Chris Betcher

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...

This post is a bit of a call for assistance from any schools in Indonesia . If you could assist we would really appreciate it. Our year 5 classes are just embarking on a thematic unit of work on Indonesia.  The students are doing research into life in Indonesia, learning about the culture, food, transport, religion and so on. It's being done as part of their HSIE strand.  By the way, HSIE stands for Human Society and it's Environment, for those outside NSW.  Oh, and NSW means New South Wales, for those outside Australia. See the joys of writing for a global audience? And that's the point really. Getting kids to think outside their own backyard, and realising that when they use certain words or abbreviations that they don't always translate across borders and timezones. Knowing that other people are asleep when you're awake, and that words and phrases you take for granted can be complete mysteries to people outside your own culture is, I think, a really important min...

I was browsing through some old files this week and I stumbled across this wonderful piece of video that brought back some great memories for me. It's just over 10 years old and is an interview with a group of students I taught back then, just after they had been awarded third place in the 1998 AT&T Virtual Classroom Contest. The Virtual Classroom Contest , for anyone that remembers it, was an amazing web-based global collaboration project that linked kids from across the world together. Over 300 schools took part each year, forming 100 teams made up of three different schools that had to be located on three different continents. The project ran for over eight months, starting with the use of forums and email to debate and discuss ideas for a theme, and then a massive collaborative push to turn their ideas into reality. We were fortunate to be teamed up with two other amazingly dedicated schools - Percy Julian Middle School in Oak Park, Illinois, and Fuwa Junior High School...

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

Being a bit of a technology geek, one place I've always wanted to visit is Silicon Valley . Stretching southwards from San Francisco to San Jose, the Bay Area and Silicon Valley are home to many of the world's major computing and technology organisations. Birthplace of companies like Apple, Adobe, Google and Twitter, breeding ground for new ideas at universities like Stanford, and host to big annual tech events like MacWorld and WWDC; the SF Bay Area really is a slice of geek Mecca. So I'm pleased to say that I'll be spending the next week or so here. I'm actually here for the Adobe Summer Institute, a 5 day conference and workshops held at Adobe's San Jose offices as part of their Education Leaders program. We get to spend all week immersing into the serious end of fun stuff like Photoshop and Flash. This afternoon I visited Wikispaces , a company based right here in San Fran only a few blocks from my hotel. Wikispaces put a message out on Twitter a while...

One of the side effects of the new web is greatly increased disintermediation , or cutting out the middleman.  It seems that everywhere you look, entire industries are being turned upside down because the web makes it so easy for people to completely bypass the traditional "middlemen" that we all used to rely on so heavily.  Musicians are bypassing record labels and releasing their music directly to their fans.  Authors are bypassing publishers and using services like lulu.com to self publish. Homebuyers often know just as much about the real estate markets as the agents.  Ordinary people can buy and sell shares without the need to go though expensive stockbrokers.  In all of these processes (and many others like them) unless the middlemen add real value along the way, they face eventual extinction.  Why would you continue to pay someone to do something that you can just as easily do yourself? This disintermediation seems to be obvious in three main areas.....

In previous posts , I've mentioned how nice it is to occasionally convert some of our online connections into real ones.  This week I had the opportunity to again meet up with someone I'd only ever know through the blogosphere. Susan Sedro is a teacher at the Singapore American School where she does ICT support for years 3, 4 and 5.  The first time I "met" her was during a group Skype call back in September last year and since that time we have read each other's blogs, chatted occasionally on Skype and, along with Kim Cofino , even recorded an episode of Virtual Staffroom together. I'd noticed that Susan was asking some very Aussie-centric questions on Twitter a while back, wanting to know the best places to go snorkelling on the Barrier Reef, etc, so I assumed she might be planning a trip down here.  We got in contact and I said if she was in Australia to give me a yell and we'd catch up.  Well, she yelled and we caught up. So last Wednesday night, Lind...

One of the really cool things about being a globally connected teacher is the opportunities to develop relationships with other like-minded educators. As I've said once or twice before, learning is a conversation and as we start to engage in that conversation it continues to feed our need for ongoing learning. Web 2.0 tools like Twitter and the blogosphere, as well as some still-useful "old skool" technologies like Skype, email and mobile phones means that we can be incredibly connected to each other if we choose to be. I started hanging around online communities a long time ago; in fact, as a teenager I was a geeky kid with a Citizens Band radio and used to sit in my room late at night having conversations with lots of people from all over Sydney and beyond that I mostly never met. (I say "mostly", because I did actually meet a few of my CB buddies and became quite good long-term friends with some of them) When I got into computers I remember the excitement...

