Chris Betcher

I'm a big user of Google's tools. I like what they offer and I like that they just keep getting better and better. When my school moved to Google Apps for Education at the end of 2011 we were generally happy with what was on offer, but there were things that we wished were just a little better, a little more polished, or had just a few more features. Over the course of 2012, some obvious things happened: Gmail got a redesign, Drive was introduced, editing of Docs on mobile devices came along, and of course Google Plus. But there were lots of smaller, less obvious, things that came along too: more fonts were added to Apps, the Research tool was added to Docs and Sheets, the Equation Editor got a boost, and so on. Unless you're on top of it, many of these improvements were easy to overlook. Over the course of the year many of the things we complained about in January were fixed, improved or added to by December. Google's tools just keep getting better all the time. When ...

It's that time of year again. Time to submit nominations for the 2012 Edublog Awards . There are those who criticise the idea of giving out awards for educational blogs as being a bit silly, or a bit unnecessary, or a bit selfserving, or a bit self-indulgent. They complain that the voting process is flawed, or that it's just a popularity contest, or that it promotes the wrong kinds of values.  Some complain that it's just a chance for gratuitous self promotion, both for the bloggers themselves and for the companies that promote educational blogging. I'm not one of those people. I think anything that supports, encourages and promotes the use of blogs in education is a good thing. Blogs are all about writing, sharing, thinking, pondering. Writing a blog forces you to clarify your thinking, state your position, defend your point of view. Blogging is a way to connect with others, debate ideas that matter to you, build a community of learners and be part of a bigger conversa...

I was recently given the privilege of giving a short keynote talk for the upcoming Flat Classroom Project cohort. The Flat Classroom Project is a wonderful professional learning program run by Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay which focuses on getting teachers and students working together on global collaborative projects - connecting classrooms around the world to work together. Julie contacted me recently to ask if I would be interested in doing it and I jumped at the opportunity. I was fortunate that I started doing some really full-on global collaborative projects with students back in the late 1990s, thanks to a program that was run by AT&T called Virtual Classroom. Although the format of the VC program was meant to be competitive - teams of three classrooms from around the world worked together to build a website on an agreed common theme - the essential principles of working together online were very much ingrained into my brain over the three years we worked on these project...

It's always good to celebrate creative successes. This is one of those times. When I first met my partner Linda she had started working on the novel she always wanted to write. That was six years ago, and the novel has certainly had its stops and starts over that time. Writing is not always an easy thing to do, and there were times when life just got in the way and it became difficult for her to keep moving that cursor to the right. However, I'm pleased to say that over the last few months she's really pushed herself to finish writing the manuscript, and over the last few weeks it's been through seemingly endless revisions and edits, fine tuning of words and sentences, and onto the final processes of typesetting and preparation for publication. I'm proud to say that Linda's first novel is now finished, published and available. The novel, eloves me, eloves me not , is a contemporary love story in which 39 year old Kayte Wexford realises that she still hasn't ...

Do you remember when digital photography appeared on the scene? Real photography buffs snickered about the idea of digital photography ever becoming mainstream... the images were too small, the number of megapixels was ridiculously low, and the images were, well, horrible. It'll never take off, they said. I guess it was about 1995 or so that the school I at which I was teaching managed to get hold of our first digital camera. It was an Apple QuickTake 100 camera. It could hold eight images if you shot them at full quality (640 x 480!) although if you stepped down the resolution to 320 x 240 you could fit a whole 32 images. It was a novelty, and definitely a sign of things to come, but the images were pretty awful. A little after that, I recall I got the the school to buy a Sony Mavica digital camera.  I recall it clearly because I wrote the submission for a grant to buy it, such was the special, novel nature of 'digital' photography. The Mavica FD-5 didn't use film. I...

During the Learning 2.012 event, a number of the Learning 2 Leaders had the opportunity to present a short mini keynote on a topic of their choice. I thought it was a good arrangement, being able to hear a little bit from a number of people, instead of just one long talk from one person. In the previous Learning 2 event I attended, there were no keynotes at all, what with the conference focus being on the participants, rather than "speakers".  This year, we brought back the keynote idea, but in this new format, and I thought it worked really well.  We got to hear from 10 different people, with very different styles and perspectives, and I really enjoyed it. I somehow ended up being the first person to speak on the opening night of the conference. I decided to recycle a short presentation that I had actually shared before with the staff at Yokohama International School, but I thought the message was still relevant to this group. Here is my talk... There were lots of other gre...

