Chris Betcher

As many of you may know, I'm a big supporter of Creative Commons and the ideals of open sharing. I publish most of my stuff under a CC licence, usually BY-SA, because I think sharing is important and I believe that the world is a better place if we allow others to build on what we do (in the same way that I often build on the influences of others). So, a while back I published a couple of things to the OER Commons ; a site where teachers can upload and freely share their educational resources with others. The general idea is that if you publish to OER Commons, anyone can take your work and remix it and build upon it to create a version for their own individualised use. For busy teachers who all too often find themselves "reinventing the wheel" in the creation of their own teaching resources, it's a brilliant concept. You can also attach metadata to the resources you share to make them more searchable, and even map them to the US Common Core standards if you wish. If s...

My friend  and prolific blogger Steve Wheeler issued an interesting blogging challenge the other day called A Twisted Pair . He proposed taking two different people with no apparent connection and writing a post about learning that somehow connects the two, which I thought was an interesting idea. Steve proposed a few possible pairs of names on his post to get our ideas started, and although there were many pairings that intrigued me, two that really stood out were both people who have always inspired me - Pablo Picasso and Sir Tim Berners-Lee .  So here goes... There are probably numerous ideas to explore in terms of how the concepts of learning are embodied by these two people. I'll try to begin with the obvious and then see if we can find other connections. Let's start with Picasso. Picasso was an incredibly prolific Spanish artist with a body of work that is profoundly extensive. Over the years his work moved through multiple phase...

Some of you might have seen that I've been working on a daily blogging project this year called My Daily Create. You can visit it at www.mydailycreate.com (or click the link in the menu bar above). The basic idea is that I'm attempting to create something every day of the year during 2014. It could be music, a video, a drawing, a photo or a poem. It could be something practical and usable, or something retinal and frivolous. It doesn't matter what it is, I just plan to make something each day. So far it's going pretty well and I haven't missed a single day yet. Earlier this week I presented a keynote at the EduTECH conference in Brisbane on the topic of creativity at the invitation of the organisers. I find creativity an interesting topic to talk about, but it's usually one of those things that's easy to talk about in general terms but much harder to talk about specifically. I felt even more challenged by it because several of the other speakers were also t...

It's interesting that as you get older you become increasingly aware of your own influences. Aside from my parents and my direct family, who obviously had a major influence on my life, there are only handful of people whose ideas, thoughts and perspectives about the world have been so influential, so pervasive, so far reaching, that I can honestly say they have shaped the person I have become. We all have them. They are the people you would invite to your ultimate fantasy dinner party. The ones who are so interesting, so fascinating in their ideas and the way they think about things, that you would give anything to spend time talking with them, learning from them and being in awe of them. I only have a few people in that category, but one is Marcel Duchamp. For most people reading this, your reaction is probably "Marcel who?" I don't want to turn this into a history lesson, so if you want to know more about Duchamp, you can no doubt look him up . It's quite like...

As December 2013 came to an end I was considering doing another one of those 365 Day Photo Project, where you take a photo every day for a year. I've done these before, one very successfully where I actually did take and post a new photo every day for a year, and two other attempts that started well but eventually ran out of steam. Being disciplined is hard, at least, it is for me. These projects where you promise yourself that you will do something every day for a year are not easy. You miss a day here or there and then conclude that there's no point carrying on with it.  In truth, even if you only took 150 photos out of the 365 you're supposed to, you'd still have 150 photos! Not to mention a whole lot more practice as a photographer. This year I wanted to do something, but was looking for something a bit different to just taking photos. So I asked for some suggestions on Twitter and got a bunch of interesting ideas back. Taking these suggestions as a whole, I thought...

One of the most common questions I get asked by teachers is how to include video in their online resources. Whether it's including video clips in Moodle or embedding a video into a wiki or blog, the use of video can be a powerful tool for helping students learn. As someone once said to me "Give me 3 minutes and the right piece of video, and I can teach you almost anything". Working with video has a reputation for being complicated. I remember doing an online video project about 13 years ago with a school in Japan and we were literally air-mailing VHS cassettes to each other each because it was the "simplest" way to get the job done. Indeed, it's true that even just a few years ago, working with video was still relatively difficult... the file sizes are huge, the editing process can be complex, and storing video files for playback on the web has traditionally involved a bewildering array of codecs and other technical-sounding choices. It's all too much fo...

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 ...

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...

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...

Last weekend, I was in Yokohama doing some workshops with Kim Cofino for various groups of teachers in the Tokyo/Yokohama area, including the current COETAIL cohort. It was a heap of fun, and I'll write more about that later. On Monday, I spent the day running PD for staff of Yokohama International School , and I was asked to do a short presentation to get things started. The brief was just to present "something inspirational", whatever that meant. To be honest, my mind was drawing a complete blank and was quite lost for an idea. I went back to the hotel room on Sunday night - my last night before returning home to Australia - and started working on my presentation. I was really quite stuck for an idea, but I was also keen to get it done so I could go out exploring some of the Japanese sights on my last night there. I got to the point where if I stayed in the hotel room working I knew I wouldn't see anything so I just decided to go out exploring anyway and hopefully...

