Chris Betcher

Over the past couple of weeks, I had the great privilege of visiting Pakistan, and working with over 120 teachers across Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. Like a number of other countries across the Asia Pacific region, Pakistan is making changes to their education systems, with an increasing move to educational digitisation happening in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic. Schools that were thrown suddenly into using digital tools are now starting to rethink what this all means for education moving forward. Google is playing a significant role in this shift too, with Chromebooks and Workspace forming an important part of this new digital landscape, and working closely with Pakistan and other frontier markets across the region. After flying into Islamabad via an extended 21 hour stopover in Doha, Qatar, I arrived at the first training venue to meet almost 40 enthusiastic teachers from the Beaconhouse Schools system. I was really impressed not only with their existing knowledge of Workspa...

This post is likely to be the first of a couple of reflections about my recent experiences in Beijing for the Learning 2.012 conference . There is so much to absorb; the organisation and location of the conference itself, the experience of spending a week in China's amazing capital city, but mostly the genuine privilege of being able to spend time with a remarkable group of talented educators from around the globe. Firstly, China. This is my second trip to China, the previous being for the same conference two years ago in Shanghai. I wrote some thoughts about that trip at the time and how awestruck I was by China's rapid growth. That certainly hasn't changed. China is still full of surprises, and especially so in Beijing where there is such a dramatic contrast between the ancient and the modern. On my first full day there I got to go shopping for pearls with Julie Lindsay and Lucy Gray (trust me, that Julie knows how to shop!) and then later that day Lucy and I explore...

If you like, you can skip right to the bottom of this post and just watch the video, but I always find the story behind the story kind of interesting. So I thought you  might like to know a little bit about how and why this video was made. It started out with a simple tweet from my buddy Kim Sivick in Philadelphia.  It started a conversation that went something like this... Do I know anyone who might make a quick Welcome to Australia video? I sure do. And besides, I owe Kim a favour. When I was running blogging workshops with our staff last year I was hoping to tap into the experiences of some very blog-savvy educators by getting them to Skype in and talk to our teachers about the realities and the practicalities of using blogs in the classroom. When I asked for volunteers on Twitter (where else?) Kim Sivick  was one of those who generously responded and agreed to spend time talking with us to share her expertise. I also got to meet Kim in person at ISTE in Philadelphia ...

It's been a big few weeks. I'm currently writing this while flying in an Air Canada Boeing 777, seat 40J, somewhere just south of the equator and slightly west of the International Date Line, chasing the sun around the globe on my way back to Sydney. I've been in Canada for much of the last few weeks, visiting our Canadian family and friends, something I wish I could do more often. But for three days I managed to slip away down to Philadelphia PA for my first ISTE conference . If you know me, or read this blog at all, you may know that I tend to get around to a few conferences in various places, but the ISTE Conference (and prior to that, a NECC) has eluded me so far. For whatever reasons, I haven't been able to get to this event so when the opportunity came up this year I jumped at it. And I'm glad I was able to… it is an amazing event. In thinking about ISTE 2011 to decide what to blog about it, there are a few notable things to mention, but for me, one really st...

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...

Chinese people, as a general rule, have dark hair.  As a race of people, they also tend to not be quite as tall as some other races of people.  And you could be forgiven for thinking that most Chinese people adhere to fairly strict diets because they tend to be fairly slim in build. Now before you accuse me of making racist remarks, I'm simply making an observation on what I've seen.  And apparently the Chinese people themselves would concur with these observations because whenever they see a westerner (or "big nose" as they call us) who is tall, heavily built or has non-black hair, they tend to stare and talk.  Because I'm fairly tall, in some cases I even had some of the Shanghai locals come up and ask to have their photo taken with me, such is their interest in these strange "big nose" visitors. So you can imagine the attention we drew when myself, Wes Fryer , Gail Lovely and Melinda Alford decided to spend a day of sightseeing in Suzhou , ( 苏州市 ) a...

This is the first time I've ever done this, but I'd like to welcome a guest writer to Betchablog.  This post was written by one of my work colleagues, Pam Nutt, and was actually the first part of her welcoming address to staff for the start of the 2010 school year.  I enjoyed hearing Pam deliver this address to our teachers so I asked if she'd mind posting it here for all to read.  As you'll discover, it was based on some of her experiences in Alice Springs in outback Australia, and I liked the way she linked it back to kids and learning.  Enjoy! --- “You’re  so privileged,” some said. “Very few people see the Todd flowing.”  Others, with an almost  reverential whisper, said “Only 1% of tourists see water flowing from Uluru .” The sign outside the Alice Springs Desert Park said it all: “You will never look at deserts in the same way again.” Indeed. Torrential rain. Enormous umbrellas that benefited little. Puddles that we gave up walking around and j...

Being a bit of a technology geek, one place I've always wanted to visit is Silicon Valley . Stretching southwards from San Francisco to San Jose, the Bay Area and Silicon Valley are home to many of the world's major computing and technology organisations. Birthplace of companies like Apple, Adobe, Google and Twitter, breeding ground for new ideas at universities like Stanford, and host to big annual tech events like MacWorld and WWDC; the SF Bay Area really is a slice of geek Mecca. So I'm pleased to say that I'll be spending the next week or so here. I'm actually here for the Adobe Summer Institute, a 5 day conference and workshops held at Adobe's San Jose offices as part of their Education Leaders program. We get to spend all week immersing into the serious end of fun stuff like Photoshop and Flash. This afternoon I visited Wikispaces , a company based right here in San Fran only a few blocks from my hotel. Wikispaces put a message out on Twitter a while...