This post is likely to be the first of a couple of reflections about my recent experiences in Beijing for the Learning 2.012 conference . There is so much to absorb; the organisation and location of the conference itself, the experience of spending a week in China's amazing capital city, but mostly the genuine privilege of being able to spend time with a remarkable group of talented educators from around the globe. Firstly, China. This is my second trip to China, the previous being for the same conference two years ago in Shanghai. I wrote some thoughts about that trip at the time and how awestruck I was by China's rapid growth. That certainly hasn't changed. China is still full of surprises, and especially so in Beijing where there is such a dramatic contrast between the ancient and the modern. On my first full day there I got to go shopping for pearls with Julie Lindsay and Lucy Gray (trust me, that Julie knows how to shop!) and then later that day Lucy and I explore...

Dear Internet, I could use some of your help if you have a moment. I've been fortunate to have been asked to present an extended workshop at the Learning 2.012 Conference in Beijing China in a few weeks. It's very exciting. I presented at the Learning 2.010 conference in Shanghai two years ago and it was totally awesome, absolutely one of the best learning events I've been part of . The session I'm running this year is called Creativity and Innovation in the Classroom . It's a big topic that could really go in any number of directions, which is both exciting and scary at the same time (made even more scary by the possibility that we might not have any Internet access that week in China!) Obviously I feel as though I have something to contribute on the topic or I wouldn't have suggested it, but I would really love to tap into some of your collective wisdom. I'm a big believer in the wisdom of the crowd, and I'm hoping to pick your collective brains a lit...

A couple of years ago, I coauthored a book about teaching and learning with interactive whiteboards. I'm not going to debate the pros and cons of IWBs here, but believe me when I say I can see both sides of the arguments for and against them. Regardless of your opinions about the worth of IWBs, I was pleased that the book was able to focus on the importance of quality teaching, and I think we made a pretty solid point in the book that any classroom technology is only as good as the pedagogical expertise being applied to its use. It was an interesting exercise, as I'd never written an actual book before. As this type of niche book goes, it's been reasonably successful. It sold out of its first, and then second editions, and has now been reprinted several times. It got some excellent reviews. The company that published it, ACER Press , tells us that it's actually their number one selling book, so it's rather nice to know that it's been well received by so many pe...

About 5 years ago, there was an incident in Adelaide where a classroom blog and the South Australian Department of Education and Children's Services had a bit of a falling out.  It was well documented at the time, so I'm not going to rehash it here, suffice to say that it was a bunfight at the time and as a result there was significant tension between the educational blogging community and the Powers That Be in South Australia. Like many other bloggers, I expressed my thoughts on it at the time. I spoke to the person who was directly affected by the dispute, as well as a number of other people in the know. Eventually, everyone involved tried to take what they could learn from the situation and we all just moved on.  Life is too short to be dragged down by that stuff. However, over the last few weeks I've had some idiot posting abusive comments on this blog expressing (quite forcefully) their opinions on that situation from 2007. They have been abusive and rude to me perso...

I posted this on Google+ last week... Do you teach in a school that uses tablets? (iPads, Android tablets, etc) Have you been involve in planning the rollout and implementation of a tablet program in a school? Do you have thoughts about how suitable tablets are for education? Do you have any success stories to share? Warnings to give? Come along and join in the conversation as we take this opportunity to learn from each other about this fast growing area of educational technology. Here's what happened.  It's a long recording (1:18:00) but has lots to think about... Thanks to everyone who joined us, both in the actual Hangout and also in the live stream.

The recent decision in the Apple/Samsung debacle has really got me thinking about a few things. If you read my last blog post you'll know that I feel somewhat disappointed in Apple's seemingly bullying behaviour towards a competitor. I suppose I feel like this because I have had such a high opinion of Apple for so long and this is just not what I expected from them. The hashtag #boycottapple was trending globally on Twitter for a while this morning so clearly a lot of other people were equally unimpressed with the whole thing. Realistically, I know it's more complicated than that. The fact is that Apple is a company, not a person, and companies are ruled on business decisions, not emotions. There is no doubt that Apple brought amazing innovation to the phone business with the release of the first iPhone and that numerous competitors immediately changed their design ideas in order to compete. And yes, quite a few of them probably copied some ideas. I also understand that Ap...

I'm feeling disillusioned and sad today. When I was much younger I met someone that truly amazed me. They were young at the time too, full of interesting ideas and brilliant thinking. They were different to everyone around them and they stood out because of their genius. I loved being exposed to their thinking, and they made me see the world differently. They let me explore the world in ways I hadn't really considered before. Looking back, I think I could even say their ideas have shaped my personality in ways that I probably wasn't even aware of, and I ended up choosing a career path based on the passion they instilled in me. They always impressed me. They had attention to detail that was astounding. They inspired me, and millions of others too. They came up with incredible ideas that were brilliantly different, and they had a profound influence on the world around them. Of course, they had influences of their own too, and they were often shameless about taking the seeds ...

