Chris Betcher

I've been asked to present a keynote and workshop at the National Education Summit in Melbourne in August. The organisers of the event wanted to do an interview and ask a few questions as a way of promoting the event, which I did via email. This has been published elsewhere, but I thought I'd crosspost it here for the record. 1. What are some of the important messages for teachers in your presentation ‘The Track of the Storm’ at the National Education Summit in Melbourne? The title "Track of the Storm" was inspired by Part 3 of Charles Dickens' novel, "A Tale of Two Cities". The book opens with the famous lines ... It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we...

The following is from an email I wrote to someone who asked if I was going to be presenting at the EduTech conference in Brisbane this year. As you can see, my answer is no, but I think what's important is my reason for saying no. If you're planning to present at EduTech, I hope you consider the effect of saying yes. To be honest, I am not a big fan of EduTech, mainly because I really don't like their policy of non-payment for Australian speakers. I find it quite insulting that they are willing to pour outrageous amounts of money into getting overseas speakers but are not willing to pay anything for local speakers. I think they need to approach this with greater equity and offer ALL their speakers some form of payment, even if the locals just get a token amount. As I've no doubt pointed out before, this is a (very) commercial event run for profit by a professional conference-running company, and yet they expect the vast majority of what they are offering to their cus...

Some of you might have seen that I've been working on a daily blogging project this year called My Daily Create. You can visit it at www.mydailycreate.com (or click the link in the menu bar above). The basic idea is that I'm attempting to create something every day of the year during 2014. It could be music, a video, a drawing, a photo or a poem. It could be something practical and usable, or something retinal and frivolous. It doesn't matter what it is, I just plan to make something each day. So far it's going pretty well and I haven't missed a single day yet. Earlier this week I presented a keynote at the EduTECH conference in Brisbane on the topic of creativity at the invitation of the organisers. I find creativity an interesting topic to talk about, but it's usually one of those things that's easy to talk about in general terms but much harder to talk about specifically. I felt even more challenged by it because several of the other speakers were also t...

Having just experienced an interesting juxtaposition of two quite different conference modes, I was struck by the following thoughts... I spent most of last weekend putting a presentation together for the k12 online conference.  This virtual conference was started by a small group of teachers and has run every year since 2006. It is composed entirely of online video presentations of up to 20 minutes in length. These videos are presentation of ideas, best practice, classroom examples and big thinking submitted by educators from around the world. Presenters submit proposals just like a conventional conference, and these proposals are vetted by a selection panel for quality and relevance. Selected presenters then produce their 20 minute video and submit it and each year, over a 2 week period, these videos are released publicly.  There are a few live events and such to accompany them over the 2 weeks that the "conference" is running, but importantly these video presentations live...

I'm a big user of Google's tools. I like what they offer and I like that they just keep getting better and better. When my school moved to Google Apps for Education at the end of 2011 we were generally happy with what was on offer, but there were things that we wished were just a little better, a little more polished, or had just a few more features. Over the course of 2012, some obvious things happened: Gmail got a redesign, Drive was introduced, editing of Docs on mobile devices came along, and of course Google Plus. But there were lots of smaller, less obvious, things that came along too: more fonts were added to Apps, the Research tool was added to Docs and Sheets, the Equation Editor got a boost, and so on. Unless you're on top of it, many of these improvements were easy to overlook. Over the course of the year many of the things we complained about in January were fixed, improved or added to by December. Google's tools just keep getting better all the time. When ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

A few weeks ago I posted my application video for the Sydney Google Teacher Academy . According to their schedule, I wasn't expecting to hear anything back about it until late next week, so I was very excited yesterday when I checked my email and found this waiting for me... You have been selected to participate in the Google Teacher Academy - Sydney. After reviewing your application, we believe that you have the experience and passion necessary to positively impact education in your region, and we are excited to have you join us on Wednesday 20 April 2011 at the Google office in Sydney. Woohoo! I'm aware that it's a pretty hotly contested thing to get into, so I'm feeling very fortunate to have been accepted. Of course, as well as spending time at Google 's fantastic new Sydney offices and getting hands-on and in-depth with all the cool tools that Google offers for education , the other best part is in the networking and the conversations that I know will take pla...

At the 2010 ULearn conference I was asked to participate in a Pecha Kucha event.  A Pecha Kucha is a way of giving a presentation with 20 supporting slides, where each slide is automatically timed to show for only 20 seconds.  This leads to a presentation of exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds.  Despite being one of the shortest presentations I've given, this was certainly one of the hardest to put together, just in terms of working out the timing and figuring out what to say in those 20 blocks of 20 seconds.  It sounds easy, but it certainly took a while to get it together. Here is the summary of what the talk was about… "As a gifted polymath, Leonardo da Vinci stands out as the prototypical lifelong learner. Curious, inventive, creative... All the things we would love our students to be. But how well would da Vinci have survived in today’s typical classroom?  If Leonardo was a student in a school today would he have achieved to the same degree?" And here are the ...

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...

Nǐ hǎo! I'm currently in Shanghai, China for the Learning 2.010 conference , and that's pretty exciting for a number of reasons. Firstly, mainland China is somewhere I've always wanted to go. In particular, Shanghai is fascinating because of its almost incomprehensible growth.  Intellectually, I know that China is a fast rising star, rapidly moving from a developing nation to a developed nation. We've all heard the statistics about the size and growth of China, of how Chinese is destined to become the most used language on the Internet, of how China has more honours students than the US has students, and so on.  Seriously though, no matter how many times I see the " Did You Know " videos that tell me how fast China is growing, nothing can quite prepare you for the endless ocean of concrete and skyscrapers that simply didn't exist a mere 15 years ago. Perhaps more than any statistic, this is where China's growth really hit home for me... I got picked up...

I recently wrote about the Apple ITSC events that I was lucky enough to have been a part of.  They're all over now, and after having participated at ITSCs on the Gold Coast, Adelaide, Perth and Melbourne (as well as the one in my home town of Sydney) I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed being involved in them.  One of the best aspects of the way ITSC was run this year was the way they leveraged the unconference concept and tried to break away from the traditional "sit and git" model of learning at conferences.  The unconference model is a good model for learning because it attempts to meet people's needs for knowledge, allowing those with expertise to share it and those with questions to ask them.  The lack of rigid structure is what makes it work along with the fact that you learn more when you get actively involved in learning about things that are directly relevant to you. If you ever want to run an unconference, there is plenty of advice online about how...

<understatement>I've been to a lot of conferences lately.</understatement> The Champion Schools Conference in Wellington. ACEC in Mebourne.  ITSC on the Gold Coast, then Adelaide, Sydney and Perth. They've all been very good and I've gotten something from all of them.  They've all had slightly different angles and focuses, but it's pretty clear that any worthwhile education-based conference these days tends to have the same consistent underlying message, one that most active members of the edtech community would have heard many times before... The world is changing, technology is helping drive that change, and schools need to move with that change if they are to remain relevant.  That's it in a nutshell.  Of course, there are many much deeper conversations we need to keep having about the how, why, what, when and where of enabling these changes, and we need to keep pushing the message out to those teachers still unaware that these fundamental chan...