Chris Betcher

I haven't seen an actual paper credit card statement for a long time because I've banked electronically for years, but I switched banks recently and they just sent me my first credit card statement on this new account. I was really pleased to see a prominent section on the statement (mandated by government legislation) pointing out just how long this bill will take to pay off if I were only to pay the minimum amount. I think this is a great thing for developing financial literacy, as I'm always shocked at just how little some people know about money, especially credit, and how little they understand its impact. On my credit card's closing balance of $1898.20, it tells me that even if I spent nothing more on the card, and just paid the minimum required amount each month until it was paid off, it would take me 18 YEARS 6 MONTHS, and would accrue $4,348.57 in interest! I hope we are teaching this stuff to kids at school, so they don't fall into the "free money...

I've never really been what you might call a perfectionist. Nor do I believe that it's ok to do a half-assed job of things. It's good to do things right and to the best of your ability, and if I had a choice between doing something badly or doing it well, I'd always rather do it well. But it's also easy to become paralysed with inaction when you feel that something needs to be done perfectly. I saw two examples of this recently... Our school has a very dedicated team of foreign language teachers, and we take our language education very seriously. Many of our students graduate with great proficiency in multiple languages, which I think is pretty amazing. Our languages staff are all deeply passionate about their language teaching and insist that any language should be taught using only the "proper" version of that language... so, for example we teach our French students how to speak Parisian French, and would never encourage them hear "improper" ve...

Many people I know struggle with technology. They bumble by, more-or-less managing to make their computer do what they want it to do, but often without that real sense of confidence that comes from feeling fluent with the software they are interacting with. And let's face it, when we talk about "technology", we mostly mean "software". Sure, there are some hard-to-use hardware devices but by and large when I watch someone struggling to feel comfortable using "technology", it's usually because they are out of their depth with the software they are trying to use, not the hardware. It might not seem like it when you're so frustrated you just want to throw your laptop out the nearest window, but companies who build software try really hard to make their tools easy to use. Of course, not all software is actually easy to use, but I do believe that all software designers really do try to make their software as easy to use as possible. It's not eas...

Ok, hopefully you're read Part 1 of this article and you now have your calendars all set up in Google Calendar instead of iCal..  Now let's get that all synced up to your phone. One of the biggest benefits of Apple's MobileMe service it the way it keeps your iCal calendars in sync with your iPhone. Unfortunately MobileMe costs $129/year here in Australia (even though it's only $99 in the US and our dollar is almost 1:1 at the moment... don't get me started on that!) The good news is that you can get exactly the same sort of synchronization at no cost by using Google Calendar instead of Apple's iCal, plus you get all the extra benefits of sharing calendars that only Google's cloud can offer. If you're a Google user then you've probably set up Gmail on your iPhone. The trouble is, when you set that up you probably did the obvious thing and went to Settings, selected Mail, Contacts, Calendars and then chose the Gmail option. That seems kind of obvious...

At the recent Google Teacher Academy in Sydney we were given a presentation by Danny Silva about making Google Calendar "sexy". Although Danny was probably being a bit tongue-in-cheek about it all, I have to admit it made me completely rethink my use of digital calendars. This rethink was also helped along by a late night geek-session with my buddy Roland Gesthuizen , another new GCT, who was showing me some of the cool things he does with integrating Gmail and Google Calendar. I'd been using Apple's iCal software that came with my Mac, which I generally quite liked. What I didn't like was the $129 it cost me each year for MobileMe in order to sync my calendar across all my computing devices. The massive benefit of a digital calendar is it's ability to set up a 2-way sync between computer to phone. Adding an appointment on my iPhone and having it magically appear on all my computers was definitely a killer feature. Of course, I also keep a work-related calend...

This is an experiment. I'm using DragonDictate, a program for the iPad that lets you talk directly into the computer as it turns your words into text. A teacher at school today asked me about using dictation and word recognition software for her students that had trouble with learning. I think it's a great idea, although the problem will probably be that in order to have speech recognition recognise your voice you do need to speak really clearly in the first place. For many kids, especially the ones that struggle with learning, speaking clearly can be almost as difficult as writing. Still, I think we will try the experiment because, well, the software is free and it would be interesting to see just how well it can handle the students voices. I'm dictating this blog post into dragon and I'm going to publish it pretty much as it was recorded mistakes and all if you see mistakes in this you'll know why. And if you don't see mistakes in this then you can assume that...

I guess many readers of this blog would know that I work as an ICT Integrator at a large independent girls' school in Sydney.  Large chunks of my day are spent working with our teachers and our students to help them understand a little more about technology and how it might be used to make teaching and learning more engaging and effective.  Of course, teachers always seem to be very busy, and one of the difficulties in trying to deliver some form of ongoing PD is simply getting them to find the time to do so.  I've tried a number of different models for delivering PD; some work quite well, others not so much. It usually comes down to finding time, and making it meaningful. In case it's of any use to you, I thought I'd share an email that I sent to all the teachers in our junior school (R-6) yesterday.  It's an outline of how I plan to be delivering ICT professional development to them next term.  I've found that this model seems to work best for our staff, and i...

I'm finally back home from a fantastic week in San Jose at the Adobe Summer Institute.  The Summer Institute is a 5 day conference/workshop event run by Adobe's Education division for members of their global Adobe Education Leaders program .  I was inducted into the AEL program last year but was unable to attend the 2008 event in San Francisco. This year I was determined to attend the San Jose event and I'm really glad I went. When you do in fact know a fair bit about technology and how to use it, it becomes harder to find professional development experiences that challenge and extend you. One of the reasons I was so keen to attend the Summer Institute was that I felt it would push me to learn more and build on some of the knowledge I already have.  Having been a Photoshop user for many years, and spending many hours inside programs like InDesign (and PageMaker before that) and having taught Flash and Dreamweaver to students, I've always been quite immersed in Adobe...

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...

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 ...

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...

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'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...

In the leadup to the release of Apple's iPhone there was a great deal of talk about the device, mainly on MacBreak Weekly and the Apple Phone Show ... both excellent podcasts that set a real benchmark for quality when it comes to the podcasting medium. There was tons of pontificating and prognosticating about the iPhone, and how it would change the cell phone market forever. All that aside, one of the theories I heard over and over was that most people never actually tap into the full capabilities of their cell phone, with a huge majority of people using their phone just to make phone calls. Imagine that! The idea that most people never really explore their phone's capabilities really hit home to me the other day at a conference when I saw a demonstration of a video made by a guy from footage he had very proudly taken with his phone. It was a few shots edited together with some music under it, and I asked the question at the end "Did you edit that on your phone?...

I've been having a bit of a play with YouTube lately... not just as a consumer of content, but in true spirit of Web 2.0, as a contributor of content. It's a pretty cool site and it's easy to while away the minutes, er, hours, browsing through their stuff. I was really interested to find that Apple's totally rewritten new version of iMovie has built in support for adding videos to YouTube. It is nicely integrated too... as you finish working on your movie (using the new interface, which could be the topic of a whole other blog post), you just select YouTube from the Share menu and iMovie does all the digital origami required to package up your masterpiece into the appropriate formats and compression ratios to send it up to the 'Tube. It's very neat. It prompts you to add the relevant metadata and tags, and does a fairly efficient job of rendering and converting the file, then uploading it. As a test, I edited together this little production last night using...