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...

Hope 2010 is a great year for you all! This photo is made of three separate images stitched together with Photoshop.  It's the calm before the fireworks storm !  I thought it turned out quite well considering I didn't have a tripod and was just leaning up against the wall to hold the camera steady on a 4 second/f3.5 setting. CC photo by betchaboy http://www.flickr.com/photos/betchaboy/4233820172/

So here I am in Christchurch, New Zealand for Ulearn 09, certainly one of the biggest Ed Tech conferences in NZ, and probably one of the biggest in the southern hemisphere I would think. It's a education conference that I've wanted to attend for the last few years, having only ever heard good things about it, but for whatever reason I just haven't been able to get here for it. This year was different, and after hearing how good it was from my work colleague, @sirchriss , I was very keen to get here. Fortunately, a number of Australian educators were sponsored to attend the event this year and I was lucky enough to have my presentation submissions accepted, so here I am. It really is a beautiful part of the world, and Christchurch is a very attractive city. The conference itself is quite large, with close to 2000 delegates, 400+ workshops and presentations, 150 support staff and over 60 vendors. The logistical effort to plan and host a conference of this scale is signific...

Yes, it's meme time again.  A meme , according to wikipedia, "comprises a unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices; such units or elements transmit from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena."  In other words, it's a way to help spread a culture. The blogosphere occasionally sends these memes around as a way to spread this culture of online community... sort of like a "getting to know you" exercise that you might do with students on the first day of class.  A topic is chosen, people respond to it and then pass the meme along to others to contribute to.  By tagging others like this, the meme spreads quickly. I was tagged a couple of days ago in a meme called 7 Things You Don't Need To Know About Me, by a PE teacher in Victoria named Jarrod Robinson , or mrrobbo to those that know him.  He was tagged by Rodd Lucier from Canada, otherwise known as thecleversheep .  (I find it interesting that Rodd...

It seems so easy to make global connections these days. Tools like Twitter , Skype , podcasts, blogs and even good old fashioned email make it easy to build connections with others. But they also make it easy to overlook the fact that behind each tweet, IM or email there are real people. Although the online world has made us the most connected we have ever been, at the same time the sometimes faceless, disembodied nature of it can also allow us to be quite disconnected if we let it. One of the things I've really enjoyed doing over the last couple of years is to take every opportunity to make real connections with the people behind the avatars. I remember the first time I bumped into Judy O'Connell at a meeting in Sydney... although I knew of HeyJude and had read her blog for a while there was still this sense of "wow... so you ARE real!" when I finally met her. Since then, I try to make a point of meeting other members of my online world in the real world wheneve...

I have on occasion been frustrated - dare I say critical - of the sometimes glacial pace of change in the broader educational community when it comes to embracing the use of ICT. I occasionally say things that might make me appear less compassionate than I really am. But believe it or not, I really do have a great degree of patience and time for anyone who is genuinely interested to know more about how to effectively integrate technology into the demanding job of teaching kids every day. A week or so ago, I returned from the CEGSA (Computer Education Group of South Australia) conference in Adelaide where I had the great pleasure of giving one of the keynote addresses. I got to meet so many wonderful, dedicated educators who were there giving up two days of their holidays to come and learn more about technology and how it can be effectively used it with their students. The people I met at CEGSA are already the "believers" however. They were attending the conference, presum...

We may be just a couple of NYFBs , but I had the pleasure yesterday of catching up with Jenny Luca from Melbourne, author of the Lucacept blog. Jenny was in town with her friend Helen to attend a presentation by Garr Reynolds on how to do better presentations. We made tentative plans to catch up and fortunately things fell into place and we were able to actually meet up. After the ridiculously difficult task of finding a parking spot, made all the more difficult by the fact that I left my wallet at home and so had no money to pay for even meter parking, I eventually found a legal parking spot only a short walk from where we could meet. Thank you universe. Jenny is one of the refreshing voices in the Aussie blogosphere, with so much passion and enthusiasm for education and how technology can make it better. I was very keen to meet up and have a chat. After finally meeting on the corner of Grosvenor and George streets, I suggested we go take a look at the new Sydney Apple Store a...

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...

It's been quite a week in the educational blogosphere... A lot of the chatter (or rather, twitter) has been focussed on the sudden forced closure of Al Upton's classroom blog by his Year 3 students.  The closure was requested by DECS, the South Australian Department of Education and Children's Services in response to a parent who was concerned about their kid being exposed to the dangers of the Internet.  Al's kids, well known on the web as the "miniLegends", have been blogging successfully for the last few years, and were just starting a new project where their blogging was being mentored by other teachers around the world. In theory, it sounds like a great idea... kids with a passion for writing being connected with other educators all over the world willing to help these kids with their writing, offering critique, advice, suggestions, support and generally acting as a volunteer tutoring service at no charge. Their blogging came to a screeching halt last F...

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...

There are two ICT trade show events that I'd love to attend - NECC in the US and BETT in the UK. I've probably left it a bit late to attend BETT (it starts in a week or so), but I'm seriously considering attending the 2008 National Educational Computing Conference in San Antonio Texas. After hearing all about it for the last few years I've been curious and interested to attend a NECC event, and the 2008 event just happens to fall conveniently in the midyear Australian school holidays (where I potentially have a full three weeks off!) One of the motivators for attending this year is thanks to the amazing connections I've made with so many educators throughout the US and Canada via tools like Twitter and Skype. I feel like 2007 has been the year of expanding my own personal learning network and I'm keen to get to an event like NECC to meet up with people in real life that I feel I've come to know through these virtual spaces. Besides, last years Bloggers...

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...

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, ...

My good friends Brian and Wendy picked me up from the IWB conference and took me to stay with them in Brisbane. They used to live in Sydney and we got to spend lots of time together, but I haven't seen them much since they moved... so it was great to see them again. They took me to see Riverfire, a huge fireworks spectacular on the Brisbane River. It really was pretty spectacular. I took a bunch of photos and made a little slideshow, then put it on YouTube, then linked it here. Hope you like it. [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/ZQO-mHQBaZE" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] Tags: riverfire , brisbane , fireworks

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 ...

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...

I blogged recently about my effort to raise funds for MS research by taking part in the MS Walk and Fun Run here in Sydney. Thanks to a great deal of support from friends, family and workmates I've managed to raise a decent amount of money for this great cause. The people from MS Australia rang me recently to ask if I'd be prepared to do an interview with the local newspaper to help promote the event and naturally I said yes. So one of the journos from my local paper rang me at work the other day to ask a few questions, and organise a photographer to come by my house. The angle I suggested to the journo was that I was really impressed by the online tools provided by MS Australia, such as the fundraising websites that are created when you register for the event, and that one of the reasons I have been able to raise as much as I have was due to the connections and tools that the Internet enables. I pointed out that many of my friends and aquaintances from the Blogosphere h...