Chris Betcher

 A short while back I was asked to speak at an event about ways that we can prepare students for the future of work. I was still working at Google at the time, and I thought there was an angle to the question about preparing students for the future of work that is sometimes overlooked. Here was my response... I need to start by pointing out that there have been two systems that have influenced my own perspective on the future of work, and the education system is only one of them. The other one has been in “the workplace”, or the enterprise, or business, or whatever you want to call it, in the work I’ve done outside of schools for the last decade or so. I think it’s worth calling this out because as much as schools like to prepare students for “the future of work”, schools are also filled with people who often have only experienced what work looks like inside a school .  I think I can say that what work looks like inside a school and outside a school can look very differe...

If you’ve been in education for a while there is a phrase you'll hear regularly if you listen for it. It’s just seven little words but the impact of those words can be enormous. The people who utter this phrase often mean well, but it rarely leads to much that is positive. This phrase can kill a potentially good idea, ruin a worthwhile initiative or demoralise others who want to make a difference. It may just be the most dangerous phrase in the world. The phrase is “That’s the way we’ve always done it.” You may have been on the receiving end of these words. Perhaps you came up with what you believed was a brilliant, clever, innovative or time-saving idea. You honestly feel your idea can improve an existing outcome and make a huge difference. So you approach your colleagues with your idea, knowing that by making just a few simple changes the world will be a better place. And while they might listen and thank you for your interesting suggestion, they inform you of all the reason...

I was looking at school websites tonight trying to find some information I needed and I stumbled across a school that I won't name, but on the front page of their website they made the claim they make of "Best Practices in Education" or "Advanced Learning Environment".  The images that accompanied these claims were of very traditional classrooms, doing very traditional things. Is it that schools simply don't get what those terms mean? Or are they just marketing to parents who don't understand what those terms mean? I'm not sure, but I do know that images like these completely devalue any real sense of best practise or advanced learning environments because the school clearly doesn't know what those terms actually mean. A school is not innovative or modern or advanced or "best practice" because it says so in their marketing brochures. It needs to actually BE those things it claims to be. Adding phrases like that to images like this is si...

I've been doing some work recently with a school that's using iPads with their kids, and was asked to give a talk on the topic "The place of iPads in teaching and learning". This post is just a bit of thinking out loud about that question. Let me start by saying that I think the iPad is an amazing piece of technology. I dispute the common claim about iPads just being "consumption devices". That's a load of nonsense. Used wisely, iPads open up incredible opportunities for creativity. This point was driven home during my recent 365 project, The Daily Create , where I made a creative "thing" every day during 2014. Although this project wasn't specifically based on using an iPad, the truth is that at least 80% of what I came up with over the course of the year was made on an iPad. Whether it was photo editing, making graphics, editing movies, composing music, building animations and 3D objects, or even just writing, the iPad was a perfectly cre...

The following press release  was written by Dr Jason Zagami, president of the ACCE, in response to the recent review of the Australian Curriculum. This review, undertaken by Ken Wiltshire and Kevin Donnelly on behalf of the Liberal government makes a number of recommendations that are hard to understand in their inconsistency and lack of vision. Here is Jason's press release. Please spread it around. For immediate release Australian Council for Computers in Education has deep concerns with inconsistent support for school computing in the government's response to the Review of the Australian Curriculum ACCE has considered the Review of the Australian Curriculum Report and Supplementary Material, and is deeply concerned by some of the recommendations being considered by the government in the Initial Australian Government Response. While ACCE acknowledges concern about a perceived overcrowding of the primary curriculum, there are many ways to address this other than a return to ...

I was asked by a colleague in another school the other day if I could give her a snapshot into what I actually do, and what the role of an ICT Integrator actually looks like (from my perspective anyway). Apparently she wants to talk to her school leaders about having an integrator on their staff and was trying to get an idea of what the role would entail from someone who does it. Whenever people I meet ask me what I do, they have often never heard the term "ICT Integrator". It's another one of those jobs that didn't exist when most of us were in school. We say all the time that we should be preparing our students for jobs that don't yet exist, and this role is a good example of that. I have a couple of  simple "elevator pitch" descriptions that I often use to tell people what my job involves... "I look at the stuff kids are supposed to learn in school and help teachers figure out where technology can help make that learning richer and more meaning...

