Chris Betcher

I've been in a few conference presentations lately where the topic of geocaching has come up.  Usually, the presenter asks the question "who knows about geocaching?" and about three hands go up.  The presenter then tries to give a quick explanation about it for those who haven't heard about it - "it's like a treasure hunt", or "it's a game where people hide things for others to find", or other similar explanations.  While these summaries are mostly accurate, they don't really give enough information and many people seem interested to know more about it. Thanks to a long involvement with 4WDing, I've been playing with GPS and digital mapping for a while now, and I've done quite a bit of geocaching over the last few years, including placing our own .  When I started I was using a Garmin GPS V , a great little GPS that can basically do it all - multiple datum switching, realtime path tracking, waypoint extrapolation - you name it, ...

One of the unavoidable buzzwords of Web 2.0 is the term “tag”. Everywhere you look online you come across the term, and everything from photos to news articles to blogposts are getting “tagged”. But what exactly are “tags” and why are they such a big deal these days? To understand the importance of tagging, first let’s consider the problem that tagging sets out to solve. There was a time when everything in our lives existed only in the physical world. Books sat on shelves. Photos were in photo albums. Music was stored on CDs. Life was simple. If you wanted to find that photo of your sister-in-law Wendy wearing a silly hat at last year’s family Christmas party you simply went to the family photo album and flicked through the pages till you found it. The photo was a real physical object that existed in one real physical location. Storing a photo in a family photo album seems pretty obvious, but the problem is that this method of storing, finding and accessing an object does not scale...

I was in New Zealand recently for a conference and thoroughly enjoyed my time in the Land of the Long White Cloud. I got to meet other passionate educators, talk geeky edtech stuff and just generally hang out with them for a couple of days.  As part of the fun of hanging out with fellow geeks, I made a short video from my Nokia N95 using the live streaming ability of Qik.  The live stream was just a bit of fun, and went for a total of 5 minutes and 15 seconds.  Apart from the brief live stream, I also checked my email twice using the mobile Gmail client, and also checked my location on a Google Map while wandering through the streets of Napier. While in Napier, a text message arrived from my carrier, 3 Mobile , saying that my account balance for the month has just reached $535.  What??!!  I mean, I know that mobile roaming can be expensive, but surely this had to be some sort of mistake!  I switched my phone off and left it off until I returned to Australia. When I arrived back home ...

I recently worked with our Year 4 teachers to get their kids blogging for the first time. I'd suggested blogging as a good activity for these students as a way to get them writing and reading more, as well as being for a potentially more authentic audience.  The teachers involved were a little apprehensive at first but quickly warmed to the idea and were quite keen to give it a go, especially as I said I  would work closely with them to get our blogging project off the ground... this was the first time we had tried to use blogs with the students so I was very keen to see it succeed of course. As you may have read in a previous post, we managed to be hit with numerous technical hurdles as Edublogs recovered from a series of password resets, something the kids found annoying and tedious but also that they took very well.  The teachers of the students were a little confused that blogging was so complicated ("why do we need to reset our passwords every time we try to use the ...

Every so often I stumble across a new piece of software that just does its thing exceptionally well. In a world too full of very ordinary software products, its nice to find one occasionally that just does its job very well, with a feature set that has all the stuff you want and is not cluttered up with stuff you don't, and perhaps most importantly, an interface that is intuitive and clean so that it can be used without any real learning curve. Voicethread is a great example of such an interface. It's really exciting to see so many of these well crafted apps starting to appear on the Internet as web apps, sometimes called Rich Internet Applications or RIAs. RIAs, when done well, can give the impression of behaving like a desktop app but with all the added advantages of being in the cloud... advantages such as ubiquitous access, remote storage of data and the ability to collaborate across time and place. Google Docs uses this model and is a fine way to create online docume...

The regularity of my blogging has dropped off a bit lately, mainly because I'm in the middle of writing a book about the use of interactive whiteboard technology for teachers. Although I've got almost 20,000 words written so far, I am way behind deadline and really need to get the first draft finished so it can be submitted to the publishers in a few weeks. Until I get that done, every time I feel the urge to blog I have to remind myself that there is a (new) deadline looming and direct my writing efforts to the book instead of the blog. I feel bad that my blogging has been suffering lately, but I really need to get this done. So there you have the reason I've not been updating lately. However, I simply had to take a few minutes to share this wonderful new tool I've found called Scrivener . It's an incredible tool for anyone taking on a large writing task and I really can't believe I've never tried it before. I had heard the name mentioned but assumed ...

What's the "right" number of followers/followees on Twitter? I've previously pondered what might be the ideal number to have in your network, but there is clearly no one right answer. The right number to have is whatever works for you. Some have suggested that Dunbar's Number - around 150 - is about right, but my own Twitter network has been steadily growing to almost double that and it still seems to be worthwhile and working for me so, for now anyway, I'll let it keep growing. Whenever someone follows me I've gradually developed a process to help me decide whether I follow back or not... basically I click the link to go to the new followers page, and look for a couple of key bits of information. Are they educators? Are they actively involved in ed-tech? How many do they follow? How many follow them? How often do they update? Who do they follow?  Taking everything into account, if it looks like this person can help add value to my network I'll...

