Chris Betcher

My daughter once performed at a large choral event where she sung a solo piece. It was the first time she had performed in front of a sizable audience and the first time I had any idea that she had real singing talent. As a father, it was a beautiful thing to see, and I was very proud of her. Naturally, as a proud dad I was there with my video camcorder in hand and taped the entire performance. The event was over two evenings so I also went back the next night and taped it again, then took the two pieces of footage, dumped them into Sony Vegas and made a two-camera montage of the performance. It's still on YouTube if you want a look. Although I was present to see her perform twice, my strongest memory of that event is the video that documents it. I do recall sitting in the hall with the other people and thinking how awesome she sounded live, but what I see on the video has, over time, become the more pervasive memory. Likewise, back in 2004 we did a 3 week trip through Central...

One of the real joys of my current job is that  I get to work with our younger students in the primary school.  Having only ever taught high school, the chance to work with the R-6 kids is just so refreshing.  They are so enthusiastic, so keen and so refreshingly honest.  I've had a great time this term working with all the Junior School kids, but in particular I enjoyed working with Year 3 on some digital storytelling projects, where I suggested to the Year 3 teachers that they try Voicethread as our storytelling tool of choice.  One quick demo and they were all excited by the possibilities.  (And so was I for that matter... although I've used Voicethread a lot for my own personal use, this was the first time I've had the chance to work with students to do something with it) The kids were especially excited by the idea of getting some real feedback from real people in other parts of the world.  If you get a chance, please pop in and leave them a message. You will need to...

It's pretty simple really... When I find websites that interest me, I add them to my delicious bookmarks.  But not only do I add them, I also tag them with keywords that give them some sort of meaning.  This means that that when I need to find them I have some reference points.  Over time, these tags build into enormous library that give a pretty insightful snapshop into the sorts of things that I'm finding interesting.  Beyond that, it even gives a pretty insightful snapshot into my personality, my interests, my passions.  These patterns in the tags can be arranged into "tag clouds" that give a really good visual impression of what are usually much more complex collections of ideas and concepts. So I thought Wordle was an interesting little online app.  Written in Java, Wordle take any text or any del.icio.us feed and turns it into a tag cloud.  A very beautiful, very artistic tag cloud.  Not only does it very quickly analyse the text you feed it, but them gives yo...

UK blogger Terry Freedman wrote a great post on the TechLearning blog called " Oh Sir, you are too kind ". He actually wrote it a while ago now (Sept 07) but I only just stumbled across it... I guess that's one of the great things about blogs, the way they can capture someone's thoughts at a particular point in time and make them available to anyone, even people who stumble across them much later. Terry's basic premise is to ask why we keep putting up with teachers who can't or won't get to grips with ICT in their teaching. He seems to think that it's time to tell teachers that ICT is an important component of being a teacher and that if you can't, won't or don't get yourself up to speed with technology and how it should be used to integrate with student learning then it may be time to find another job. And he suggests that we are being way too nice about accepting this sort of thing, and allowing the laggards to get away with it. He...

Every so often I stumble across a new piece of software that just does its thing exceptionally well. In a world too full of very ordinary software products, its nice to find one occasionally that just does its job very well, with a feature set that has all the stuff you want and is not cluttered up with stuff you don't, and perhaps most importantly, an interface that is intuitive and clean so that it can be used without any real learning curve. Voicethread is a great example of such an interface. It's really exciting to see so many of these well crafted apps starting to appear on the Internet as web apps, sometimes called Rich Internet Applications or RIAs. RIAs, when done well, can give the impression of behaving like a desktop app but with all the added advantages of being in the cloud... advantages such as ubiquitous access, remote storage of data and the ability to collaborate across time and place. Google Docs uses this model and is a fine way to create online docume...

I'm running a course for our school staff at the moment called 23 Things. I borrowed the idea from the very successful 23 Things program run by the San Jose library, but have adapted it slightly for our particular school situation. Essentially, the teachers work their way through 23 separate tasks, some as simple as reading a blog post or watching an online video tutorial, while some are a little more complicated such as setting up their own blog, feedreader and delicious accounts. The course runs over 9 weeks in total, and each week they are asked to do 3 or 4 "Things" - 23 in total - that will expose them to a wide range of Web 2.0 tools and ideas by the time it's over. I'm running the course internally using our school Moodle, and have set it up in such a way that people must sign up for the course and work their way through it a week at a time.  I thought it sounded like a good idea, and  so did they it seems... 14 teachers signed up for the course very soo...

Last Friday I had a fabulous day at the Why 2 of Web 2.0 seminar in Sydney, where the special guest speaker was Wil Richardson.  Wil was also ably supported by other speakers including Australians Judy O'Connell and Westley Field . I was very keen to hear Wil speak, after having read his blog for a while now and also having met in the occasional UStream backchannel.  He had lots of good things to say (which he kindly allowed me to record with my iPod so I may post up some audio snippets.)   I was fortunate to get a seat right at the front, thanks to Judy offering to let me share the powerboard at the front table so I could plug in my Mac.  I was also able to piggyback on the wifi service and browse the various sites that Will was referring to as he told the audience about them... quite a few really interesting sites in his list , most of which are now in my del.icio.us feed . One of my colleagues from school also attend the event, and when I got back to school the next day I ask...

A rather interesting video that attempts to sum up some of the shifts and changes that schools are undergoing. There are some interesting video bites in here, but some very succinctly summarise the sorts of issues facing this institution we know as "school". Not much more I can add to it... just watch it.

I was asked to present at a conference recently and I willingly agreed. I was quite aware at the time that there would be no direct payment involved for presenting but the conference was relevant to me, I thought I had something worthwhile to add and I figured I would enjoy presenting... so I said yes. Besides, the organiser is a longstanding friend of mine and I am usually happy to help out. I've presented for this person at a number of other conferences and on each occasion my services as a presenter have been greatly appreciated, but have also been expected at no cost. Because of the good exposure it offers and because it ultimately looks good on my resume, I have willingly presented without charge and have usually not regretted doing so. But I'm wondering where to draw the line. I live in Sydney, and this particular conference is in a different state. So it means a flight, a hotel and a day away from work. It means a taxi to the airport. It means eating at restauran...

I never realised I was such an auditory learner until I became a podcast junkie. Now I listen to oodles of podcasts on all sorts of topics. My drive to work is a little longer at the new school this year and I'm rather pleased about that since I get to listen to more podcasts! Ever since starting my own podcast, The Virtual Staffroom , over a year ago I've enjoyed the opportunity to chat with other educators about school, learning and whatever else came up. Initially, the motivation for making the podcast was just to figure out how it was done, and I've been lucky to have had so many wonderful teachers offering to join me online for a Skype chat, which then ends up as a podcast. This week, in somewhat of a role reversal for me, I was invited to be on the interviewee's side of the mic for a change. I had the great pleasure of being a guest on the Ed Tech Crew Podcast this week, where Darrell and Tony had a chat to me about a bunch of things, but mainly interactive wh...