The Fireside chat took place this morning for the K12 Online Conference. There was a good roll-up of attendees via the Elluminate platform, topping out at one point at about 110 people. David Warlick was on hand to answer some questions from the group, and people were firing questions at him at a rapid pace. The chat stream was like a fast-flowing river, with comment after comment after comment streaming up the screen. Sometimes I wonder how effective these really large chat streams are, as it's so hard to have a deep discussion let alone a coherent conversation! As someone noted in the chat, it was like being ADD on steroids. However, the opportunity to connect with a worldwide group of educators and engaging in discussion and conversation about things that we think matter was wonderful. David did well to field the diverse (and sometimes quite difficult!) questions from members of the group. I even got to throw a question to David myself. Virtual environments like this are ...

It's cool to see just how our networks of connectivity are letting us find each other so easily and spontaneously, and the conversations that are evolving out of those connections. While checking my mail tonight, my Twitter goes off. It seems that Jeff Utecht in China is hosting a chat session using something called Wiziq. A number of Twitterers are talking about it. I'm intruiged, but I didn't have Jeff on my Twitter list so I carry on with what I was doing. More conversation tweets out about this session, and I'm following along vicariously through everyone else's Twitters. Pretty soon I see another tweet from Kim Cofino (from Bangkok, Thailand) talking about how she's chatting with Graham Wegner (from Adelaide, Australia) and Chrissy Hellier (from Napier, New Zealand). By this stage, I feel like the party is going on without me, so I decide to have a guess at Kim's Skype name and do some gatecrashing. ;-) Next thing I'm in a text chat with Gr...

Ahoy there me hearties! If ye be looking for a fun story about the power of the Internet, and how it can enable individuals with an idea (even a fairly quirky one!) to make it a global reality then take a read of this story about how Talk like a Pirate Day came into existence. Yarr, 'tis a tall tale but true! It just goes to show that an idea + a communications network + the right connections can have extensive effects. Two guys playing racquetball having fun talking like pirates turns into a fun day that people all over the world take part in. My Twitter feed has been full of Ahoys and Yarrghs all day! It's an interesting read to see how this event came to exist, and makes you realise that it IS very possible to have an idea that spreads far and wide with amazing efficiency if you are plugged into the right networks. Yarr, matey!

Sorry to be picking on Kim Cofino so much lately, but she's blogging like a woman possessed! :-) Kim just twittered about a post written by Struan Robertson, one of her school admin team at the school where she works in Thailand. It's a great post Struan (who incidentally, started blogging after the Shanghai Conference on the weekend - good for you!) Given all the talk over the last few days about connectedness and how our networks of like-thought are linking us all together globally, this paragraph really jumped out at me. For those that may not know, Kim is an American teacher who was working in Malaysia until last year and now works at an International school in Thailand. And how does a school in Thailand find talent like Kim?... "I was also amazed at the impact of blogging. We met and hired Kim Cofino last year through blogging because we already knew how/what she thought. Are we “inventing” a new way to run our HR Dept.? We hire people because of how they think, ...

I just read a great quote from Kim Cofino's blog, Always Learning , as she was reflecting on the Shanghai Conference from last weekend... "I didn’t realize before how much blogging (reading and writing in collaboration with others) would change my life - not just enhance my professional development like reading a journal article, but change my life - the way I think, the way I interact with people, the way I work, the way I look at the world. It’s impossible to understand the impact of these technologies unless you are using them yourself." I totally agree. Even before Web 2.0, I experienced the same thing, albiet on a slightly smaller and slower scale just through email forums and message boards. I've been active on mailing lists and forums since about 1994 and cannot imagine what it would be like to not be connected to others. Now, with blogs and RSS and Twitter and podcasts and all these other incredible tools, the fibres that forms those connections are just g...

I have the pleasure tomorrow morning of joining Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach at the Learning 2.0 Conference in Shanghai China. Sheryl is running a session called You are the Time Magazine Person of the Year and will be looking at how educators are using Web 2.0 tools to stay connected and learning. To assist her, she asked Allanah King , Barbara Dieu , David Jakes , Clarence Fisher and myself to each contribute a 5 minute spot to talk about how being connected and networked to other people has affected how we do our work. It was a nice surprise to be asked to contribute, especially in such impressive company! In thinking about this, I started jotting down some ideas. As many of you know, I can't just jot... it inevitably grows to a full essay! So for what it's worth, here is a copy of the notes I wrote for myself. (Thanks to David Warlick for his "learning is a conversation" line... I suppose if I read something he wrote and learn from it and use it, that's an...

