Chris Betcher

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...

I was browsing through some old files this week and I stumbled across this wonderful piece of video that brought back some great memories for me. It's just over 10 years old and is an interview with a group of students I taught back then, just after they had been awarded third place in the 1998 AT&T Virtual Classroom Contest. The Virtual Classroom Contest , for anyone that remembers it, was an amazing web-based global collaboration project that linked kids from across the world together. Over 300 schools took part each year, forming 100 teams made up of three different schools that had to be located on three different continents. The project ran for over eight months, starting with the use of forums and email to debate and discuss ideas for a theme, and then a massive collaborative push to turn their ideas into reality. We were fortunate to be teamed up with two other amazingly dedicated schools - Percy Julian Middle School in Oak Park, Illinois, and Fuwa Junior High School...

Every so often I stumble across a new piece of software that just does its thing exceptionally well. In a world too full of very ordinary software products, its nice to find one occasionally that just does its job very well, with a feature set that has all the stuff you want and is not cluttered up with stuff you don't, and perhaps most importantly, an interface that is intuitive and clean so that it can be used without any real learning curve. Voicethread is a great example of such an interface. It's really exciting to see so many of these well crafted apps starting to appear on the Internet as web apps, sometimes called Rich Internet Applications or RIAs. RIAs, when done well, can give the impression of behaving like a desktop app but with all the added advantages of being in the cloud... advantages such as ubiquitous access, remote storage of data and the ability to collaborate across time and place. Google Docs uses this model and is a fine way to create online docume...