Chris Betcher

I wrote a blog post a little while back called This is Not Amazing , and the basic thrust of it was that, after more than 30 years since "the personal computer revolution", more than 10 years of living in a post-Google World, and now almost a full decade into the 21st century, that we should stop being so amazed at things which are simply just part of our normal world.  The post gave a few examples of things that are, quite frankly, pretty average tasks that can be accomplished on a personal computer and it relayed the story of how I had a day where I kept getting told how "amazing" these rather mundane tasks were, by people that were, in my estimation, too easily impressed.  I tried to tie that all together by observing that we probably do our students a great disservice by being easily impressed by technologically ordinary things, since this is pretty much just the world they live in. I think when we 'ooh and ahh' over things that are simply just a regular...

Earlier this year, I had a visitor from South Africa contact me to ask if they could drop into the school at which I work while they were visiting Australia.  She was were here as part of a study tour, and had heard some good things about PLC Sydney.  In fact, her school in Johannesburg was a similar sort of school - independent, all girls, similar size - and she was interested in comparing a few ideas.  Her school was also using IWBs extensively, and was keen to see how our staff were using them. On the day she visited, we chatted for a while in the main staffroom, shared ideas about education and various resources for learning, before finally heading off on a little tour around the school. Because I knew she was coming, I sent an email around asking for volunteers who wouldn't mind us coming into their classrooms. Several responded positively, so I organised to expect us to drop by their classrooms, however I wasn't specific about times since I didn't really know when w...

Warning! Geek talk ahead.  If you aren't into the techie stuff, you may want to skip this post... A few people asked me about what themes, widgets and plugins I decided to use on the new blog site, so I thought I'd just give a quick rundown of what I'm using, bearing in mind that it's only been a few days and it's almost inevitable I'm likely to continue changing my mind about a few more things. One the whole though, I think I've got the blog running mostly the way I want. For now anyway. The site is running the latest version of Wordpress (currently 2.9.1) and PHP5 .  It's hosted with GoDaddy using their Hosted Wordpress plan running on a Linux server.  The domain name www.chrisbetcher.com is managing the actual DNS records for the site, but there are other domain names such as www.betchablog.com and www.betchablog.net that simply forward to it.  The benefit of that is that there are several paths to get to the real site.  These domain addresses u...

Sometimes it's good to stop and take stock. To think about getting rid of some of the clutter that we allow to build up. You may recall that I was thinking about shifting my blog to a new server and running a self hosted Wordpress blog. Well, I had intended to think about it a little before I did anything drastic (I think that's called procrastination), but once you get started on these things it all begins to snowball so you may as well just get on with it.  So here we are... the new online home for Betchablog. If you're reading this in an RSS reader then you probably won't even notice a change (at least I hope not! Moving the old RSS feeds across to a new server was something that always put me off making the move, but I think I worked it out). I used Google Forms to ask for some feedback about the old blog and 41 people took the time to respond with some really useful comments. (That Google Forms is just so darn useful!)  It's good to occasionally stop and take...

For a few years now, this blog has been an important place for me to do my "thinking out loud", and in the process it's been extremely rewarding to have been able to share some of that public pondering with others.  I've learned a great deal from the whole blogging experience and although the frequency of posting has sometimes varied with life's little circumstances, on the whole it's been wonderful to evolve this blog as my own little place in cyberspace. I have absolutely no intention of changing the role of this blog as a place to think about, share and discuss ideas that interest me.  Despite the rise of Twitter and other microblogging services, there's a lot I can't say in 140 characters so I plan to be writing here for quite a while yet. The theme for this blog has been pretty much the same since I started it here on Edublogs .  Almost from day one, I chose the Andreas theme, a Wordpress theme designed by the incredible Andreas Viklund because ...

Hope 2010 is a great year for you all! This photo is made of three separate images stitched together with Photoshop.  It's the calm before the fireworks storm !  I thought it turned out quite well considering I didn't have a tripod and was just leaning up against the wall to hold the camera steady on a 4 second/f3.5 setting. CC photo by betchaboy http://www.flickr.com/photos/betchaboy/4233820172/

I'm a big fan of Leo Laporte.  Leo is best known these days for running the TWiT network (This Week in Tech), a podcasting empire that publishes more than a dozen excellent tech podcasts like MacBreak Weekly , This Week in Tech , This Week in Google , FLOSS Weekly , Windows Weekly , Net@Night and quite a few others, but he comes from a background in traditional radio and TV media. Leo has a wonderful, easy-to-listen-to manner, has his finger on the pulse of the tech industry better than anyone I know, and is always covering the latest, most interesting stories in tech.  It's easy to stay current with the latest tech goings-on just by listening to one (or more) of his podcasts. I listen to at least three of them reguarly, and others when I have more time... my drive to work just wouldn't be the same without Leo! This clip is a recording of a live stream from a talk given by Leo to the Online News Association Conference in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago.  It goes ...

I hope you've all been following the K12 Online Conference this year. There have been some fabulous presentations coming out of this year's event and, as usual, there has been a diverse collection of topics and ideas with something for everyone. You can check out the entire conference at k12online.ning.com I had the privilege of being able to contribute to the conference again this year with a presentation called Ways of Working. I must admit that it deviated a bit from my original submission idea, which was to create a movie that followed the processes used by three different students as they responded to a task from their teacher. I was planning on looking how each of the three students used the web and social technologies to take a slightly different approach to dealing with the set task. As so often happens, the intention of what I wanted to do was quickly drowned out by the time and resources I actually had to make it happen, so the presentation morphed into what you se...

In the past six days I've received six emails from various companies asking me if I'd please be so kind as to promote their services, talk about their products or otherwise just mention their wares in a blog post.  This is not a new thing - I've been getting more and more of these requests over the past 12 months - but the frequency of them has been increasing to the point where it now sometimes averages one a day.  In a weird sort of way, I guess this is an indication of some level of "success" in the blogosphere. But to anyone considering asking me to be a schill for your wares, can I save you all some time?  The answer is no. This is a blog, not a brothel. Look, I'm sure your products and services are fabulous, and I have no doubt that someone, somewhere may be interested in them.  I even kind of admire the fact that you "get" the power of new/social media enough to take the initiative of asking regular people like me to spruik the benefits of you...

Crossposted on the Adobe Education Leaders blog ( http://blogs.adobe.com/educationleaders/ ) I remember the first time I saw Photoshop . I think it must have been about 1993 or so, when I got a free copy that came with a scanner purchased by my school. It must have been a "lite" version of Photoshop because I seem to recall that it didn't support layers. Even so, I really enjoyed playing with it, and I ended up installing it on all the computers in the school computer lab (license? what license?) and I started teaching the kids how to create stuff with it. They just blew me away with what they could do with it, even without layers! It was around the same time that I stumbled across an unused copy of Aldus Pagemaker in an out-of-the-way cupboard, and I convinced the school principal that we should use it to do the school yearbook; his agreement to my suggestion saw me suddenly escalated to head of the yearbook committee, a job that rolled on for many years and many issues ...