Chris Betcher

My role at school is all about trying to helping teachers leverage technology to come up with more interesting and engaging ways to help their students learn.  Some of our older students are in laptop programs which gives them fulltime 1:1 access to their own computer but many still do not, especially in the junior years. Which is a bit of a shame since there is, I think, so much scope in the younger grades to use technology in interesting ways that support the curriculum.  Unfortunately, with the way things are structured at the moment, our primary kids get scheduled into a single one hour lesson in the computer lab each week.  That's not really my preferred option, as it's hard to get technology integration working in an ongoing, embedded way when it involves trotting off to the computer room once a week. Ironically, all our primary classrooms do actually have a small pod of four desktop machines in them, but unfortunately I don't really see them getting used in any con...

I've been talking to a lot of teachers lately about copyright, Creative Commons and how we might deal with the issues that arise when we want to use other peoples' images and media and remix them into something new and creative. The restrictive thinking of traditional copyright has become an anachronism in the digital age. It just doesn't serve us well any more. The example I've been citing is the one I heard Larry Lessig mention, and that's the story of how when land owners were once given title to their land, the title of ownership used to be phrased in language that essentially said they owned not only the parcel of land, but all the ground below it to the center of the earth and all the sky above it to the heavens. It was a nice romantic concept, this idea that you owned not just the surface of the land but the infinite column of space that extended above it. Well, it was a nice romantic concept until the airplane was invented, that is. As more aircraft st...

For a bit of voyeuristic fun, you might like to take a peek at one, or all, of these sites... Twittervision , Flickrvision and Wikipediavision . There is a strange fascination watching them do their thing. All of these sites tap into the Google Maps API . I mentioned in a previous post about Twitter how an API (Application Programming Interface) can be used to give programmers backdoor access to a particular web app, enabling them to connect into them with another service or application that may or may not have ever been deigned to do so. Think of apps which have open APIs as Lego blocks that can be easily joined together, where the output of one app can be seamlessly plugged into the input of another, so that they talk to each and share data very nicely. Google Maps in particular have had plenty of interesting uses made of their very open API, and these three examples show you that in action. By using the data coming out of Twitter (the Tweets being made by people), or Flickr (th...

I've become quite a fan of Twitter, although I'll readily admit I never really "got it" to start with. However, as I mentioned in a previous post, and also in a recent tutorial video, Twitter makes a lot more sense once you add a group of people to your network. Having a likeminded group of fellow Twits from which to tap into some collective wisdom turns Twitter from a curious plaything into a rather amazing personal learning environment. Twitter has an open API (Application Programming Interface), which mean that programmers who can think of interesting ways to mash the basic Twitter feed into another service are able to tap into the guts of Twitter in order to get it to power their own apps. There are a number of interesting tools/toys that hang off the Twitter API, from useful local clients like Twitterific , Twitterroo , Snitter , Spaz and Twitterbox , to fun implementations like Twittervision and Twittervision 3D . And just to show how circular life is, I...

I was just playing around with Animoto , the fun online video creation toy that all the cool kids are talking about. It probably doesn't have a huge deal of educational merit (because aside from picking the photos and music, you really don't have any say over what it actually creates) but there is no argument that what it creates looks very funky indeed. And with so little effort! This was thrown together from some photos I had on my hard drive just to see how Animoto worked...  I'd forgotten I had these pics... they were of some of the great teachers I worked with last year on my exchange year to Canada when we were messing about with PhotoBooth one day... wow, I really miss you guys!! It's amazing just how a bit of music and a few special effects can make a presentation look so cool though. [kml_flashembed movie="http://widgets.clearspring.com/o/46928cc51133af17/46ef6fa73ea1c92a" width="432" height="250" wmode="transparent" /]

Steve Madsen emailed me a few months ago behalf of the NSW Computer Studies Teachers Association , asking if I'd like to run a workshop at the next CSTA quarterly meeting. He didn't have any particular theme in mind at the time, and indicated that he was happy for me to pick the topic... anything that might be useful to teachers of computing... and he asked that I get back to him with my idea for a workshop. No problem I said. I thought about what might be useful to a group of computing teachers. They would be a tech savvy group, so what could I possibly share with them? As much as it might sound like a buzzword, it seems to me that there is still an awful lot about the whole Web 2.0 phenomenon that many teachers are still trying to get their heads around, so I thought something along those lines might be useful. I didn't want it to be too predictable though, and simply talking about blogs and wikis seemed like just a little too... I don't know... obvious? I star...

There is obviously a great deal of interest among teachers regarding the possible educational uses of online video sharing sites such as YouTube and Google Video . Tons of new copycat services are popping up all over the web, with cryptic Web2.o names like iFilm , Viddler , Viddyou , Umundo and even the unambiguously named TeacherTube . It's clear that the use of short video snippets is proving very popular with lots of people. I attended a workshop a few years ago where I heard a talk by Hall Davidson . If you've not heard of Hall Davidson before he is the guy behind United Streaming , which I understand has since been acquired by Discovery Learning. Hall was really pushing this notion of giving teachers and kids access to short, sharp, to-the-point video clips in order to engage the learner and effectively impart a specific concept. He proposed that video was an exceptionally powerful medium, but that we don't need to sit a class in front of a TV to watch a full 60...

This is too funny... Unless you've been living under a rock, you probably noticed that YouTube has become quite the phenomenon over the last year. If you've spent anytime at all browsing YouTube, you've probably seen some of the more popular videos stored there... It's amazing the way they tend to bubble up to the top in popularity. It seems that the Barenaked Ladies have been watching YouTube too. Barenaked Ladies are a Canadian band based in Toronto and I must confess to have become particularly fond of their music when I lived there. I think they are very clever, both lyrically and conceptually, and I really enjoy their insightful wit. BNL's latest video clip is a real testament to this cleverness. They contacted many of the "stars" of YouTube - the Evolution of Dance guy, the two guys from Diet Coke and Mentos experiment, Where the Hell is Matt, and even Geriatric1927 among others. They managed to get these people to lip-sync to their latest s...

This is pretty cool. Go visit www.geogreeting.com and type in a phrase or word... it then spells out the phrase using letters made of satellite-imaged buildings that are shaped like the letters. Spell with Flickr does a similar thing, but made up of letters found in Flickr photographs. Nice. Thanks to Judy 'Connell for putting me onto this.

A mate put me onto the great mashup of GWB doing U2... very clever I thought... [youtube]4kKN92DASn0[/youtube] Thanks for pointing me to it Simon.