Chris Betcher

On January 1 this year, thanks to a bit of prodding from my mate John Pearce , I started a 365 Photo Challenge... whereby I planned to take a photo every single day this year and post it to the web. I'd tried doing this once before but never made it longer than a few days before I lost focus and let it slip away.   So here we are nearly 11 full months into my 365 Days of Light Photo project and I'm pleased to report I haven't missed a single day yet! ( I've been late to post them a few times, but never more than about 48 hours behind schedule either, which I think is pretty darn amazing!) I post them all to a Posterous site I set up called 365 Days of Light , which in turn crossposts to Twitter, Identica,  Flickr. and PicasaWeb (which is really Google+).  It also used to post to Facebook until I quit my account there).  Here is a link to the collection so far ... (minus the first few days of January which I forgot to include back then) Part of the challenge for me wa...

With nearly two week down in the 365 Day Photography project I'm starting to get my head around some of the more useful tools for photography on the iPhone.  There are lots of interesting photography apps to choose from in  Apple's App Store, and I've had a good play with many of them - something I probably wouldn't have done if I didn't have a project to focus on.  That's one of the reasons I like doing "projects", and one the reasons that Project Based Learning works so incredibly well. When you have something to focus on, even something as innocuous as simply taking a photo each day, it opens up a whole range of new learning experiences. This blogpost outlines some of the more useful and interesting iPhone photography apps I've been using (or plan to use). Firstly, I should acknowledge that the camera in the iPhone 4 is pretty damn impressive to start with. It has its limtations, sure, but it really can take some pretty extraordinary photos if...

I like photography. In fact I like imagery in general, which is, I suppose, why I enjoyed art school so much. The combination of not only interesting images, but also interesting ideas, made the four years I spent at art school some of the best years of my life. However, it was only after I taught art for a few years that I discovered that, while I liked art, I didn't necessarily like teaching art. I've since spoken to many people who proclaim that the quickest way to kill your passion for something is to do it for a living. I'm not sure that's the case... what I do now, working with kids and technology and the future, is what I love doing. But I understand what they are saying... for many people, their passions need to be unshackled from the daily "must do" so that they can be enjoyed as a "want to" instead. So, working with imagery and design and graphics and photography remains something I enjoy simply for the sake of it. I like to take photos, o...

After leaving Shanghai the other day I traveled south to Hanoi, Vietnam.  My Sydney school has an "arrangement" with a Vietnamese school here.  The school is called the Vietnam Australia School , or VAS Hanoi, and the arrangement is that as well as the school offering a standard Vietnamese curriculum it also offers a scaled down and modified Australian curriculum focusing on English and Commerce.  This Australian component is taught by native English-speaking teachers, using courseware and textbooks developed by staff back at PLC Sydney, and the goal is to get the kids leaving school with qualifications in two languages and two countries.  I've been keen to get to VAS for a while to see what it's all about, so when I asked my principal for permission to attend Learning 2.010 in Shanghai he suggested that I drop into VAS Hanoi on the way home and do some training and support for the staff here. So for the past few days I've been at the school, seeing how it operat...

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...

Another meme is doing the rounds of the edublogosphere at the moment, called the Passion Quilt meme. I was tagged to contribute by Woody Delauer , a teacher from Maryland in the US, and asked to keep this meme going. (I think I was tagged by this a few weeks ago by someone else but we were in the middle of moving house at the time so it slipped through the cracks - sorry!) The Passion Quilt meme works like this... Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons (or even find one marked as copyright but then write to the owner to ask permission).  You can also make/take your own of course.  This picture should capture the quality that YOU are most passionate for kids to learn. Give your picture a short title. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to the blog entry that tagged you. Include further links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow...

This is a joint post between Sue Waters and myself about integrating Flickr with Picasa, and has been cross posted on each of our blogs. Let's start with a little background on this post's origin After spending some time yesterday migrating Linda's entire photo collection (well, most of it... did I mention that regular backup is very important?) into Google's Picasa photo management application and then giving her a bit of a tutorial in how to use it tonight, she asked the next obvious question... how do I put some of these photos onto Flickr ? A good question. After all, Flickr is without a doubt the best online photo sharing website around. With amazing tools and options, an incredible online community for sharing and learning from each other, and a huge array of APIs that enable Flickr to work with a range of different online and offline services, the decision to use Flickr as your online photo storage tool of choice is a bit of a no-brainer. However, on the...

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" /]

Yes, it's yet another made-up word from the wonderful world of Web 2.0... Moblogging. Moblogging, or mobile blogging, is all about being able to take photos on your mobile phone and blog them directly to a blogging service without the need to go via a computer as such. I bought a new Sony Ericsson K610i mobile phone recently and was quite excited to find not only a good quality camera that took a decent photo, but also an option in the photo gallery menu that said "Blog this". Naturally it didn't take me long to have a play with it and I can now snap a photo with the phone, and with a single menu selection it will resize the photo and upload to a blog in one fell swoop! Unfortunately, it doesn't let you specify which blogging service you use so I can't set it to upload to this blog, but it does do a fairly seamless job of going to a Blogger account. The very first time you send a photo off into cyberspace, it automatically creates a new blog account on Blog...

It's always nice to find useful software that's free. The open source movement has had a major influence in enabling software makers to build great apps and get them out there for people to use, usually at no charge. Free is good. What's more unusual is to find free software from the big names, like Microsoft. A few notable exceptions have emerged from the Microsoft stable over the last few years though, such as Producer , Photostory and even Sharepoint , which have actually been quite good. The latest cool freebie is a thing called Paint.Net , developed by a group of student programmers who did an internship at Microsoft and developed a fresh new image editing tool using Microsoft's .NET framework. Microsoft is not a big player in the image editing area, and doesn't have a significant product in that space. They've obviously given a challenge to these young programmers to develop something for image editing and the result is supposed to be amazing. Check ...

When I first saw Google's interface for search a few years ago it was like a breath of fresh air. It wasn't cluttered with crap like every other major search engine seemed to be at the time. Yahoo! and whatever other search engines were around back then took a portal approach and jammed as much stuff on the screen as they could fit, whereas Google's search tool was elegant in its simplicity. I'm sure this elegance is a major reason behind its ongoing success. That, and the fact that it would actually find what you wanted 99% of the time, and sites couldn't buy their way into the top rankings. For much the same reason I've not been a big fan of web photo storage sites like Photobucket or even Flickr, because of the amount of clutter and crap that goes along with them. I have a Flickr account but rarely use it because it's just too, I dunno, inelegant. So I was very pleased to have just discovered Google's Picasa Web Albums , a free photo storage and w...