I was recently in Hong Kong for the excellent 21st Century Learning conference, where I had the very great pleasure of running some hands-on workshops in Google stuff, and also giving the closing keynote. As I mention at  the start of this talk, it was quite intimidating to think that I could say anything worth hearing after an amazing couple of days of learning from so many other amazing educators. (Having people like Stephen Heppell and Gary Stager in the audience didn't make it any less intimidating either) I actually didn't even realise these talks were being recorded so when I spotted this on Twitter today it came as a bit of a surprise. For what it's worth, here is a video of my talk, called Babies and Bathwater. http://youtu.be/d127FRlxVuY I go to quite a few conferences, and I'm always a little surprised at how few of them bother to video the presentations. Given the amount of time and energy that conference organisers put into running these events, you'd th...

With Google turning 15 last week, I've been pondering  about just how much friction has been removed from our lives because of technology (and web technology in particular).  Thanks to the web, many things that were once difficult, expensive, complicated or time-consuming have been made less of all of these things, and much of the inherent friction in these things has been dramatically reduced, and in some cases even eliminated completely. This removal of friction hasn't always been painless, and many industries have been decimated by the massive disintermediation that  digital technology has brought to them. Take the music industry as an obvious example.  In the space of about a decade, we've seen a huge shift from the idea of buying music on plastic disks to that of downloading music from "somewhere on the Internet", hopefully by still paying for it with some sort of subscription model like Spotify or Google Play All Access, but all too often pirated for free ...

It's clear that there is quite a lot about this thing we call "school" that probably needs to change and that there are many schools around the world that are embracing and leading that change with some really innovative ideas about teaching and learning. However, from what I can tell, innovation and genuine change for the better in education is still rather patchy and relies greatly on the passion and drive of individual teachers, many of whom fly "under the radar" in order to make positive change in their own educational circumstance. There are certainly schools that are, as a single organisation or even a whole system, making giant strides towards reinventing what modern education should be about, but if I was able to randomly drop you into one of the many millions of classrooms around the world to observe what's taking place inside it, I think it would still be fairly hit or miss as to whether you'd find teaching and learning that was modern, contemp...

On Ozteachers the other day, we were informed that the Draft paper for the new Australian Curriculum: Technologies has been released for review and ACARA, the government body charged with overseeing its implementation, is looking for feedback during the consultation period. Figuring that I should probably know more about this document than I currently do, I thought it might be a good idea to set up a Google+ Hangout On Air, and invite whoever wants to talk about it together for a discussion.  It was also a motivator to get me to actually read the document first! Thank you to those that were able to join in, in particular Bruce Fuda, Jason Zagami, Roland Gesthuizen, Nicky Ringland, and Matt Wells, as well as several others who dropped in and out during the call like Tim Wicks, Maurice Pagnucco and MaryAnne Williams. There was also some good discussion taking place in  the backchannel on Google+ , so visit that too if you're keen to read a bit more. I'm still getting my head aro...

Dear Internet, I could use some of your help if you have a moment. I've been fortunate to have been asked to present an extended workshop at the Learning 2.012 Conference in Beijing China in a few weeks. It's very exciting. I presented at the Learning 2.010 conference in Shanghai two years ago and it was totally awesome, absolutely one of the best learning events I've been part of . The session I'm running this year is called Creativity and Innovation in the Classroom . It's a big topic that could really go in any number of directions, which is both exciting and scary at the same time (made even more scary by the possibility that we might not have any Internet access that week in China!) Obviously I feel as though I have something to contribute on the topic or I wouldn't have suggested it, but I would really love to tap into some of your collective wisdom. I'm a big believer in the wisdom of the crowd, and I'm hoping to pick your collective brains a lit...

Yesterday at PLC Sydney we held a whole-staff PD workshop with American educator Mark Church. Mark is a co-author of the book Making Thinking Visible , as well as a contributor to the Project Zero team. I found myself really resonating with much of what he had to say. I liked the fact that his focus was on really good pedagogy, and although I could see many connections to the sorts of thinking that I find myself constantly exposed to in the edtech world, his message had very little to do with the use of technology. It was really just all about good teaching. PLC brought Mark out from the US especially for this workshop after members of our senior leadership heard him speak at another event. They were really impressed with his message and felt it was just what our staff needed. I tend to agree. In schools like ours, where we are essentially teaching to a largely compliant, affluent and literate demographic, it's doesn't seem to be too difficult to have our students achieve si...

I wonder how many teachers would be prepared to gather all their students together at a school assembly sometime and say the following to them ... "Look, we just need you all to know that we do NOT trust you. We've talked about it, and we think that given the opportunity, you will all get up to no good and make poor decisions. Because of this, we plan to closely monitor your every move and to make sure that you don't get away with anything, ever. We plan to prevent you from doing common tasks that are probably perfectly fine and safe. However, since we are, after all, assuming that you won't be able to make your own good decisions about those things, we have taken the liberty of making those decisions for you. Essentially, we think you are all a bunch of thieves, cheats and liars with no sense of morals or ethics, and you probably spend all your time looking at pornography anyway. We have no intentions of assuming anything other than the worst... as I said, we real...

