Chris Betcher

I was recently interviewed on The Press Release podcast with David Hotler . I found it in interesting chat with him and we covered quite a range of topics so I thought I would just share the episode here as well. Whenever I get interviewed I generally prefer not to know the questions in advance, and this was no exception. I find the conversation flows much better when I have no idea where its going. David asked some good questions that led into, hopefully, an interesting discussion.   I guess you can be the judge of that!   You can subscribe to The Press Release directly on their website . There are a ton of interesting episodes there! Thanks for having me David!

In these next few posts, I'm going to try and describe some of the projects we've been doing at school lately.  My role at PLC Sydney is ICT Integrator, and I very much see it as a role where I support, advise and consult with our classroom teachers about ways to enrich their lessons with technology. It's a hard line to walk sometimes, since it often forces me to cross that line between giving advice on how to use the technology and giving advice on how to teach. The nature of digital technology makes it a really good fit with the general principles of quality teaching practice... and sometimes that fit is so good that I find it difficult to suggest ways to use technology without also suggesting that the underlying pedagogy should shift to match it.  Fortunately, I work in a school where most of our teaching staff are willing to take such suggestions on board, be it simply just regarding the use of technology, or to actually shift they way they approach the job of teaching....

One of the real joys of my current job is that  I get to work with our younger students in the primary school.  Having only ever taught high school, the chance to work with the R-6 kids is just so refreshing.  They are so enthusiastic, so keen and so refreshingly honest.  I've had a great time this term working with all the Junior School kids, but in particular I enjoyed working with Year 3 on some digital storytelling projects, where I suggested to the Year 3 teachers that they try Voicethread as our storytelling tool of choice.  One quick demo and they were all excited by the possibilities.  (And so was I for that matter... although I've used Voicethread a lot for my own personal use, this was the first time I've had the chance to work with students to do something with it) The kids were especially excited by the idea of getting some real feedback from real people in other parts of the world.  If you get a chance, please pop in and leave them a message. You will need to...

I never realised I was such an auditory learner until I became a podcast junkie. Now I listen to oodles of podcasts on all sorts of topics. My drive to work is a little longer at the new school this year and I'm rather pleased about that since I get to listen to more podcasts! Ever since starting my own podcast, The Virtual Staffroom , over a year ago I've enjoyed the opportunity to chat with other educators about school, learning and whatever else came up. Initially, the motivation for making the podcast was just to figure out how it was done, and I've been lucky to have had so many wonderful teachers offering to join me online for a Skype chat, which then ends up as a podcast. This week, in somewhat of a role reversal for me, I was invited to be on the interviewee's side of the mic for a change. I had the great pleasure of being a guest on the Ed Tech Crew Podcast this week, where Darrell and Tony had a chat to me about a bunch of things, but mainly interactive wh...

I was doing some stuff on Voicethread this morning and spotted a Twitter from Alec Couros directing me to a very powerful use of Voicethread. Alec is a professor at the University of Saskatoon in Regina, Canada, and posed the question "What does your Network mean to you?" as a Voicethread and got a large number of responses from a wide range of educators. It's very interesting to scan through the responses and see what a wide range of ideas can be held within a single Voicethread. Take a look for yourself... [kml_flashembed movie="http://voicethread.com/book.swf?b=67978" width="600" height="450" wmode="transparent" /]

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...

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 have the pleasure tomorrow morning of joining Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach at the Learning 2.0 Conference in Shanghai China. Sheryl is running a session called You are the Time Magazine Person of the Year and will be looking at how educators are using Web 2.0 tools to stay connected and learning. To assist her, she asked Allanah King , Barbara Dieu , David Jakes , Clarence Fisher and myself to each contribute a 5 minute spot to talk about how being connected and networked to other people has affected how we do our work. It was a nice surprise to be asked to contribute, especially in such impressive company! In thinking about this, I started jotting down some ideas. As many of you know, I can't just jot... it inevitably grows to a full essay! So for what it's worth, here is a copy of the notes I wrote for myself. (Thanks to David Warlick for his "learning is a conversation" line... I suppose if I read something he wrote and learn from it and use it, that's an...

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...

James Farmer has been up to his upgrading tricks again, and Edublogs has been offline for a few hours today.  I don't mind, I just appreciate the facts that he takes the trouble to keep the Edublogs service at the cutting edge of Wordpress technology.  Anyway, it gave me a chance to do a bit of playing on my other blogs, tweaking a few things here and there. I also managed to get a new episode of the Virtual Staffroom podcast online.  It's been a long time between episodes, due mainly to a series of personal dramas but also because it took me a while to get broadband on again where I'm living now.  Anyway, the point is that a new episode is up -  "Open Minded"  - and another episode is in the works, Taking it Further".  Check them out, they are pretty good actually!  :-) I've also been having a good play with the Sidebar Widgets in Wordpress.  Very cool.  I'd been wondering how to add extra services to the sidebars like Clustr maps and other things wh...

