Chris Betcher

A while ago I realised that my online life was in password hell. I was using literally hundreds of sites and services that required passwords, but they were held together with a confusing mess of old passwords that I'd mostly forgotten, numerous passwords which were being used on more than one site,  passwords that didn't meet the usual complexity rules usually required across the Internet, and so on. I often found myself having to do a password reset just to access a site, and of course that new password became yet another one I had to remember. Or forget. I felt things were a little bit out of hand so I finally took a few steps to clean up my digital life. First, using the same password for everything is an exceptionally stupid idea. Instead, I came up with my own system that helped me create hard-to-guess, but easy-to-remember passwords that I could apply to any site.  Having a clear system for this meant that when I signed up for some new online service I could quickly come...

Have you had this conversation with another teacher yet? Me:  Hey, have you ever thought about starting a class blog?  You can use it publish what happens in your classroom, put up all the cool things your class does, and share it all with the world. What do you think? Them: Are you crazy? Why would anyone be even remotely interested in reading about what we do? And anyway, no one will ever see it... they probably wouldn't even be able to find it! And then, eventually, they do start a class blog. And pretty soon the conversation changes to this... Me: Hey, you should post up those photos of what your class did last week on your class blog. And what about that video you made with the kids? How about we post that on YouTube? Them: Are you crazy? You want me to put that stuff with the kids online where everyone can get to it? It's way too dangerous! I don't want the whole world seeing it! So which is it? When we post stuff online are we putting it somewhere where no one wi...

I've been keen to get more of our staff blogging, since I know from first hand experience what a powerfully reflective process it can be. I've always found that taking the time to write causes me to think more deeply about what I do, it makes me more aware of the ideas and approaches that I'm using with those I teach, and it's also made me a much better writer than I once was. I'd argue that blogging really helps improve your communication skills on many levels while building a stronger foundation for understanding your own beliefs and convictions. There is something both magical and affirming about putting your thoughts down in words, and even moreso when you decide to publicly share those words with others. As you can probably tell, I'm a bit of a fan of blogging (or connective writing, to borrow a phrase from Will Richardson ) During 2011, our school had the opportunity to apply for an AGQTP grant. This grant program is funded by the Australian government...

We all see the world through our own personal lens. Consequently, we all form our own opinions about the world and depending on the sorts of experiences you've had in the past, your view of the world and how it works can easily be coloured by those experiences.  Sometimes, we form opinions about things based on experiences that are limited or incomplete or biased one way or the other, and the interesting thing is that we still believe those opinions are correct, even when they can be completely wrong. There's a lot to be said for real expertise. One of my favourite examples of pitting a narrow opinion against broad expertise is from the movie Cool Runnings .  In one scene, the team coach Irving Blitzer (played by John Candy ) is having an exchange with Sanka Coffie (played by Doug E Doug ), where they are arguing about who should be the driver of the bobsled. Sanka is a Jamaican pushcart champion and sees himself as the obvious choice. But Jamaica is ...

I was following a discussion on a mailing list today about the various internet blocking and filtering policies that different schools implement. Someone said their school was revising their fitering/blocking policy and wanted to know what others were doing. From the replies I saw, it seems that many schools are still running scared of what their kids might do on the web, and still block access to useful services like YouTube and Flickr, and pretent things like Facebook and Twitter don't exist. Seems that even after 10 years, Web 2.0 is still a scary bogieman to many schools. I'm curious to know why, in the schools that do block access to certain sites (and it sounds like it tends to be mainly social media sites), what educational reason is given.  I'm just trying to look at the other way for a moment and instead of assuming that sites should be blocked unless a case it made to unblock them, why we never seem to do it the other way around. Is there really any reliable rese...

I have an RSS feed set up that automatically scans the Google news feed s for the phrase " PLC Sydney " or " Presbyterian Ladies College ", so anytime either of those phrases appear in a news publication worldwide I get notified of it.  (Which, if you want to monitor your school's online public image, is a useful thing to set up by the way!)  While I do get the occasional mention of other Presbyterian Ladies Colleges such as the ones in Melbourne or Perth , and occasionally the abbreviation PLC Sydney turns up some non-related stuff , having the RSS feeds scanning the news for mentions of your school is handy. Recently, I spotted this article in one of the local papers.  It was a project that I didn't even even realise was taking place in the school so I was surprised when I spotted it.  (I also like the idea that some of our teachers are now doing interesting projects that use ICT and they don't need me to make it happen!  Yay! The good kind of redund...

