Chris Betcher

Silly me. I was mowing the lawn the other day and I stupidly managed to get my big toe caught in the mower blade while it was running at full speed. The blades ripped right through my shoe and mangled the tip of my big toe. Needless to say, it really hurt! I was home on my own, and had to figure out what to do next... there was blood going all over the place, I felt myself going into shock, as I tried to figure out how to get myself to a doctor. It was not a lot of fun. The good news is that despite smashing my toenail off and slicing the end of my big toe, it could have been a hell of a lot worse. Fortunately, the bone was not broken and I still have all my toes so apart from a bit of pain and inconvenience I think I'm pretty lucky. It highlighted to me - in a very real way - that lawnmowers are bloody dangerous things! With their sharp, rapidly rotating blades, they are obviously capable of doing some real damage to the human body. Naturally, I never intended to get my toe in...

I'm a huge believer in the notion of trust and respect as the primary drivers in the relationship between student and teacher. People have occasionally told me that I'm just incredibly naive about this, but all I can talk from is my own experience, and in my own experience, building relationships of trust, respect and genuine care between student and teacher is the foundation upon which all "policy" rests on in my  classroom. I realise that school administrators will feel a need for something a little more concrete than this, but any policies, AUPs or guidelines that aren't based on this first rule are  simply not sustainable in my view. Take blocking and filtering for example. While school boards have the best of intentions for protecting students when they block access to web 2.0 tools and other social technologies, such policies fail the trust and respect test, because they start with an assumption that bestows upon the students neither trust nor respect. Or wh...

Ah serendipity, how I love it. We have a major building project going on at school right now.  The bulldozers are busily demolishing walls from our old library, and and we will soon have a beautiful new library Information and Research Center.  From the plans I've seen, it should be a great space. I was asked today to come to a meeting next month and give a short talk to a group of parents and supporters of the new school library building project.  Many of these folks are still getting their head around the massive shifts in the way information is managed.  Many of them perhaps don't realise that the term "library" no longer means what it once meant.  Information is different in a digital age, and so libraries need to manage information differently.  My talk to them needs to cover (briefly) an overview of how information and libraries and "books" are different to what they used to be. So I thought it extremely serendipitous when I opened my email this afte...

This is the first time I've ever done this, but I'd like to welcome a guest writer to Betchablog.  This post was written by one of my work colleagues, Pam Nutt, and was actually the first part of her welcoming address to staff for the start of the 2010 school year.  I enjoyed hearing Pam deliver this address to our teachers so I asked if she'd mind posting it here for all to read.  As you'll discover, it was based on some of her experiences in Alice Springs in outback Australia, and I liked the way she linked it back to kids and learning.  Enjoy! --- “You’re  so privileged,” some said. “Very few people see the Todd flowing.”  Others, with an almost  reverential whisper, said “Only 1% of tourists see water flowing from Uluru .” The sign outside the Alice Springs Desert Park said it all: “You will never look at deserts in the same way again.” Indeed. Torrential rain. Enormous umbrellas that benefited little. Puddles that we gave up walking around and j...

There always seems to be a lot of talk about the need for more teachers to embrace "21st Century skills". Of course, there's a lot of discussion about what these "21st Century skills" actually are. Many people have debated and discussed this issue, asking the question of what exactly should today's learners know in order to function in the "21st Century". I'm sure there are a whole lot of really good answers to these questions that dig deeply into effective pedagogy and the deeper philosophy of education. This post is not about those things. Instead, here is a list of simple, easily-learnable skills that I think would make life as a teacher in the 21st Century simpler and much more productive. While they're not exactly earth-shatteringly profound in terms of the big issues of education, they are greatly useful skills to have... and in my experience they are also skills that all too few teachers seem to actually possess. I find that posse...