I remember being at a university Open Day once and walking past some girls, obviously in their final year of high school, trying to decide what course they should enroll in at uni. I couldn't help overhearing their conversation about how they planned to choose... one was considering study based on the likelihood of getting a job from it, and her friend was considering her future choices based on which career paid the most. While I suppose these are both somewhat relevant factors, the idea that young people would be making choices about their life direction based on which had the shorter job queue or which helped them buy their first car quicker made me a little sad. I often think that the conventional wisdom we give kids amounts to "go to school, get a good education, get a good job and work real hard", and it's something that has always bothered me. As adults, parents, and especially educators, we talk a lot to our older kids about the idea of "getting a job...

I want our schools to be better. I believe that the biggest improvement we can make to our schools is to be fussier about who we allow to teach in them. I look forward to the day where the teaching profession is non-unionised, and underperforming teachers who have lost the passion and spark that our students so deserve are able to be relieved of their duty. I hope we find ways to identify those teachers who cannot teach, or have lost interest in doing it well, or who see what they do as a paycheck rather than a calling, and find ways to respectfully but firmly move them on, as they have no place in today's classrooms. I want to be a part of a teaching profession where you need to reinvent yourself every year, where having interests and skills outside "the system" make you better at what you do, and where we don't confuse "20 years of experience" with "1 year of experience, repeated 20 times". I want an educational system where students experience t...

2011 has been an interesting year for blogging. I feel like my own personal blogging has been really suffering lately, not just from being really busy at work, but also from the endless distractions of Twitter and Google+ which, if I let them, could easily become my sole places for sharing stuff online.  Certainly, there are some people, like Mike Elgan , who use Google as their sole online presence and funnel all their other online stuff into G+.  It's a potentially intriguing strategy, as the engagement factor on G+ is certainly very high.  You could also argue that Twitter has replaced a great deal of sharing that was one done via blogs, and there's little doubt that between the "Big Three" of Facebook, Twitter and Google+, the nature of blogs and blogging  has shifted considerably since I first started using them back in 2005.  I'm blogging less, for sure, and it definitely leaves a void that I miss filling. However, this was also the year when I ...

I just read a post on a mailing list where the topic touched on teachers that struggle with technology.  The phrase that really got me going was something about making allowances for teachers who don't like or understand technology ( whether they are new grads or close to retirement) and how this is all a bit hard for them. This is something I feel really passionate about so I have to say it... Technology in schools is NOT a new thing. I just cannot accept excuses about technology being optional, whether it's from someone who is new to teaching or others who are close to retirement. There are children in those classrooms every day who deserve the best education we can offer them, and it is completely unfair if that education is less than it should be because someone wants to pick and choose which aspects of their job they feel are important.  No child should have to put up with out of date learning experience just because their close-to-retirement teacher is "taxiing to th...

As a technology integration specialist my job is to help other teachers learn more about technology, but the real spillover is that I get to help other teachers to learn more about all sorts of stuff. Because of this I've come to a much better understanding of what it means to be a lifelong learner, to find true joy in learning for learning's sake, and to be curious about pretty much everything. I love learning, and I find it difficult to understand why others sometimes appear not to. Many schools espouse the values of lifelong learning, but not all have teachers who live those values on a daily basis. We have a new principal in our school this year, and like all management changes it often comes with a great deal of conjecture about what might change, what new ideas will be put in place. Over the last few weeks I've been able to get an insight into our new boss and what's important to him, and to get a feel for where our school might be heading over the next few year...

Rob is a music teacher friend of mine who works in the NSW Southern Highlands, and he dropped me an email this afternoon asking if I knew of any schools who were thinking about using iPads.  His school is moving forward with an iPad trial and he was wondering what resources might exist that would help them avoid "reinventing the wheel". As it turns out, I've been seeing a lot of iPad related information lately so I thought I'd post a reply here on the blog rather than just reply to Rob in an email, just in case some of the information is of some use to others. I'll preface it by saying that I think there are a lot of things in education that could certainly use some reinventing, and maybe this is a good chance to do it. There seem to be a lot of schools looking at how iPads might fit in so it may be a little early to avoid the reinventing and instead take advantage of the opportunity to do some  inventing . While there are plenty of lessons about 1:1 learning to ...