At the IWB Conference on the Gold Coast today I met up with a bunch of teachers from the OzTeachers mailing list community, many of whom I have known for years but only met this weekend for the first time. What an interesting world we live in... we rounded up as many of them as we could to pose for a group photo in from of Bryn Jones' infamous "iVan". Standing, left to right, it's Margo Metcalf, Val Macauley, Bryn Jones, Mal Lee, Sue Green, Fiona Banjer and Kim English. In the front is myself and John Pearce. Kel Hathaway, Sue Burvill-Shaw, Adrian Greig and AnneMarie Loi were at the conference too, but we couldn't find them for this photo unfortunately... It was a great conference, and I'll blog more about it later, but for now I just wanted to say G'day to all the OzTeach members I met today... it was great to put a face to the names!  Thanks also to all those nice people who came up to me and let me know that they either read this blog, or listen to ...

Just noticed that Karl Fisch from The Fischbowl blog has had his "Did You Know?" presentation updated to a newly revised version, thanks to some internet collaboration from Scott McLeod and a guy called XPlane who helped with the Flash animation. Karl originally created this for his own school's use last year and, as it mentions in the presentation, it was originally destined to be shown only to about 150 people.  However, it was shared on Karls' blog, the edublogosphere picked up on it and pretty soon it had been distributed to over 5 million people.  Yes, we live in exponential times.  Watch it.  Use it.  Share it.  Go start some conversations... [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/pMcfrLYDm2U" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] The full story on this presentation can be found here .   Thanks for sharing Karl.

You may recall that a little game of tag went around the edublogosphere sometime last year. In this game, many edubloggers were called upon to list five little-known facts about themselves and then tagging the meme on to five more bloggers. It was a fun exercise to help share the love, and a good learning experience in getting to know more about tagging your posts for Technorati. It seems that round two has started... Jo McLeay just tagged me for a similar meme that's floating around the edublogosphere at the moment. Jo posted a list of Eight Random Facts about herself , and tagged eight more bloggers to help pass along the idea, incuding myself. So here goes... I spent 4 years at Art School in the early 80s, and majored in Screenprinting, Photography, Multimedia and Film/Video. In the 80s I was in a band called The Jellybabies and for a few years we played regular gigs in lot of pubs around Sydney . When I was 8 years old, I won the TV Times Sesame Street drawing c...

My school bought a few class sets of laptops recently. The whole point of having laptops instead of another computer lab was so they could be used more flexibly around the school, but the obvious problem was how to store and transport them from room to room. I'd seen classroom laptop trolleys on the market but none of them seemed to be exactly what we were after. The main laptop trolley maker in the Australian market appears to be PC-Locs from Western Australia, and although their products look ok, in my opinion they are hugely overpriced for what they are. For our 15 laptops we would have had to buy their 20 bay model, and at just over $5000 each they seemed outrageously expensive! I'd had a number of conversations with them on the telephone, but they were pretty firm on their pricing and there was no way I was going to pay that sort of money for a few pieces of welded steel and some rubber wheels, so this was a business deal that was clearly never going to happen. I eve...

Found this article in a news link the other day. It seems that the growing list of terminology surrounding the "new web" (can I call it that?) is getting up some people's noses... "Blog", "netiquette", "cookie" and "wiki" have been voted among the most irritating words spawned by the Internet, according to the results of a poll published on Thursday. Topping the list of words most likely to make web users "wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the keyboard" was folksonomy, a term for a web classification system. "Blogosphere", the collective name for blogs or online journals, was second; "blog" itself was third; "netiquette", or internet etiquette, came fourth and "blook", a book based on a blog, was fifth. "Cookie", a file sent to a user's computer after they visit a website, came in ninth, while "wiki", a collaborative website edited by its readers...

If there was ever a doubt that the tools of Web 2.o are dramatically simplifying the way we can embed digital technologies into our classrooms, let me point you towards a neat little project run by a couple of amazing teachers who decided to dabble with the possibilities of a wiki. This wonderful piece of web collaboration was put together by Neil D'Aguiar from Richard Challoner Secondary School in New Maiden, Surrey, UK, and Simon O'Carroll from Holy Trinity Catholic High School in Oakville, Ontario, Canada. It's a great example of how something as simple as a wiki can be used to develop a sophisticated web project that works simply and easily across the boundaries of time and place. The site can be found at flatplanet.wikispaces.com . I first met Simon when I was on a teacher exchange to Canada during 2006. We shared a workroom (and occasionally chicken wings) and became quite good mates. As a teacher of Religion, Simon was a relative newbie to the integration of te...