Chris Betcher

As we celebrate Christmas and 2010 draws to a close, here's a little video to make you smile. Special Christmas wishes to everyone who has been part of my world for the last 12 months.  It's been a wonderful year, full of learning, fun, travel, meeting interesting people, connecting with my network, and sharing ideas with each other.  I've had the good fortune to do some travelling this year and met many wonderful folk in person that I've only ever known online, as well as meeting a whole of great new people, and that's been a real highlight for me.  You know who you are, and I feel so much richer for it.  Thanks!   I feel like 2010 has been an amazing year of connecting with others, and it's been incredibly rewarding on many levels.  To everyone who has left comments on the blog, connected via Twitter or Facebook or Skype or email or the many other ways we have of being connected (including face to face of course!), thank you... those connections mean a gr...

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 ...

Chinese people, as a general rule, have dark hair.  As a race of people, they also tend to not be quite as tall as some other races of people.  And you could be forgiven for thinking that most Chinese people adhere to fairly strict diets because they tend to be fairly slim in build. Now before you accuse me of making racist remarks, I'm simply making an observation on what I've seen.  And apparently the Chinese people themselves would concur with these observations because whenever they see a westerner (or "big nose" as they call us) who is tall, heavily built or has non-black hair, they tend to stare and talk.  Because I'm fairly tall, in some cases I even had some of the Shanghai locals come up and ask to have their photo taken with me, such is their interest in these strange "big nose" visitors. So you can imagine the attention we drew when myself, Wes Fryer , Gail Lovely and Melinda Alford decided to spend a day of sightseeing in Suzhou , ( 苏州市 ) a...

I wonder if Karl Fisch knew what he was starting when he made the original "Did You Know?" PowerPoint file for his staff at Arapahoe High School back in early 2007.  Fisch just wanted to share a few thoughts about a fast changing world with his fellow teachers, but by posting a copy to his blog it got picked up by others who found it fascinating, it went completely viral, has been made into several versions, has been remixed and modified many times, and its many incarnations have now been viewed many millions of times on YouTube and other online video sites.  All of this really speaks about the power of the web to help spread ideas... In case you haven't seen it here is version 4.0, the latest incarnation of "Did You Know?" Nice work Karl. Technorati Tags: karlfisch , didyouknow

I'm finally back home from a fantastic week in San Jose at the Adobe Summer Institute.  The Summer Institute is a 5 day conference/workshop event run by Adobe's Education division for members of their global Adobe Education Leaders program .  I was inducted into the AEL program last year but was unable to attend the 2008 event in San Francisco. This year I was determined to attend the San Jose event and I'm really glad I went. When you do in fact know a fair bit about technology and how to use it, it becomes harder to find professional development experiences that challenge and extend you. One of the reasons I was so keen to attend the Summer Institute was that I felt it would push me to learn more and build on some of the knowledge I already have.  Having been a Photoshop user for many years, and spending many hours inside programs like InDesign (and PageMaker before that) and having taught Flash and Dreamweaver to students, I've always been quite immersed in Adobe...

One of the real joys of my current job is that  I get to work with our younger students in the primary school.  Having only ever taught high school, the chance to work with the R-6 kids is just so refreshing.  They are so enthusiastic, so keen and so refreshingly honest.  I've had a great time this term working with all the Junior School kids, but in particular I enjoyed working with Year 3 on some digital storytelling projects, where I suggested to the Year 3 teachers that they try Voicethread as our storytelling tool of choice.  One quick demo and they were all excited by the possibilities.  (And so was I for that matter... although I've used Voicethread a lot for my own personal use, this was the first time I've had the chance to work with students to do something with it) The kids were especially excited by the idea of getting some real feedback from real people in other parts of the world.  If you get a chance, please pop in and leave them a message. You will need to...