Chris Betcher

This video is doing the rounds at the moment and has appeared on a few other blogs, but just in case you haven't seen it, I thought I'd post about it here.  Set in medieval times, it tells the story of a new book user, just making the transition from the tried and tested scroll.  He can't figure out a few things about this new fangled technology, so he calls the helpdesk.  Know any teachers like this? Make sure you stay right to the end. [youtube]xFAWR6hzZek[/youtube]

I've shifted houses recently and my access to good quality broadband has been a patchy, which explains why I've been a bit sporadic with these blog posts. I'm not always online when I get the urge to write. I could write it in Word and do a cut-and-paste I suppose, but I just don't seem to like doing it that way. Enter Ecto. Ecto is an offline blogging tool. I bought a copy a while back, simply on the basis that it was a damn good idea, even though I didn't use it all that much and tended to just blog directly into Wordpress or Blogger or whatever. But with my sporadic broadband lately I've rediscovered just what a cool tool Ecto is. It let's you write your blog posts offline, with all the features you would get when online. It even handles Technorati tags directly in the application (which makes sense since the author of the software apparently works for Technorati Japan.) It has great support for linking and embedding stuff into your posts, includi...

I have spent a large chunk of my computing life in Microsoft Office.  As a teacher, I think it's hard to avoid.  Tools like Word, PowerPoint and Excel form a sizable basis of the sorts of tools we use every day to create and present stuff to our kids.  I even have a few "qualifications" in Office, from a bunch of Brainbench certificates, to an International Computer Driving Licence , and even a few units from the Microsoft Office Specialist certification program.  I mean, if you're going to spend a lot of time in these apps, you may as well know how to use them properly, right? I recently had to create a few teaching resources using Microsoft Office 2007 .  Office 07 is a fairly radical rethink of the interface for the Office suite.  The trouble with previous versions of Office is that they had so many features and tools that most users never found them.  Many were buried so deep in the interface that the average user simply never stumbled across them.  I even had a...

I was watching a Toronto breakfast show the other morning called BT , in which they ran a story about a school being selected to be part of a $15,000 classroom makeover competition . The school was Philip Pocock Secondary School and the live cross to the school on the morning show presented the story in a typical teaser fashion... you know how it goes, "coming up after the break, we show you the amazing results of a classroom makeover..." Of course, this caught my attention. As an educationalist, and particularly one who is interested in the ways in which schools need to change to become more relevant to our 21st century students, I was keen to see what sorts of things had been done to give this classroom a makeover. As the show cut to an ad break, my mind was running wild with questions... What sort of cool, innovative things have they done to this classroom? What could you do to a learning space that might better engage our digital natives in the learning process? W...

I was on an international flight the other day doing a long haul across the Pacific Ocean. It was aboard a new 767 that had been fitted out with personal entertainment screens in the back of every seat. Last time I flew on this particular airline they had a single large screen that showed one movie to everyone, but on this flight I had a choice of about 20 movies, as well as music and games, all accessed by a touch screen in front of me. I watched a few movies on the flight and found it was a much better way to absorb the long flight than the previous situation of sitting through a single screening of a pre-selected movie that I probably never even wanted to see in the first place. In fact, last time I recall being on a flight with a one-size-fits-all movie screening, most people, including me, were not even watching it. On this flight however, as you can see in the photo, there are a few important differences. Firstly, most people were watching a movie. And not the same movie min...

Not three words you normally find in the same sentence, but last week I had the opportunity to attend the Microsoft Education Roadshow in Sydney. It was part of the regular traveling circus that Microsoft puts on every so often to show off its commitment in the education space. I've been a number to these events before, but hadn't committed to going to this one since they were usually little more than a sales wolf in educational sheeps clothing. But a few weeks prior to the event I had been asked by Intouch Consultancy if I would like to contribute some lesson plans based on the new Office 2007 applications, and those lessons would be released as part of the package of new educational content being shown at the roadshow. For that reason alone - I think it's called ego - I decided to attend the event this year. I've been a little critical of Microsoft in the past, and some of their events... you may have read my thoughts about the Vista release in Toronto last yea...

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]