Chris Betcher

If you like, you can skip right to the bottom of this post and just watch the video, but I always find the story behind the story kind of interesting. So I thought you  might like to know a little bit about how and why this video was made. It started out with a simple tweet from my buddy Kim Sivick in Philadelphia.  It started a conversation that went something like this... Do I know anyone who might make a quick Welcome to Australia video? I sure do. And besides, I owe Kim a favour. When I was running blogging workshops with our staff last year I was hoping to tap into the experiences of some very blog-savvy educators by getting them to Skype in and talk to our teachers about the realities and the practicalities of using blogs in the classroom. When I asked for volunteers on Twitter (where else?) Kim Sivick  was one of those who generously responded and agreed to spend time talking with us to share her expertise. I also got to meet Kim in person at ISTE in Philadelphia ...

I remember being at a university Open Day once and walking past some girls, obviously in their final year of high school, trying to decide what course they should enroll in at uni. I couldn't help overhearing their conversation about how they planned to choose... one was considering study based on the likelihood of getting a job from it, and her friend was considering her future choices based on which career paid the most. While I suppose these are both somewhat relevant factors, the idea that young people would be making choices about their life direction based on which had the shorter job queue or which helped them buy their first car quicker made me a little sad. I often think that the conventional wisdom we give kids amounts to "go to school, get a good education, get a good job and work real hard", and it's something that has always bothered me. As adults, parents, and especially educators, we talk a lot to our older kids about the idea of "getting a job...

After our recent move to the Google cloud and all the services within it like Docs and Gmail, our Languages department have had to face a few new challenges. We teach several different languages here at PLC Sydney and many of them requires the use of special characters. French, for example, uses accented characters like é, è, ç, å and so on. Prior to the move to Google, our language teachers knew all the various keyboard shortcuts to enter these characters into a program like Word or Outlook, and life was good. After the move to Gmail and Docs however, these same keyboard shortcuts no longer worked, making the potential move to Google Docs seem like a bad idea for language teaching. "It's ridiculous that Google Docs can't do such basic things when it's so easy in Word and Outlook" was the general consensus. Searching for a solution online revealed that we were not the only ones who were struggling with this issue . Lots of people were complaining about the poor d...

Have you had this conversation with another teacher yet? Me:  Hey, have you ever thought about starting a class blog?  You can use it publish what happens in your classroom, put up all the cool things your class does, and share it all with the world. What do you think? Them: Are you crazy? Why would anyone be even remotely interested in reading about what we do? And anyway, no one will ever see it... they probably wouldn't even be able to find it! And then, eventually, they do start a class blog. And pretty soon the conversation changes to this... Me: Hey, you should post up those photos of what your class did last week on your class blog. And what about that video you made with the kids? How about we post that on YouTube? Them: Are you crazy? You want me to put that stuff with the kids online where everyone can get to it? It's way too dangerous! I don't want the whole world seeing it! So which is it? When we post stuff online are we putting it somewhere where no one wi...