Chris Betcher

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...

During the Learning 2.012 event, a number of the Learning 2 Leaders had the opportunity to present a short mini keynote on a topic of their choice. I thought it was a good arrangement, being able to hear a little bit from a number of people, instead of just one long talk from one person. In the previous Learning 2 event I attended, there were no keynotes at all, what with the conference focus being on the participants, rather than "speakers".  This year, we brought back the keynote idea, but in this new format, and I thought it worked really well.  We got to hear from 10 different people, with very different styles and perspectives, and I really enjoyed it. I somehow ended up being the first person to speak on the opening night of the conference. I decided to recycle a short presentation that I had actually shared before with the staff at Yokohama International School, but I thought the message was still relevant to this group. Here is my talk... There were lots of other gre...

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...

This post is a bit of a call for assistance from any schools in Indonesia . If you could assist we would really appreciate it. Our year 5 classes are just embarking on a thematic unit of work on Indonesia.  The students are doing research into life in Indonesia, learning about the culture, food, transport, religion and so on. It's being done as part of their HSIE strand.  By the way, HSIE stands for Human Society and it's Environment, for those outside NSW.  Oh, and NSW means New South Wales, for those outside Australia. See the joys of writing for a global audience? And that's the point really. Getting kids to think outside their own backyard, and realising that when they use certain words or abbreviations that they don't always translate across borders and timezones. Knowing that other people are asleep when you're awake, and that words and phrases you take for granted can be complete mysteries to people outside your own culture is, I think, a really important min...

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...

I think I can safely say I've just been to one of the best conferences I've ever attended.  It was well run, well organised and I believe provided content that was highly relevant to all the participants.  The irony is that the day before it all started, it was completely unorganised and had virtually no content planned at all.  I'm talking about the Learning 2.010 Conference held last week at Concordia International School in Shanghai, China. I think it's really important to draw a clear distinction between being un organised and being dis organised.  Dis organised is when things are a complete mess, no one has any idea of what's happening, people are not getting their needs met and it leads to frustration for everyone involved.  This conference was definitely not dis organised. Un organised, on the other hand, implies a understanding that learning is messy and that when we need to learn something we learn it best if we can learn it just-in-time, not just-in-ca...