Until fairly recently, most of my computing was done locally using "real apps". By this, I mean they are cllient-side applications installed on the hard drive of my own computer. I guess I've always liked the speed and convenience of having my applications - tools like Office, email, calendar, feedreader, etc - right there on my hard drive where I could get to them running at full local speed. Once you've been spoilt by the responsiveness of locally-run apps, web apps that run from the Internet just aren't as snappy. Of course, many will say that locally installed apps are old skool; that if you really think with a Web 2.0 mindset, then running your key software directly from the Internet makes more sense. The world is certainly trending that way, with a proliferation of Web 2.0 apps that now run directly from "the cloud" and computing devices designed to work this way, such as the Macbook Air . Computing in the cloud started with obvious appl...

Just wanted to share this Voicethread that some of my students did (there are still more kids to add their voices yet). In my Year 7 art class we were looking at the work of contemporary Australian aboriginal artist Sally Morgan, and the students had to examine a painting called My Grandmother's Country. We had quite a long discussion about it in class and looked at some of the symbolism used in the painting. The students then had to write a response to the work. In the past, this task is usually done purely as a text-only task... it gets discussed in class and they then do the writing at home. I thought I'd try using Voicethread instead, because it allowed them to access the artwork from home, to zoom in to see detail, and to hear me re-explain what they needed to do with it. (I know, I know, YOUR students never forget anything you tell them in class, but mine sometimes do). They were a bit shy about leaving voice comments at first, so instead they wrote a written respons...

Twitter was down for a while today. In order to feed the Twitter addiction, @shareski started a group Skype chat and started to drag people into it, who in turn started to drag more people into it. Pretty soon we had our very own pseudo-Twitter going, as everyone continued adding people into the chat space until there must have about 50 people in the room... easily the biggest Skype chat I've had. Twitter eventually came back up, and a huge collective global sigh of relief was breathed. Still, the Skywitter chat was a fun experiment. As Vicki Davis observed... "It is like an Elvis impersonator -- not the real thing but close enough when the real one is dead." That comment made my day. :-) Tags: twitter , skype , pln

I was invited by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach to contribute some thoughts to a session at the Texas Tech Forum today in Austin TX. It was very nice to be asked, especially when I found that I was in the company of such respected educators as Terry Freedman and Emily Kornblut. The topic for conversation was Virtual Communities for Professional Development and Growth , where all three of us had been invited to share a few minutes talking about how we use virtual networks to support our own learning. Unfortunately, my audio stream was largely unusable and we had to abandon it before I really got started. Seems that the trans-Pacific bandwidth gods were not smiling this morning (or was it David Jakes using all the bandwidth in the next room playing with Google Earth? Hmm, we'll never know) Nevertheless, here's the brief outline of what I would have said, or something very much like it... If you accept that Learning is a Conversation , and that some of the most powerful learning can ta...

I occasionally feel a little guilty. Although I am very much committed to the idea that technology should be integrated, no, more than that, embedded, into what happens in a classroom on a day-to-day basis, the truth is that I have spent many years teaching computing as a discipline in its own right. And I have to keep telling myself that that's ok, that there are still many kids who have a deep interest in technology for the sake of technology and find the very nature of computing highly engaging as a stand alone topic. So I'm cool with that. It's ok to be a geek. I believe one mark of a good teacher is to be able to take complex ideas and simplify them without making them simple. For example, there are a couple of concepts in the realm of computing that are not really all that hard to understand but can be very hard to explain. Binary numbers can be one. Vector graphics another. So I was really impressed when I saw VectorMagic , a somewhat geeky (yet very cool) web ...

I've been trying to make a screencast of Skype conversation. And I thought it would be pretty simple. But as so often happens, there are technical issues to overcome that can make things so much trickier than you first thought they would be. I've done quite a bit of screen capturing before, usually for short training videos on how to do certain software tasks. In fact I made a CD for a commercial training organisation a few years back that had over 80 tutorial screencasts on it made with Capture Cam Pro , so I figured I knew how to do this stuff. I've also been using Jing lately to make short screencasts on tech tips for our school network users. I think that screencasting is a great way to learn (and teach) this sort of practical, "show me" sort of stuff. Atomic Learning is another excellent resource based on this idea. So I wanted to make a couple of screencasts to demonstrate how to use the features of Skype. I'd been using Snapz Pro X on the M...

