Chris Betcher

I recently gave this keynote talk at the EdTechTeam Cape Town Summit, titled "Imagine the Possibilities". I've actually given this talk a number of times at Summits and other events all over the world, and this is likely the last time I'll use it, so I'm posting it here just for posterity.

I spent a few hours this afternoon driving the nearly 200km from Sydney to Bathurst for a day of work in a Bathurst school tomorrow. As I crossed the Blue Mountains and went past Lithgow, the roads open up a little and there are longer, straighter faster stretches of road. On one particularly long straight stretch of road I noticed that my steering wheel hung ever so slightly to the right even though I was driving in a straight line. It wasn't enough to really bother me, but I started to wonder why it was like that and what it would take to fix it so the steering wheel was perfectly neutral while driving in a straight line. I'm sure the reason had something to do with the camber of the road, and I realised that I do in fact have some level of understanding of how a vehicle's steering system works. How did I know this? As I pondered the question I remembered back to my very first car and how I had - on several occasions - pulled the steering wheel off and put it back on agai...

I was turned onto this rather cool new tool that I think has a ton of great potential in the classroom. It's called Flipgrid . It's a way to collect short video responses to a prompt. As well as looking great, it works on mobile (with the Flipgrid app), doesn't require a login, and is super simple to use! I've embedded a link to an example. Just click the container below and it will take you to a topic page. Then just click the big green plus button to start recording (and you'll probably also need to click "allow" to give permission to your camera). Then just record your message, add your name and a poster frame, then submit it. As more people submit theirs you can revisit the site to see what they add. Give it a go! After you click the button, say who you are, where you're from, what you teach, and how you might use this with your students. You have 60 seconds! Go! The direct link to the topic page is  https://flipgrid.com/2a35ea The administrator of...

I had a knock on our front door a few weeks ago. It was a young English guy going door to door for an electricity retailer, trying to get me to switch my power company.  As it turns out, it was his first day so he didn't really know a lot about what he was selling and couldn't answer many of my questions in detail. To be fair, I can be a bit analytical about these things and I don't think he was prepared for so many questions. His spiel was basically "You should switch to us because we are better", but when I asked about the rates they charge, all he could respond with was "We have really good rates". If you ever come knocking on my door, whether you're trying to get me to switch energy companies, make a donation to your cause, or convince me that Jesus loves me, you better be prepared to engage. I ask lots of questions. You better have answers. So I grabbed my most recent power bill, and asked him exactly what their rates were per KWh. He had never ...

After a successful iPad trial at school last year, the teachers all agreed it was working really well.  So this year we asked our year 5 and 6 students to bring an iPad to school and I've been working with the teachers and students in those classes to help ensure we get the most from this arrangement. I think it's been working really well; the kids have been incredibly responsible and have been producing some really interesting work with them. I had an email from a Year 5 parent a few weeks ago asking some questions about the iPad program, in particular about required apps, the rules and expectations for their use, the use of games (including one called Goldrush that she was concerned about), impacts on socialisation, responsibilities for backing up data, etc. In particular, this parent had a few concerns about using the iPad for playing games versus using it a a learning tool. I wrote a fairly long and detailed email in reply, and I'm republishing it here (anonymised of co...

I was asked by a colleague in another school the other day if I could give her a snapshot into what I actually do, and what the role of an ICT Integrator actually looks like (from my perspective anyway). Apparently she wants to talk to her school leaders about having an integrator on their staff and was trying to get an idea of what the role would entail from someone who does it. Whenever people I meet ask me what I do, they have often never heard the term "ICT Integrator". It's another one of those jobs that didn't exist when most of us were in school. We say all the time that we should be preparing our students for jobs that don't yet exist, and this role is a good example of that. I have a couple of  simple "elevator pitch" descriptions that I often use to tell people what my job involves... "I look at the stuff kids are supposed to learn in school and help teachers figure out where technology can help make that learning richer and more meaning...