If there's one thing I hate it's when people assume I'm an idiot and try to rip me off. So when I got home today I opened the mailbox (yes, the real one!) to find this letter from a company called the Domain Renewal Group .  Their letter - which looked very much like an invoice -  was addressed to me as the owner of the domain betchablog.com and kindly informed me that this domain was due for renewal soon and that I should pay this as soon as possible.  The wording on the letter said that " the domain name registration is due to expire in the next few months "... and that... " Failure to renew your domain name by the expiration date may result in a loss of your online identity ." All of that is true.  Betchablog.com IS coming up for renewal, and I DO need to renew it. The problem is that Domain Renewal Group are NOT my domain registrar, and they never have been.  I happen to have all of my various domains registered with GoDaddy , and I've never eve...

Silly me. I was mowing the lawn the other day and I stupidly managed to get my big toe caught in the mower blade while it was running at full speed. The blades ripped right through my shoe and mangled the tip of my big toe. Needless to say, it really hurt! I was home on my own, and had to figure out what to do next... there was blood going all over the place, I felt myself going into shock, as I tried to figure out how to get myself to a doctor. It was not a lot of fun. The good news is that despite smashing my toenail off and slicing the end of my big toe, it could have been a hell of a lot worse. Fortunately, the bone was not broken and I still have all my toes so apart from a bit of pain and inconvenience I think I'm pretty lucky. It highlighted to me - in a very real way - that lawnmowers are bloody dangerous things! With their sharp, rapidly rotating blades, they are obviously capable of doing some real damage to the human body. Naturally, I never intended to get my toe in...

Someone once said to me that if you do something once, it's an accident. Do it twice and it's a coincidence. Do it three or more times and that's just the way you're living. The underlying message is that if you repeat something enough, then the patterns of use start to tell their own story. Your repeated activity starts to build up into a pattern of use and looking at those patterns can often give insights into the activity that are not apparent by looking at the individual instances of the activity. This idea of allowing data to "rest where it lays" and deriving insights from it is essentially the idea behind tag clouds, whose patterns reflect repeated use of words, tags, keywords or ideas. If you look at someone's Delicious tag cloud and see the patterns emerging in the form of highlighted, emphasised words, then you see a clear indication of what interests that person. The more they bookmark using tags, the more evident their interests. The numbers...

I spent today, pretty much by accident, at a forum-style discussion of the issues surrounding the Australian government's proposal to filter the Internet access of all Australian citizens .  I say "by accident" because the invitation to attend an " Internet Filtering and Censorship Forum " appeared in my email a couple of weeks ago, and without reading it too carefully, I thought it was going to be an educationally focused discussion about the filtering issues that schools face.  That would have been useful and interesting, but I didn't realise that the discussion would actually be centred on the bigger issue of the Australian government's proposed Internet filtering scheme.  I'm glad I went. Look, there is no argument from me that we need to keep our children safe online.  We absolutely need to protect them from the things that are clearly inappropriate, obscene or undesirable.  I remember the first time I realised my son had seen things online that...

There is a Twitter phishing scam going around at the moment that I'm unhappy to say I fell right into. This quick post is just a warning to anyone who reads it to hopefully help them not do the same thing. I'd been off the grid for a few days so I hadn't heard the news about this scam, but it's been floating through the Interwebs for 2 days apparently. It did strike me as odd when i clicked on it that I had to relog in to Twitter, but I'd been playing with different browsers so the fact that it was asking me for a password didn't seem all that unusual. Of course, I should have taken more notice of the URL that was in the address bar, but I was too late. I got a direct tweet from John Pearce that said... "fixed it.. hehe here is that blog i wanted to show you http://twitterblogs.access-logins.com/login" I know John. I trust John. So I clicked it. It asked for a password, which as I mentioned, was not unusual considering I was trying a new browser (...

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 ...

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...

It's sometimes difficult getting kids to understand the full implications of something as seemingly harmless as putting their photo online. They often don't realise that, just like The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins , once something goes online it is near impossible to remove it. This video makes a pretty good point of showing the effect of this behaviour... [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/iwBz-hxjSLU" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] It's something that both children and adults need to understand well. This is a post-Google world we live in. It's no longer unusual that an employer Googles the name of a potential hire to check their reputation and see what they have done (or equally, not done). When you go out with a new person, it's likely that your date has Googled you, MySpaced you or FaceBooked you to get a little bit of "background" on the sort of person you are. In a digita...