  If you've been involved in education circles for any length of time, you would no doubt be aware of the work of Jamie Mackenzie.  Jamie is probably best known as the creator of the Webquest concept, but also does a lot of great work with higher order thinking, and the use of deep questions to deal with complexity and encourage kids to really think.  I was fortunate to be invited to attend a two day CEO workshop with Jamie Mackenzie over the last couple of days and I found it really worthwhile.  Like a lot of good information, you find yourself marvelling at the sheer simplicity of his ideas but still wondering why you've never thought of this stuff yourself.  It was great to meet the guy in person after having heard and read so much about his work over the years. His workshops focussed on the use of deep questions to encourage deep thinking, with some great hands-on examples of using primary sources of information to investigate suppositional questions about interesting top...

I am sitting in class at the moment, minding a group of kids for another teacher that had a meeting to attend. The kids are good, working quietly and getting their task done... Then up popped a mate on Skype, a teacher from Saskatchewan, asking a couple of questions about a podcasting project I did last semester so we chatted online for a while talking about all sorts of podcasting stuff. He did however mention that where he was in Saskatchewan was having a huge snow blizzard at the moment, and that a friend of his had a some photos of the storm on his blog. I headed over to his friends blog and found an interesting post about what happens in school during a snow day. What I found interesting was this comment... “We took the morning to divide our 13 student class (a result of a depleted school population) into four groups to create a project about the effects of the blizzard. We had a podcast group, a newsletter group, a video group and a digital story group.” This is what school s...

Time magazine recently announced that the person of the year for 2006 is in fact... me! And you. And all those other bloggers, podcasters, and users of the ever expanding range of Web2.0 tools. Apparently, Time magazine thinks we are having such an impact on the world that we have been collectively recognised as "Person" of the Year. Thank you, thank you very much. When Time produced this issue , they wanted to have a mirror on the cover to reflect back the image of the person holding it. To this end they had a supplier in Minnesota provide them with nearly 7,000,000 pieces of reflective Mylar to stick on the cover. That's a lot of Mylar! (Ironically, the people about whom the article was written are probably more likely to read it online anyway.) Of course, if you happen to own an iSight-enabled Mac, not only do you have obviously better taste than your Windows-toting brethren, but you can take advantage of a very neat little trick that only iSight enabled Macs ca...

Wow, I'm amazed.   This podcasting idea is actually working.  The Virtual Staffroom , my little project to try and share the great  technology integration work done by some of Australia's leading teachers is actually working. I got an email today from a guy at the Australian Catholic University in Ballarat, Victoria, asking if he could burn 80 copies of the podcast to CD and give it to a group of pre-service teachers as they train to go out into the classrooms of Australia.  I was blown away.  This is within 48 hours of going live with Anne Baird's Episode 1. And then I just checked the iTunes Store, who are now including the show in their podcast directory.  It's currently ranked number 1 podcast in the Educational Technology section! In fact its also ranked number 10 in the Education section overall. And this is just the beginning!  Bring it on... :-)

Yay! Another little project I've been working on lately is The Virtual Staffroom, a podcasting project where I'm trying to create a virtual conversation space for leading teachers to talk about the ways they integrate technology into their classrooms. Episode one launches today with a wonderful conversation with Anne Baird from Wedderburn school in Victoria, Australia. Head on over to www.virtualstaffroom.net and check it out. It should also be available very soon through the Podcast directory of the iTunes Store.

Yes, it's almost that time of year again. Yes, on October 5 it will be World Teacher Day . So take a moment and send a quick email to a teacher that made a difference to you or your children. There's nothing quite so lovely as getting a note from a student who tells you that you made a difference to them. I know it's the true reward of the teaching profession. Anyway, I'm looking to also launch a new project I've been working on, and I reckon October 5 could be just the right date to do it. It's a podcasting project where I'm getting the best, smartest, most creative teachers I know and sticking a few of them in a Skype conference, recording our conversation and releasing it as a podcast. We'll talk about technology education in particular and what we can do to make school a great experience for the kids we teach. Check it out on www.virtualstaffroom.net , and hopefully by October 5 we will have podcast number 1 up and running! Details for subscr...