Chris Betcher

I often ponder why systemic change is so hard to make happen in education.  Systemic change (and by that I mean not just change from a handful of scattered individuals but an all-in buy-in to create change right across a school system) is never easy, but it seems to happen with far less resistance in fields outside of education.  Schools just seem extra hard to shift. I'm pretty optimistic about the positive effects that technology can bring to education.  I really do believe that the school experience for both teachers and students can be made richer and more meaningful with the wise use of technology.  Not just technology for technology's sake, but by making intelligent decisions about what and how our students learn and supporting that learning with appropriate technologies.  I've never seen technology as an add-on, or just another thing that teachers need to somehow squeeze into their day, but rather as a deeply embedded set of tools, methodologies and skill...

In a bizarre and unexpected turn of events, I had a call from the good folk from ACEC a couple of days ago asking if I'd be interested in presenting something at the Friday keynote session. Apparently there was a spot available and someone suggested my name.  That was great news for me, since I really wanted to go to ACEC... not only does it sound like it will be an awesome conference, but there are so many people from my online world who will be there that I want to meet up with in person.  Naturally, I said yes. The hard part is that I was told I can talk about whatever I like. That's dangerous enough, but further complicated by the fact that I've been busy lately presenting some stuff for several other conferences and I don't really want to just reuse the same stuff.  I realise that I'd be talking to a totally different group of people so it's not the overlap that's the problem, but I'd just rather come up with something specifically for ACEC. My pro...

So, here I am on the beautiful (but currently rainy) Gold Coast. I arrived this evening to spend the weekend at Gold Coast ITSC 2010, the annual Innovative Technology in Schools Conference run by Apple.  It certainly sounds like it will be fun, and I'm rather humbled to have been asked to give the keynote address. What's more surprising to me is that Apple asked if I'd do not only this one, but the entire Australian ITSC series, so over the next month or so I'll also be at the Adelaide, Sydney, Perth and Melbourne events as well.  It came as a complete surprise to be asked, but I'm really thrilled to be able to be a part of them. Apple is using a different approach to the ITSC events this year that sounds like it will be really good. It's all very unconferencey.  Beyond the keynote, there will be lots of opportunity to mix and share and socialise and learn together. I think that's great, and it's certainly the best part of most conferences I've been...

Silly me. I was mowing the lawn the other day and I stupidly managed to get my big toe caught in the mower blade while it was running at full speed. The blades ripped right through my shoe and mangled the tip of my big toe. Needless to say, it really hurt! I was home on my own, and had to figure out what to do next... there was blood going all over the place, I felt myself going into shock, as I tried to figure out how to get myself to a doctor. It was not a lot of fun. The good news is that despite smashing my toenail off and slicing the end of my big toe, it could have been a hell of a lot worse. Fortunately, the bone was not broken and I still have all my toes so apart from a bit of pain and inconvenience I think I'm pretty lucky. It highlighted to me - in a very real way - that lawnmowers are bloody dangerous things! With their sharp, rapidly rotating blades, they are obviously capable of doing some real damage to the human body. Naturally, I never intended to get my toe in...

I'm a huge believer in the notion of trust and respect as the primary drivers in the relationship between student and teacher. People have occasionally told me that I'm just incredibly naive about this, but all I can talk from is my own experience, and in my own experience, building relationships of trust, respect and genuine care between student and teacher is the foundation upon which all "policy" rests on in my  classroom. I realise that school administrators will feel a need for something a little more concrete than this, but any policies, AUPs or guidelines that aren't based on this first rule are  simply not sustainable in my view. Take blocking and filtering for example. While school boards have the best of intentions for protecting students when they block access to web 2.0 tools and other social technologies, such policies fail the trust and respect test, because they start with an assumption that bestows upon the students neither trust nor respect. Or wh...

Ah serendipity, how I love it. We have a major building project going on at school right now.  The bulldozers are busily demolishing walls from our old library, and and we will soon have a beautiful new library Information and Research Center.  From the plans I've seen, it should be a great space. I was asked today to come to a meeting next month and give a short talk to a group of parents and supporters of the new school library building project.  Many of these folks are still getting their head around the massive shifts in the way information is managed.  Many of them perhaps don't realise that the term "library" no longer means what it once meant.  Information is different in a digital age, and so libraries need to manage information differently.  My talk to them needs to cover (briefly) an overview of how information and libraries and "books" are different to what they used to be. So I thought it extremely serendipitous when I opened my email this afte...

This is the first time I've ever done this, but I'd like to welcome a guest writer to Betchablog.  This post was written by one of my work colleagues, Pam Nutt, and was actually the first part of her welcoming address to staff for the start of the 2010 school year.  I enjoyed hearing Pam deliver this address to our teachers so I asked if she'd mind posting it here for all to read.  As you'll discover, it was based on some of her experiences in Alice Springs in outback Australia, and I liked the way she linked it back to kids and learning.  Enjoy! --- “You’re  so privileged,” some said. “Very few people see the Todd flowing.”  Others, with an almost  reverential whisper, said “Only 1% of tourists see water flowing from Uluru .” The sign outside the Alice Springs Desert Park said it all: “You will never look at deserts in the same way again.” Indeed. Torrential rain. Enormous umbrellas that benefited little. Puddles that we gave up walking around and j...

There always seems to be a lot of talk about the need for more teachers to embrace "21st Century skills". Of course, there's a lot of discussion about what these "21st Century skills" actually are. Many people have debated and discussed this issue, asking the question of what exactly should today's learners know in order to function in the "21st Century". I'm sure there are a whole lot of really good answers to these questions that dig deeply into effective pedagogy and the deeper philosophy of education. This post is not about those things. Instead, here is a list of simple, easily-learnable skills that I think would make life as a teacher in the 21st Century simpler and much more productive. While they're not exactly earth-shatteringly profound in terms of the big issues of education, they are greatly useful skills to have... and in my experience they are also skills that all too few teachers seem to actually possess. I find that posse...

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...