Chris Betcher

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...

My daughter Kate loves to sing. She discovered this ability a few years ago when she came home from school and announced that she wanted to try out for a solo part in a local performing arts concert. Although we always thought she had a nice voice that could carry a tune, we had totally missed the fact that she was actually quite talented vocally and so her intention to sing solo at this concert was a bit of a surprise. Long story short, she has discovered her voice and is working hard at developing it further. She's done workshops and music camps and is now working with a singing coach. She really does love to sing. She was recently selected to be part of the Talent Advancement Program (TAP), a program for kids with musical talent aged 13 to 18. For the 23 kids selected to be part of TAP, it's a pretty special group to be take part of. They get to learn and grow by actually performing in front of people. Tomorrow, they are all performing at the Sydney Royal Easter Sh...

Of all the tools that are shaping our new information landscape, perhaps none is more controversial than Wikipedia . As an encyclopedia that can be written and edited by anyone, it certainly attracts its fair share of skepticism. There are even some educators who refuse to allow their students to use Wikipedia as a research source, claiming that there is no verifiable level of authority in its articles and that it is far too easy for it to contain information that is inaccurate, misleading or just plain wrong. They argue that students should not trust an encyclopedia written by just anyone. Others take a more positive view, believing that the overall level of quality in Wikipedia is as good, and possibly better, than commercially available encyclopedia products created by qualified professionals. Both viewpoints are, to some extent, valid. It’s true that Wikipedia has the potential to be full of errors, silly facts and misinformation, and that anyone, even an anonymous user, can edit ...

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...

That old argument about the validity of Wikipedia as a tool for research raised its head again at school this week when our library staff asked that a link to Wikipedia be removed from the "Library Links" section of our school intranet. Naturally, I questioned this and was politely informed that although the library staff think Wikipedia probably has a use, that use was not as a legitimate research tool. They preferred to disassociate the school library from Wikipedia, and only endorse "real" encyclopedias like Britannica and World Book . It seems that real encyclopedias are not free and require a login. To avoid an argument I removed it. (Besides, the kids would still use it anyway whether it was linked from the library links list or not.) But it made me disappointed to realise just how much some of us still don't "get it", to say nothing of how embarrassing it is that I work at a school where the library wants to stick its head in the sand abo...

If there was ever a doubt that the tools of Web 2.o are dramatically simplifying the way we can embed digital technologies into our classrooms, let me point you towards a neat little project run by a couple of amazing teachers who decided to dabble with the possibilities of a wiki. This wonderful piece of web collaboration was put together by Neil D'Aguiar from Richard Challoner Secondary School in New Maiden, Surrey, UK, and Simon O'Carroll from Holy Trinity Catholic High School in Oakville, Ontario, Canada. It's a great example of how something as simple as a wiki can be used to develop a sophisticated web project that works simply and easily across the boundaries of time and place. The site can be found at flatplanet.wikispaces.com . I first met Simon when I was on a teacher exchange to Canada during 2006. We shared a workroom (and occasionally chicken wings) and became quite good mates. As a teacher of Religion, Simon was a relative newbie to the integration of te...

I was a bit horrified at a message I received through my school email account today. It was an internal memo basically saying that we were not to use Wikipedia with the students because it was far too unreliable. This pessimistic view of Wikipedia was in stark contrast to an excellent podcast I listened to only the day before, titled Introducing Web 2.0 by Tim Wilson . Tim is an educator who is really passionate about the potential of Web 2.0, and has a much more positive outlook on Wikipedia as a learning resource. I for one don't agree with most of the criticism levelled at Wikipedia, and would like to think that as a staff we could have had some sort of professional discourse about this issue before we throw the baby out with the bathwater and just say don't use it. Just like we expect our students to critically assess the resources we place in front of them, I think we also need to critically assess our use of resources like Wikipedia rather than just declare it ...