Chris Betcher

I spent a few hours this afternoon driving the nearly 200km from Sydney to Bathurst for a day of work in a Bathurst school tomorrow. As I crossed the Blue Mountains and went past Lithgow, the roads open up a little and there are longer, straighter faster stretches of road. On one particularly long straight stretch of road I noticed that my steering wheel hung ever so slightly to the right even though I was driving in a straight line. It wasn't enough to really bother me, but I started to wonder why it was like that and what it would take to fix it so the steering wheel was perfectly neutral while driving in a straight line. I'm sure the reason had something to do with the camber of the road, and I realised that I do in fact have some level of understanding of how a vehicle's steering system works. How did I know this? As I pondered the question I remembered back to my very first car and how I had - on several occasions - pulled the steering wheel off and put it back on agai...

Yesterday, I ran an all day iPad workshop for the teachers at my school. There were two things that were a bit unusual about it. One is that it was an all day event. Usually in a school - or at least in my school - it's hard finding time for staff professional learning that allows for any real immersion and play. The second unusual thing is that it was held on a Saturday.  (And not just any Saturday, but the Saturday of the first week back after the Summer break!) No coincidentally, the fact that it was a Saturday was the whole reason we were able to get that extended period of time for learning. When I offered it to our staff (as an entirely optional event for anyone that was interested in coming along) I thought maybe we'd get 3 or 4 teachers show up. Surprisingly, we had 25. Some even brought their children and spouses along. They didn't get paid for attending, and there was no pressure to be there. But 25 turned up. I was impressed. We had a fun day of learning what iPa...

As much as I would have loved to have been in Melbourne all week for ACEC 2010 , it just wasn't on the cards for me. A pity, because it sounded like there was a lot of really interesting sessions to attend, and one that particularly caught my eye was the Lego Robotics one with Chris Rogers , a professor of engineering from the Centre for Engineering, Education and Outreach at Tufts University in Boston.  I've been a Lego fanboy for a long time, and have worked with kids to do some pretty awesome stuff with it over the years, but unfortunately my current school doesn't really do very much with Lego. (In fact, computer programming in general gets a pretty rough deal at PLC, something that I'd really like to see change) However, we do run a Computer Club every week in our junior school and we've decided that we will introduce programming to these kids to start with.  We've begun by getting them going with Scratch , with a plan to get some Lego Robotics gear and ma...

One gem of wisdom I've quoted a number of times on this blog is from a speech given by professor Seymour Papert, and it goes like this... "The model that says learn while you’re at school, while you’re young, the skills that you will apply during your lifetime is no longer tenable. The skills that you can learn when you’re at school will not be applicable. They will be obsolete by the time you get into the workplace and need them, except for one skill. The one really competitive skill is the skill of being able to learn. It is the skill of being able not to give the right answer to questions about what you were taught in school, but to make the right response to situations that are outside the scope of what you were taught in school. We need to produce people who know how to act when they’re faced with situations for which they were not specifically prepared." What I really like about that quote is the idea that it's not the specific content of what we teach that rea...