Chris Betcher

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...

You may have noticed that it's been a bit quiet here on the blog lately. I've not been writing here as much as usual and I've really missed it! There have been a couple of reasons for this little sabbatical, but the most significant one was the book project I've been working on with Mal Lee. For almost a year now (OMG, has it really been that long?!) Mal and I have been writing a book together about the use of interactive whiteboards for education. It's been a huge project, partly because it's been a lot to write - nearly 60,000 words - but mostly because it's been an absolute journey of learning for me as we've written it. I'm pleased to say that the finished manuscript finally went to the publishers this week! In case you're interested, here's a little bit of background into the book... Mal Lee is an ex school principal and he provided a lot of the insights around the management, funding and leadership aspects of implementing IWBs effec...