I'm not a big fan of Christopher Pyne. As far as I'm concerned, our new federal education minister has shown himself to be inept and completely out of his depth in his current portfolio. He continually implies that Australia's teachers are less competent than they should be and that our students are not receiving a proper education. The amount of political mudslinging every time he opens his mouth is just an embarrassment to any thinking person. In his interviews with that other redneck extremist lunatic, Alan Jones on 2GB, the two of them make complete asses of themselves as they bask in idiotic, inflammatory statements about Australian teachers. The thing that really ticks me off about Pyne is this phrase he continually uses... "back to basics".  In adopting this phrase he poo-poos "modern teaching methods" which he considers airy-fairy, and talks about how we need to get back to a direct instruction model where students listen to a teacher talk at the...

I was recently in Hong Kong for the excellent 21st Century Learning conference, where I had the very great pleasure of running some hands-on workshops in Google stuff, and also giving the closing keynote. As I mention at  the start of this talk, it was quite intimidating to think that I could say anything worth hearing after an amazing couple of days of learning from so many other amazing educators. (Having people like Stephen Heppell and Gary Stager in the audience didn't make it any less intimidating either) I actually didn't even realise these talks were being recorded so when I spotted this on Twitter today it came as a bit of a surprise. For what it's worth, here is a video of my talk, called Babies and Bathwater. http://youtu.be/d127FRlxVuY I go to quite a few conferences, and I'm always a little surprised at how few of them bother to video the presentations. Given the amount of time and energy that conference organisers put into running these events, you'd th...

While not every student might want to write their own software, understanding the big ideas of coding is a skill that all students would benefit from, even the very young ones. Understanding the key ideas of computational thinking – identifying patterns, thinking algorithmically, manipulating data, solving real problems, etc – is an important step in helping our students build mastery over their world. This presentation aims to take you on a guided tour through some of the resources available to your students to help them learn the principles of creating code.  It starts by looking at a range of desktop and mobile apps suitable for teaching very young students to program, right through to tools and websites that can help your older students learn to hack code, and much more. If you do actually try any of this stuff out, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. PS: This is my fourth contribution to the K12 Online Conference , and I think it's a great format for an o...

It's been said that you know when a 1:1 computing initiative is truly working in a school because you stop talking about it. The conversation stops being about the hardware - the computers, the tablets, the wifi, the network, etc. When all that stuff works the way it is supposed to, it begins to fade from the conversations that take place in the school. We stop talking about the devices and start talking about the learning that takes place with the devices. We stop thinking about the infrastructure required to make the technology work, and we just use it, fully expecting that it "just does". A good 1:1 program should be like oxygen. It becomes so ubiquitous that you start to forget it's there. Students and teachers begin to blend the use of technology into their daily routine in a way that becomes so seamless that it feels natural. Taking the technology away would be almost like taking oxygen away. You don't notice it until it's not there. How do you get to th...

It's clear that there is quite a lot about this thing we call "school" that probably needs to change and that there are many schools around the world that are embracing and leading that change with some really innovative ideas about teaching and learning. However, from what I can tell, innovation and genuine change for the better in education is still rather patchy and relies greatly on the passion and drive of individual teachers, many of whom fly "under the radar" in order to make positive change in their own educational circumstance. There are certainly schools that are, as a single organisation or even a whole system, making giant strides towards reinventing what modern education should be about, but if I was able to randomly drop you into one of the many millions of classrooms around the world to observe what's taking place inside it, I think it would still be fairly hit or miss as to whether you'd find teaching and learning that was modern, contemp...

On Ozteachers the other day, we were informed that the Draft paper for the new Australian Curriculum: Technologies has been released for review and ACARA, the government body charged with overseeing its implementation, is looking for feedback during the consultation period. Figuring that I should probably know more about this document than I currently do, I thought it might be a good idea to set up a Google+ Hangout On Air, and invite whoever wants to talk about it together for a discussion.  It was also a motivator to get me to actually read the document first! Thank you to those that were able to join in, in particular Bruce Fuda, Jason Zagami, Roland Gesthuizen, Nicky Ringland, and Matt Wells, as well as several others who dropped in and out during the call like Tim Wicks, Maurice Pagnucco and MaryAnne Williams. There was also some good discussion taking place in  the backchannel on Google+ , so visit that too if you're keen to read a bit more. I'm still getting my head aro...

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...

