Chris Betcher

I was turned onto this rather cool new tool that I think has a ton of great potential in the classroom. It's called Flipgrid . It's a way to collect short video responses to a prompt. As well as looking great, it works on mobile (with the Flipgrid app), doesn't require a login, and is super simple to use! I've embedded a link to an example. Just click the container below and it will take you to a topic page. Then just click the big green plus button to start recording (and you'll probably also need to click "allow" to give permission to your camera). Then just record your message, add your name and a poster frame, then submit it. As more people submit theirs you can revisit the site to see what they add. Give it a go! After you click the button, say who you are, where you're from, what you teach, and how you might use this with your students. You have 60 seconds! Go! The direct link to the topic page is  https://flipgrid.com/2a35ea The administrator of...

I started on Twitter back in February 2007, joining the service as user number 779,452 using the name @betchaboy . At the time, I thought I was already late to the Twitter party but looking back at it now that the number of users has crossed into the billions , I guess that wasn't the case. In the time I've been part of Twitter, my use of it has grown considerably. As I write this, my Twitter account follows 3,931 people (mostly other educators with a nice mix of others thrown in just to keep in interesting), and there are 8,496 people following me. With over 11,000 tweets since I joined, Twitter has been a big part of my learning for the last 7 years. Twitter has been an incredibly valuable tool of connection and learning, and has enabled me to be part of conversations and communities that I never would have discovered otherwise. Twitter has, quite literally, been life and career changing for me. I've written quite a few blog posts about Twitter over the years, some...

Geocaching is a great way to combine a bit of fun technological geekery with some good old fashioned go-outside-and-get-some-fresh-air action. I spent an afternoon with Lauren Sayer, who was visiting from Melbourne, using our GPSs, iPhones, Flip Videos and other techy toys and went geocaching around Sydney. If you've never tried it before, geocaching is essentially a treasure hunt where you go looking for a hidden treasure (more correctly known as a geocache) which someone plants and publishes on www.geocaching.com . It's a simple enough concept... once you sign up on the site, you enter your current position and it will tell you what caches are hidden nearby. You then just pick one that sounds interesting, enter the cache coordinates into your GPS and navigate to the hidden treasure. It sounds simple enough, but once you start to allow for the real-world factor it does start to get a shade more complicated. GPS devices will tell you where you are but they have limits as t...

While catching up on my Tweets tonight I noticed one from @shareski (and swooned over by @speters !) pointing out that Twitter made a cameo appearance on CSI, as shown in the video below... It's always interesting to see a less mainstream technology such as Twitter showing up in a very mainstream place like a top rating TV show... it's sort of like being a teenager and seeing your dad wearing the same brand of clothing as you... You just sort of get the feeling that he's only doing it to appear cool... It seems to me that seeing Twitter on CSI signals a recognition of that technology, sort of the two ends of the long tail coming face to face for a moment. It's like reading a novel where the main character is a webdesigner or a podcaster, rather than a lawyer or an accountant. I've never watched CSI so I don't know who they two characters are, but I really liked the exchange between them in this scene where they are looking through the victim's Twitter page ...

I've become quite a fan of Twitter, although I'll readily admit I never really "got it" to start with. However, as I mentioned in a previous post, and also in a recent tutorial video, Twitter makes a lot more sense once you add a group of people to your network. Having a likeminded group of fellow Twits from which to tap into some collective wisdom turns Twitter from a curious plaything into a rather amazing personal learning environment. Twitter has an open API (Application Programming Interface), which mean that programmers who can think of interesting ways to mash the basic Twitter feed into another service are able to tap into the guts of Twitter in order to get it to power their own apps. There are a number of interesting tools/toys that hang off the Twitter API, from useful local clients like Twitterific , Twitterroo , Snitter , Spaz and Twitterbox , to fun implementations like Twittervision and Twittervision 3D . And just to show how circular life is, I...