being un organised and being dis organised.  Dis organised is when things are a complete mess, no one has any idea of what's happening, people are not getting their needs met and it leads to frustration for everyone involved.  This conference was definitely not dis organised. Un organised, on the other hand, implies a understanding that learning is messy and that when we need to learn something we learn it best if we can learn it just-in-time, not just-in-ca...

Nǐ hǎo! I'm currently in Shanghai, China for the Learning 2.010 conference , and that's pretty exciting for a number of reasons. Firstly, mainland China is somewhere I've always wanted to go. In particular, Shanghai is fascinating because of its almost incomprehensible growth.  Intellectually, I know that China is a fast rising star, rapidly moving from a developing nation to a developed nation. We've all heard the statistics about the size and growth of China, of how Chinese is destined to become the most used language on the Internet, of how China has more honours students than the US has students, and so on.  Seriously though, no matter how many times I see the " Did You Know " videos that tell me how fast China is growing, nothing can quite prepare you for the endless ocean of concrete and skyscrapers that simply didn't exist a mere 15 years ago. Perhaps more than any statistic, this is where China's growth really hit home for me... I got picked up...

I have an RSS feed set up that automatically scans the Google news feed s for the phrase " PLC Sydney " or " Presbyterian Ladies College ", so anytime either of those phrases appear in a news publication worldwide I get notified of it.  (Which, if you want to monitor your school's online public image, is a useful thing to set up by the way!)  While I do get the occasional mention of other Presbyterian Ladies Colleges such as the ones in Melbourne or Perth , and occasionally the abbreviation PLC Sydney turns up some non-related stuff , having the RSS feeds scanning the news for mentions of your school is handy. Recently, I spotted this article in one of the local papers.  It was a project that I didn't even even realise was taking place in the school so I was surprised when I spotted it.  (I also like the idea that some of our teachers are now doing interesting projects that use ICT and they don't need me to make it happen!  Yay! The good kind of redund...

My role at school is all about trying to helping teachers leverage technology to come up with more interesting and engaging ways to help their students learn.  Some of our older students are in laptop programs which gives them fulltime 1:1 access to their own computer but many still do not, especially in the junior years. Which is a bit of a shame since there is, I think, so much scope in the younger grades to use technology in interesting ways that support the curriculum.  Unfortunately, with the way things are structured at the moment, our primary kids get scheduled into a single one hour lesson in the computer lab each week.  That's not really my preferred option, as it's hard to get technology integration working in an ongoing, embedded way when it involves trotting off to the computer room once a week. Ironically, all our primary classrooms do actually have a small pod of four desktop machines in them, but unfortunately I don't really see them getting used in any con...

Our Year 2 classes do a project each year called Great Inventions.  The students learn about various inventions and how they have changed over time, and over the past few years they have demonstrated that learning by producing a PowerPoint file that summarises the history of these inventions. As you may have read in my previous post, two of my pet hate phrases are "do research" and "make a PowerPoint".  Whenever I see these two phrases in the same sentence I can almost guarantee that we're looking at a fairly low level task that focuses more on recall and summary of facts than it does on authentic learning.  I'm also wary of any time I see students "making a PowerPoint" that simply gets handed into the teacher for marking, rather than being used as a presentation platform since it is usually a sign that it's being used as a glorified note taking tool; a place to write text complete with the distractions of bright colours and annoying graphics. ...

In these next few posts, I'm going to try and describe some of the projects we've been doing at school lately.  My role at PLC Sydney is ICT Integrator, and I very much see it as a role where I support, advise and consult with our classroom teachers about ways to enrich their lessons with technology. It's a hard line to walk sometimes, since it often forces me to cross that line between giving advice on how to use the technology and giving advice on how to teach. The nature of digital technology makes it a really good fit with the general principles of quality teaching practice... and sometimes that fit is so good that I find it difficult to suggest ways to use technology without also suggesting that the underlying pedagogy should shift to match it.  Fortunately, I work in a school where most of our teaching staff are willing to take such suggestions on board, be it simply just regarding the use of technology, or to actually shift they way they approach the job of teaching....