I wonder how many teachers would be prepared to gather all their students together at a school assembly sometime and say the following to them ... "Look, we just need you all to know that we do NOT trust you. We've talked about it, and we think that given the opportunity, you will all get up to no good and make poor decisions. Because of this, we plan to closely monitor your every move and to make sure that you don't get away with anything, ever. We plan to prevent you from doing common tasks that are probably perfectly fine and safe. However, since we are, after all, assuming that you won't be able to make your own good decisions about those things, we have taken the liberty of making those decisions for you. Essentially, we think you are all a bunch of thieves, cheats and liars with no sense of morals or ethics, and you probably spend all your time looking at pornography anyway. We have no intentions of assuming anything other than the worst... as I said, we real...

If you like, you can skip right to the bottom of this post and just watch the video, but I always find the story behind the story kind of interesting. So I thought you  might like to know a little bit about how and why this video was made. It started out with a simple tweet from my buddy Kim Sivick in Philadelphia.  It started a conversation that went something like this... Do I know anyone who might make a quick Welcome to Australia video? I sure do. And besides, I owe Kim a favour. When I was running blogging workshops with our staff last year I was hoping to tap into the experiences of some very blog-savvy educators by getting them to Skype in and talk to our teachers about the realities and the practicalities of using blogs in the classroom. When I asked for volunteers on Twitter (where else?) Kim Sivick  was one of those who generously responded and agreed to spend time talking with us to share her expertise. I also got to meet Kim in person at ISTE in Philadelphia ...

I remember being at a university Open Day once and walking past some girls, obviously in their final year of high school, trying to decide what course they should enroll in at uni. I couldn't help overhearing their conversation about how they planned to choose... one was considering study based on the likelihood of getting a job from it, and her friend was considering her future choices based on which career paid the most. While I suppose these are both somewhat relevant factors, the idea that young people would be making choices about their life direction based on which had the shorter job queue or which helped them buy their first car quicker made me a little sad. I often think that the conventional wisdom we give kids amounts to "go to school, get a good education, get a good job and work real hard", and it's something that has always bothered me. As adults, parents, and especially educators, we talk a lot to our older kids about the idea of "getting a job...

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...

It’s an interesting sign of how this connected world we live in actually works when I see people coming back to revisit an idea that was floated months earlier, still mulling it over and willing to come back and re-clarify things again in their own head, which in turn helps others (like me) to re-clarify things in mine. I'm referring to a post called Unlearning, Relearning, Learning by Graham Wegner, who was in turn responding to an earlier post written on this blog back in May this year. The conversation had basically turned to the idea of how people learn. Graham referred to another post from Dean Groom, where Dean talked about the idea of people being able to learn on demand, when they need it, by accessing the wealth of available online resources that are scattered across the Internet, produced by the millions of members of the online community. This mass-sharing has produced what Dean referred to as "the scattered manual", where the instructions for doing pretty mu...

I’m writing this from the Novotel Twin Waters Resort on Queensland’s beautiful Sunshine Coast.  It’s a hard life, I know, but someone has to do it. It’s been a spectacular day here, and I’ve managed to fill it with a bike ride along the beach, drinks at the bar, and lazing around the poolside area, so it hasn’t really been too hard to take. No need to feel sorry for me. I'll be ok. But it hasn't all been just lazing around the pool and soaking up sunshine... The real reason I’m here was to take part in the first Interactive Teaching and Learning Masterclass conference, run by the good folk at IWB Net. I had the privilege of being involved as a presenter, leading one of the Cohort sessions and doing the keynote on the  Saturday. The ITL Masterclass conference attempted to be different to a typical conference. Most traditional conferences have a pretty standard format… There is a keynote address in the morning, followed by a series of workshops or breakout sessions that are al...

I just read a post on a mailing list where the topic touched on teachers that struggle with technology.  The phrase that really got me going was something about making allowances for teachers who don't like or understand technology ( whether they are new grads or close to retirement) and how this is all a bit hard for them. This is something I feel really passionate about so I have to say it... Technology in schools is NOT a new thing. I just cannot accept excuses about technology being optional, whether it's from someone who is new to teaching or others who are close to retirement. There are children in those classrooms every day who deserve the best education we can offer them, and it is completely unfair if that education is less than it should be because someone wants to pick and choose which aspects of their job they feel are important.  No child should have to put up with out of date learning experience just because their close-to-retirement teacher is "taxiing to th...