Chris Betcher

If you don’t teach in Australia, it may surprise you to learn that we have specific fonts that must be used in early years and primary education. These fonts are mandated by each state and are a requirement for schools to use when creating resources for young students. The fonts are used when teaching handwriting to young students. If you ARE an Australian teacher, particularly for the early years students from grades K to 3, but in primary school generally, you know that having access to these fonts is kind of a big deal. You are expected to use these fonts to make resources for students, such as worksheets and activities, so being able to install them on your computer is important. For a very long time now, it’s been a bit of an issue that these mandated fonts have not been available in Google Docs. I don’t think I’ve ever run training for teachers where the question about Foundation Fonts in Docs has not been asked. It’s just one of those inevitable questions that comes up every sin...

16 years ago I started a podcast. It was an exciting time for educational technology. For those with long memories, you might recall that there was a huge shift taking place at the time in the way we use the internet, called Web 2.0. For those who were paying attention, this shift changed almost everything about the way we understood the web. It went from a one-way, information consumption experience to being a two-way, participatory experience that spawned a huge wave of ordinary people who were suddenly able to easily produce and publish their own content to the web. Around this time the world discovered blogs, wikis, podcasts, and all manner of innovative web tools designed to help anyone find their voice and connect with an audience. I was curious to play in this new sandpit. Like many others, I started a blog, set up a wiki, signed up for every exciting new service that came along, like YouTube, Twitter and MySpace, and began to explore what this Web 2.0 shift was about, and as a ...