I've always aspired to be an Apple Distinguished Educator , but I've never actually done anything about applying for it. As far as my own personal computer use goes, anyone who knows me knows that I am most definitely a Mac guy, but I assumed that I wouldn't be able to apply to be an ADE because most of the schools I've worked in have been primarily Windows schools.  As they say, one should never assume. While it's true that many - probably most - ADEs work exclusively in Apple schools, apparently it's not always the case.  While chatting with someone from Apple a while ago I mentioned this, and they replied that the ADE program is aimed at recognising teachers, and does not necessarily focus on the type of computers used in the school that teacher works at. To become an ADE you obviously need to be active in certain ways that help spread the message about technology and it's value for education.  You need to be passionate about the ways that digital technol...

At the 2010 ULearn conference I was asked to participate in a Pecha Kucha event.  A Pecha Kucha is a way of giving a presentation with 20 supporting slides, where each slide is automatically timed to show for only 20 seconds.  This leads to a presentation of exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds.  Despite being one of the shortest presentations I've given, this was certainly one of the hardest to put together, just in terms of working out the timing and figuring out what to say in those 20 blocks of 20 seconds.  It sounds easy, but it certainly took a while to get it together. Here is the summary of what the talk was about… "As a gifted polymath, Leonardo da Vinci stands out as the prototypical lifelong learner. Curious, inventive, creative... All the things we would love our students to be. But how well would da Vinci have survived in today’s typical classroom?  If Leonardo was a student in a school today would he have achieved to the same degree?" And here are the ...

Nǐ hǎo! I'm currently in Shanghai, China for the Learning 2.010 conference , and that's pretty exciting for a number of reasons. Firstly, mainland China is somewhere I've always wanted to go. In particular, Shanghai is fascinating because of its almost incomprehensible growth.  Intellectually, I know that China is a fast rising star, rapidly moving from a developing nation to a developed nation. We've all heard the statistics about the size and growth of China, of how Chinese is destined to become the most used language on the Internet, of how China has more honours students than the US has students, and so on.  Seriously though, no matter how many times I see the " Did You Know " videos that tell me how fast China is growing, nothing can quite prepare you for the endless ocean of concrete and skyscrapers that simply didn't exist a mere 15 years ago. Perhaps more than any statistic, this is where China's growth really hit home for me... I got picked up...

In these next few posts, I'm going to try and describe some of the projects we've been doing at school lately.  My role at PLC Sydney is ICT Integrator, and I very much see it as a role where I support, advise and consult with our classroom teachers about ways to enrich their lessons with technology. It's a hard line to walk sometimes, since it often forces me to cross that line between giving advice on how to use the technology and giving advice on how to teach. The nature of digital technology makes it a really good fit with the general principles of quality teaching practice... and sometimes that fit is so good that I find it difficult to suggest ways to use technology without also suggesting that the underlying pedagogy should shift to match it.  Fortunately, I work in a school where most of our teaching staff are willing to take such suggestions on board, be it simply just regarding the use of technology, or to actually shift they way they approach the job of teaching....

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why Larry Lessig is one of my heroes. This is a terrific video that ought to make you very angry (or at least, damn annoyed!) The question is, what will you do about that anger? Are you in this fight? And what part are you, as a modern educator, playing in creating this important reform? Recorded at TEDxNYED

As much as I would have loved to have been in Melbourne all week for ACEC 2010 , it just wasn't on the cards for me. A pity, because it sounded like there was a lot of really interesting sessions to attend, and one that particularly caught my eye was the Lego Robotics one with Chris Rogers , a professor of engineering from the Centre for Engineering, Education and Outreach at Tufts University in Boston.  I've been a Lego fanboy for a long time, and have worked with kids to do some pretty awesome stuff with it over the years, but unfortunately my current school doesn't really do very much with Lego. (In fact, computer programming in general gets a pretty rough deal at PLC, something that I'd really like to see change) However, we do run a Computer Club every week in our junior school and we've decided that we will introduce programming to these kids to start with.  We've begun by getting them going with Scratch , with a plan to get some Lego Robotics gear and ma...

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...

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 ...

Crossposted on the Adobe Education Leaders blog ( http://blogs.adobe.com/educationleaders/ ) I remember the first time I saw Photoshop . I think it must have been about 1993 or so, when I got a free copy that came with a scanner purchased by my school. It must have been a "lite" version of Photoshop because I seem to recall that it didn't support layers. Even so, I really enjoyed playing with it, and I ended up installing it on all the computers in the school computer lab (license? what license?) and I started teaching the kids how to create stuff with it. They just blew me away with what they could do with it, even without layers! It was around the same time that I stumbled across an unused copy of Aldus Pagemaker in an out-of-the-way cupboard, and I convinced the school principal that we should use it to do the school yearbook; his agreement to my suggestion saw me suddenly escalated to head of the yearbook committee, a job that rolled on for many years and many issues ...