When students at our school get to Year 3 they are given their own school email account. We are a Google Apps for Education school, so the email they get is a rebadged Gmail account, and part of my role is to teach them to use it. We do lots of work on digital citizenship and we try really hard to give our students opportunities to be responsible members of the online world, but at the point they get their email we really just want to make sure they know the mechanics of using it... how to compose a message, how to reply and forward, the difference between cc: and bcc:, etc. In those early days of getting their gmail account I really just want them to get the hang of it by using it. Around the same time as they get their email account, they also do a thematic unit of work about national parks where they look at several of Australia's most prominent national parks and learn about what they are and what they do. I had a bit of a wacky idea for integrating the use of email into their ...

Olympic sports commentators have always annoyed me with the "how do you feel?" question immediately after an athlete finishes an event. It's such a shallow, inappropriate question at that moment in time. Regardless of whether you just won a gold medal or a grand final, the typical answer is both inadequate and self-obvious. You feel great. Amazing. Exhilarated. Overwhelmed. Whatever adjectives you offer at that moment all probably fall short of communicating the real emotion of winning. But I find the most irksome question is when the sports commentator asks the winning athlete "did you ever dream you'd be here winning a gold medal?", as though the athlete was somehow unexpectedly caught by surprise with their win. Such a question shows a complete lack of understanding of what it takes to reach the pinnacle of sporting success. The drive, the focus, the goal setting, the early morning training, the daily practise, the sheer dedication to achieve at the highe...

With the impending release of Mountain Lion , Apple's new version of the OS X operating system, I've been giving some thought to whether I'll bother upgrading or not. I am, or at least I used to be, what many would refer to as a Mac Fanboy. I still think Apple builds the best consumer computer hardware on the planet, and, so far anyway, OS X is probably still the best desktop/laptop operating system currently available. A few years ago I would not have included the "probably" qualifier in that last sentence, but lately I'm feeling more and more disenfranchised with Apple and their litigious nature and walled garden approach to creating customer lock-in. It's not that I don't like their products. I do. I have several Macs, iPads, iPhones, and Apple TVs. Walled garden or not, they build beautiful products that -  for the most part - do exactly what they claim... they just work. While I don't always approve of their proprietary attitude to the way the...

I was cleaning up my home office recently and I found a couple of installation disks for Apple's OS X Tiger operating system, 10.4.7. They must have come with the Macbook Pro I bought back in early 2006, and since that time I've upgraded  several times, to 10.5 (Leopard), 10.6 (Snow Leopard), 10.7 (Lion), and in the not too distant future I'm sure I'll make the move to 10.8 (Mountain Lion). Because I have absolutely no need to keep the OSX Tiger disks, I figured I'd sell them on eBay. After all, they might be of some use to someone with an older Mac who wants to stay on that older version of the OS, or who possibly has lost or damaged their original disks. I listed them online for $1, eBay's minimum bid, and hoped that they  might be of some benefit to someone, somewhere. Less than 24 hours after listing them, I get an email from eBay telling me they had to pull the ad after getting a takedown notice from the Business Software Alliance . "Your item was remo...

Many people I know struggle with technology. They bumble by, more-or-less managing to make their computer do what they want it to do, but often without that real sense of confidence that comes from feeling fluent with the software they are interacting with. And let's face it, when we talk about "technology", we mostly mean "software". Sure, there are some hard-to-use hardware devices but by and large when I watch someone struggling to feel comfortable using "technology", it's usually because they are out of their depth with the software they are trying to use, not the hardware. It might not seem like it when you're so frustrated you just want to throw your laptop out the nearest window, but companies who build software try really hard to make their tools easy to use. Of course, not all software is actually easy to use, but I do believe that all software designers really do try to make their software as easy to use as possible. It's not eas...

Yesterday at PLC Sydney we held a whole-staff PD workshop with American educator Mark Church. Mark is a co-author of the book Making Thinking Visible , as well as a contributor to the Project Zero team. I found myself really resonating with much of what he had to say. I liked the fact that his focus was on really good pedagogy, and although I could see many connections to the sorts of thinking that I find myself constantly exposed to in the edtech world, his message had very little to do with the use of technology. It was really just all about good teaching. PLC brought Mark out from the US especially for this workshop after members of our senior leadership heard him speak at another event. They were really impressed with his message and felt it was just what our staff needed. I tend to agree. In schools like ours, where we are essentially teaching to a largely compliant, affluent and literate demographic, it's doesn't seem to be too difficult to have our students achieve si...