Twitter is a really interesting bit of software. When I first heard about it on MacBreak Weekly I thought it sounded pretty interesting although it still didn't really make a lot of sense to me. Being naturally curious I headed over to the Twitter website and signed up for an account. After having a play with it for a while, it seemed to make even less sense so I gradually lost interest in it and moved on to other diversions. I've now changed my mind about it. Twitter is a way cool tool! How to explain it? Twitter is designed as a sort of cross-hybrid tool that merges email, SMS, instant messaging and waving your arms around trying to get attention. It is aimed at answering the very simple question - "What are you doing?" You simply type your response to that question in no more than 140 characters and send your current activity, thought, question, mood or state of mind out into the Cloud that is the Internet. My first thought about Twitter was the same as m...

The other day, a colleague on a mailing list asked for some background info on EPS graphic files. It seems her school wanted something professionally printed and the printer asked that the artwork be provided in EPS format. Thanks to the ubiquity of the web, we are mostly only exposed to the more common web graphic formats like JPEG and GIF files these days, so some of the more exotic types like EPS are not as well understood as they could be. For what it's worth, here is my reply... Ah, EPS files! A thing of beauty and a joy forever! For anyone who works with graphics Encapsulated Post Script, or EPS files, are the holy grail of image formats. They are the ideal format for storing original artwork, although they are generally pretty useless for actually applying that artwork to a final format. By that I mean that most final applications for graphics, whether it be the web or printed documents, cannot use EPS files natively. But for a way of storing the original artwork, EPS ...

Because I was doing a bit of blog navel-gazing tonight writing that last post, I decided to take a quick look at the site stats just to see what's happening there. One of the figures that really jumped out at me was the one shown in this graph. As you can see here, the majority of browser share is now coming from Firefox! Of course this is only just the stats from my blog, and being an educational blog with a predominantly teacher audience I guess there may be a disproportionate number of users who don't use Internet Explorer, but I was still surprised to see Firefox edging out IE. Not so long ago IE had no competition at all, then Firefox came along and started to gradually steal market share, but last stats I read still showed it with a fair way to go before it could claim to have a greater share than IE. Based on these numbers, Internet Explorer 6 and 7 combined only account for 38% of the traffic! That's a huge drop and won't be making Microsoft happy at all. A...

I put this slide together for the spot I did in Sheryl's presentation in Shanghai this morning. My bit was entitled Learning is a Conversation, and I was trying to get across the idea that a blog is a wonderful vehicle for getting conversations started, and that a blog is much more than just a website. Unlike a website - which is a very Web 1.0 concept - a blog is dynamic and changes often (or should!), it encourages conversation and interaction through the commenting feature, and it also enables the use of external feeds and services to help bring the page to life, making it far more than just static content on the web. You can click to enlarge the image, but the idea is that most of the sidebar features on this blog are dynamically fed by data from either the internal content management of the blog engine itself (past posts, archives, and comment management) and also from external sources such as Twitter, Flickr, Clustrmap, del.icio.us, YouTube, RSS feeds and so on. As I ad...

For a while now, ever since I've been producing The Virtual Staffroom podcast, I've been meaning to blog about the workflow I've developed for producing it. After a lot of trial and error, and making plenty of mistakes, I'd started getting a system happening on the best way to put the podcast together. Then along comes the new GarageBand as part of iLife '08 and all that changed. Normally I don't like it when my systems get disrupted, but in this case I am thrilled about the changes as it reduces the steps needed to make a podcast considerably. Added to that are some configuration changes I made to the way I capture the audio, and I reckon I can now do better quality recordings at much smaller filesizes with far less effort, so it's win-win all round. For anyone that might be interested, here are the tools and the workflow I plan on using from now on to create podcasts. I've got another podcast interview lined up for tomorrow night so I'm excit...

I think I just experienced one of those "Oh my God" moments when you see a new technology that takes a task you potentially do often and simplifies in a way that you never thought possible. The reason I say that you "potentially" do it often is that these tasks are usually either difficult or time consuming or just plain inconvenient because they involve too many steps, so you tend to avoid them where possible. An example would be sharing what you see on your screen with someone else across a network. Still images aren't too hard, but capturing an animated movie of what you are doing on your screen is tricky and usually requires special software, and then the task of sharing that movie over the Internet usually requires a few more steps, plus the issues of incompatable file formats, Mac/Windows issues, yaddah, yaddah... Too hard! So when I just downloaded and installed Jing from the Jing Project, I was blown away by just how much they have simplified this pr...

Someone at work asked me a question today about how to do something, and I thought it was a good question. Sometimes, the definition of a good question is a question I happen to know the answer to, and in this case I did. :-) Although I've written about this topic before, it was a while ago and since the answer might be of use to others I thought I'd respond here in my blog. That way I can just direct my colleague Bernie to the blog to get the answer, plus it might benefit a few others as well. The question was this... "If I see a video on YouTube that would be useful to me, how can I get my own standalone copy?" This would be useful if you needed to show that video somewhere you weren't connected to the Net, or to embed it into a slideshow for example. The videos on YouTube are in Flash Video format, (.flv) and don't play nicely with most other programs such as PowerPoint or Keynote files. (The notable exception is SmartNotebook, which works really...