Chris Betcher

I'm sitting in one of our school computer labs at the moment supervising students working on the computers. We open our labs for lunchtime a few days a week so the students can use the computers, presumably to catch up on "work". And what do these kids - our teenage digital natives - do when the get unrestricted free access to the school computers? Just looking around the room right now and seeing what they're up to reveals the following... more than half of them are working on their Bebo pages, a few are looking through their MySpace accounts and a couple seem to be just browsing through websites for song lyrics and anime cartoons. There are two kids checking their email, using Yahoo!Mail and Hotmail, and one is browsing through a collection of digital photos she took at the school swimming carnival last Friday. Oh, and one had a Publisher document open that looked vaguely like it could have been a school task, but I could be wrong. It may have been a party i...

This is too funny... Unless you've been living under a rock, you probably noticed that YouTube has become quite the phenomenon over the last year. If you've spent anytime at all browsing YouTube, you've probably seen some of the more popular videos stored there... It's amazing the way they tend to bubble up to the top in popularity. It seems that the Barenaked Ladies have been watching YouTube too. Barenaked Ladies are a Canadian band based in Toronto and I must confess to have become particularly fond of their music when I lived there. I think they are very clever, both lyrically and conceptually, and I really enjoy their insightful wit. BNL's latest video clip is a real testament to this cleverness. They contacted many of the "stars" of YouTube - the Evolution of Dance guy, the two guys from Diet Coke and Mentos experiment, Where the Hell is Matt, and even Geriatric1927 among others. They managed to get these people to lip-sync to their latest s...

My school has recently created a new teaching space. We were short of classrooms, and the idea was hatched to enclose an open undercroft area and turn it into a classroom. It was a great idea, and a really good lateral thinking solution. When I first saw the new room, the thing that I loved immediately about it was that the whole back wall was entirely made of glass doors, effectively giving an open view of the classroom to the outside and the outside in. Although it didn't open up onto some beautiful view, it did mean that the people walking past the room were able to see in, making the activity in that room far more transparent, if you'll excuse the pun. On closer inspection, I was amazed that the room - a new classroom created in early 2007 - had not been wired for data points, had not been fitted with wifi, had not had a provision for an interactive whiteboard or a ceiling mounted data projector. The furniture that had been ordered for the room consisted of single desk...

My apologies for the long delay between blog posts... things have been a bit upside down in my world lately as I deal with a little more change than I can comfortably get my head around. Speaking of change, I can always rely on Karl Fisch's blog to link me up with amazing resources that make it just so obvious why the world is changing and why our schools must start to embrace that change. The more I see of the schools I have worked in, the more I worry about just how much we don't "get it", and how dangerously irrelevant we are becoming to the digital generation. This video in particular just gave me goosebumps when I saw it... [youtube]6gmP4nk0EOE[/youtube]

I recently asked a group of Grade 10 kids recently to review some Web 2.0 apps as part of a Communications assessment task. Basically, I directed them to the Web 2.0 list at www.go2web20.net , and asked them to browse the list to find two apps that looked interesting to them and write a review about them. Of course, this exposed them to quite a few Web 2.0 applications/websites on their quest to find two they liked, and also familiarised them with Web 2.0 as a concept. (Yes, most of them were already familiar with the concept of Web 2.0 and its read/write nature, but many did not connect this stuff with the term Web 2.0). We had been using classroom blogging with Learnerblogs all semester with every student having set up their own blog, and we had also dabbled with wikis as well. Like most teenagers, many of the kids were already avid MySpace and YouTube users, so the jump to learning about more Web 2.0 stuff was a logical one. I was pleasantly surprised to find just how eloquent,...

A friend sent me an email with this note in it.  I had a chuckle at the intended humour, and quickly realised just how close to the mark it really was.  I made a few minor modifications to it, but here it is... Question: What is the truest definition of Globalization? Answer: Princess Diana's death. You ask why? An English princess with an Egyptian boyfriend crashes in a French tunnel, driving a German car with a Dutch engine, driven by a Belgian who was drunk on Scottish whisky followed closely by Italian Paparazzi on Japanese motorcycles; treated by an American doctor, using Brazilian medicines. This is posted to an Australian blog site, using American technology, and you're probably reading this on a computer that use Taiwanese chips and a Korean monitor, assembled by Bangladeshi workers in a Singapore plant. That, my friends -  is Globalization! I realise there are probably a couple of liberties taken with the truth there, but on the whole it is amazing when you start to th...

Not much time left to do this, but if you are an edublogger and you haven't yet taken this survey, be quick!  It will only be available until Monday morning.  Results will be posted on Wednesday. https://websurveyor.net/wsb.dll/39416/educationblogsurvey.htm I find blogging a very soul cleansing activity myself, but it will be interesting to hear what others say.

Following on from the "Five Things" meme that floated through the edublogosphere recently, Kim Cofino's blog had a nice little post about listing the places in the world she's been to. I was impressed by her map, and thought I'd give it a go too. This website will let you highlight the places in the world you've been, and I thought it very cool. I have to admit that mine probably looks a little more impressive than it really is... There are places I've been to that were short localised visits, but this tool highlights the whole country. So although I've only been to Hong Kong, the map shows all of China. Likewise, I certainly haven't seen all that much of North America yet. And yes, I have been to a lot of islands throughout the Pacific, but it was with my parents when I was much, much younger, so really, I haven't travelled nearly as much as I wish I had. Not travelling more extensively is one of my biggest regrets in life actually, alth...

I am sitting in class at the moment, minding a group of kids for another teacher that had a meeting to attend. The kids are good, working quietly and getting their task done... Then up popped a mate on Skype, a teacher from Saskatchewan, asking a couple of questions about a podcasting project I did last semester so we chatted online for a while talking about all sorts of podcasting stuff. He did however mention that where he was in Saskatchewan was having a huge snow blizzard at the moment, and that a friend of his had a some photos of the storm on his blog. I headed over to his friends blog and found an interesting post about what happens in school during a snow day. What I found interesting was this comment... “We took the morning to divide our 13 student class (a result of a depleted school population) into four groups to create a project about the effects of the blizzard. We had a podcast group, a newsletter group, a video group and a digital story group.” This is what school s...

It seems to me that when the tools of Web 2.0 start to reach a point where they can offer a viable option for the many tasks we do every day, that we can start to think in terms of reaching critical mass. I find it compelling to see the huge number of Web 2.0 apps listed over at http://www.go2web20.net/ Perhaps critical mass is not far off?