Chris Betcher

I wrote a blog post a little while back called This is Not Amazing , and the basic thrust of it was that, after more than 30 years since "the personal computer revolution", more than 10 years of living in a post-Google World, and now almost a full decade into the 21st century, that we should stop being so amazed at things which are simply just part of our normal world.  The post gave a few examples of things that are, quite frankly, pretty average tasks that can be accomplished on a personal computer and it relayed the story of how I had a day where I kept getting told how "amazing" these rather mundane tasks were, by people that were, in my estimation, too easily impressed.  I tried to tie that all together by observing that we probably do our students a great disservice by being easily impressed by technologically ordinary things, since this is pretty much just the world they live in. I think when we 'ooh and ahh' over things that are simply just a regular...

Earlier this year, I had a visitor from South Africa contact me to ask if they could drop into the school at which I work while they were visiting Australia.  She was were here as part of a study tour, and had heard some good things about PLC Sydney.  In fact, her school in Johannesburg was a similar sort of school - independent, all girls, similar size - and she was interested in comparing a few ideas.  Her school was also using IWBs extensively, and was keen to see how our staff were using them. On the day she visited, we chatted for a while in the main staffroom, shared ideas about education and various resources for learning, before finally heading off on a little tour around the school. Because I knew she was coming, I sent an email around asking for volunteers who wouldn't mind us coming into their classrooms. Several responded positively, so I organised to expect us to drop by their classrooms, however I wasn't specific about times since I didn't really know when w...

Warning! Geek talk ahead.  If you aren't into the techie stuff, you may want to skip this post... A few people asked me about what themes, widgets and plugins I decided to use on the new blog site, so I thought I'd just give a quick rundown of what I'm using, bearing in mind that it's only been a few days and it's almost inevitable I'm likely to continue changing my mind about a few more things. One the whole though, I think I've got the blog running mostly the way I want. For now anyway. The site is running the latest version of Wordpress (currently 2.9.1) and PHP5 .  It's hosted with GoDaddy using their Hosted Wordpress plan running on a Linux server.  The domain name www.chrisbetcher.com is managing the actual DNS records for the site, but there are other domain names such as www.betchablog.com and www.betchablog.net that simply forward to it.  The benefit of that is that there are several paths to get to the real site.  These domain addresses u...

Sometimes it's good to stop and take stock. To think about getting rid of some of the clutter that we allow to build up. You may recall that I was thinking about shifting my blog to a new server and running a self hosted Wordpress blog. Well, I had intended to think about it a little before I did anything drastic (I think that's called procrastination), but once you get started on these things it all begins to snowball so you may as well just get on with it.  So here we are... the new online home for Betchablog. If you're reading this in an RSS reader then you probably won't even notice a change (at least I hope not! Moving the old RSS feeds across to a new server was something that always put me off making the move, but I think I worked it out). I used Google Forms to ask for some feedback about the old blog and 41 people took the time to respond with some really useful comments. (That Google Forms is just so darn useful!)  It's good to occasionally stop and take...

For a few years now, this blog has been an important place for me to do my "thinking out loud", and in the process it's been extremely rewarding to have been able to share some of that public pondering with others.  I've learned a great deal from the whole blogging experience and although the frequency of posting has sometimes varied with life's little circumstances, on the whole it's been wonderful to evolve this blog as my own little place in cyberspace. I have absolutely no intention of changing the role of this blog as a place to think about, share and discuss ideas that interest me.  Despite the rise of Twitter and other microblogging services, there's a lot I can't say in 140 characters so I plan to be writing here for quite a while yet. The theme for this blog has been pretty much the same since I started it here on Edublogs .  Almost from day one, I chose the Andreas theme, a Wordpress theme designed by the incredible Andreas Viklund because ...

Hope 2010 is a great year for you all! This photo is made of three separate images stitched together with Photoshop.  It's the calm before the fireworks storm !  I thought it turned out quite well considering I didn't have a tripod and was just leaning up against the wall to hold the camera steady on a 4 second/f3.5 setting. CC photo by betchaboy http://www.flickr.com/photos/betchaboy/4233820172/