Chris Betcher

Our Year 2 classes do a project each year called Great Inventions.  The students learn about various inventions and how they have changed over time, and over the past few years they have demonstrated that learning by producing a PowerPoint file that summarises the history of these inventions. As you may have read in my previous post, two of my pet hate phrases are "do research" and "make a PowerPoint".  Whenever I see these two phrases in the same sentence I can almost guarantee that we're looking at a fairly low level task that focuses more on recall and summary of facts than it does on authentic learning.  I'm also wary of any time I see students "making a PowerPoint" that simply gets handed into the teacher for marking, rather than being used as a presentation platform since it is usually a sign that it's being used as a glorified note taking tool; a place to write text complete with the distractions of bright colours and annoying graphics. ...

In these next few posts, I'm going to try and describe some of the projects we've been doing at school lately.  My role at PLC Sydney is ICT Integrator, and I very much see it as a role where I support, advise and consult with our classroom teachers about ways to enrich their lessons with technology. It's a hard line to walk sometimes, since it often forces me to cross that line between giving advice on how to use the technology and giving advice on how to teach. The nature of digital technology makes it a really good fit with the general principles of quality teaching practice... and sometimes that fit is so good that I find it difficult to suggest ways to use technology without also suggesting that the underlying pedagogy should shift to match it.  Fortunately, I work in a school where most of our teaching staff are willing to take such suggestions on board, be it simply just regarding the use of technology, or to actually shift they way they approach the job of teaching....

I've been a but sporadic here on the blog lately.  I've got all this stuff in my head that I want to write about but to be honest, I guess I just haven't felt much like the physical act of typing lately.  I'm actually a pretty lousy typist, despite the fact that I've tried, seriously tried, to develop a good typing technique over the years.  I've had typing lessons, I've used computer typing tutor software, and I've tried to force myself to use the right touch typing technique.  But all of that, and I still can't really type all that well. When I was at school as a student, I actually did a proper typing course.  In fact, I'll digress for a moment and mention that my school offered something that I've not really seen in too many other schools since... every Thursday afternoon we did "activities".  We all got to choose from a wide range of activities to do for a few hours every Thursday. Some students went off to play sport, running ...

I've just been watching a video online of someone doing an IWB demonstration at the recent ISTE event in Denver, and I have to say, I'm a little speechless. IWBs are certainly a controversial technology and cop a lot of flak for being a waste of money in classrooms, and although I hate to sound like an apologist, I too often find myself defending them.  I defend them because I believe that in the hands of a good teacher they can be valuable tools, and I get a bit tired of hearing the technology being attacked when it seems to me that all technologies are fairly inert until someone actually does something useful (or not) with them.  As a concept, IWBs sound like a good idea to me... here's a tool that can support all manner of digital resources and is connected to the wider world via the web, but still has that human element that brings the class members together to discuss ideas around a  shared, large-screen environment, sharing talking, making eye contact.  That al...

I saw an email from someone today suggesting that they would be starting next term to teach their students to write HTML code from scratch, so the kids could make their own webpages. My initial reaction when I read this message was to ask "Why?" Why would anyone bother to learn HTML coding from scratch when there are so many great editing tools around? Surely, in a WYSIWYG world, learning how to to actually write HTML code is a complete waste of time? With so many great web editing tools around, isn't learning to write raw HTML code a pointless exercise? In once sense, these are valid questions. There's no doubt that the majority of websites these days are created using a templated approach and an "engine" such as Wordpress , Drupal , Joomla , Squarespace , etc. It's also true that for any really customised web work, it would still fall to a workhorse like Adobe Dreamweaver or something else, such as excellent free tools like KompoZer or  NVU edi...

I guess many readers of this blog would know that I work as an ICT Integrator at a large independent girls' school in Sydney.  Large chunks of my day are spent working with our teachers and our students to help them understand a little more about technology and how it might be used to make teaching and learning more engaging and effective.  Of course, teachers always seem to be very busy, and one of the difficulties in trying to deliver some form of ongoing PD is simply getting them to find the time to do so.  I've tried a number of different models for delivering PD; some work quite well, others not so much. It usually comes down to finding time, and making it meaningful. In case it's of any use to you, I thought I'd share an email that I sent to all the teachers in our junior school (R-6) yesterday.  It's an outline of how I plan to be delivering ICT professional development to them next term.  I've found that this model seems to work best for our staff, and i...

I recently wrote about the Apple ITSC events that I was lucky enough to have been a part of.  They're all over now, and after having participated at ITSCs on the Gold Coast, Adelaide, Perth and Melbourne (as well as the one in my home town of Sydney) I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed being involved in them.  One of the best aspects of the way ITSC was run this year was the way they leveraged the unconference concept and tried to break away from the traditional "sit and git" model of learning at conferences.  The unconference model is a good model for learning because it attempts to meet people's needs for knowledge, allowing those with expertise to share it and those with questions to ask them.  The lack of rigid structure is what makes it work along with the fact that you learn more when you get actively involved in learning about things that are directly relevant to you. If you ever want to run an unconference, there is plenty of advice online about how...

I remember back in the mid 90s I started to hear more and more about this upstart operating system for computers called Linux. It was an alternative to Windows and Mac, and was based on an open source project started in 1991 by a student in Helsinki named Linus Torvalds .  I thought it sounded like a fascinating project and I liked the sound of it, since any alternative to Windows had to be a good thing.  In about 1997 there was lots of talk about this new OS and its potential so I wanted to give it a shot. I originally tried to install it on my trusty old Thinkpad using a copy of Redhat Linux that came free on the cover of a computer magazine, but I didn't have much luck so abandoned it at the time. Not long after that I heard the infamous John "Mad dog" Hall speak at a computer show in Sydney, where he passionately and logically espoused the virtues of open source software as a legitimate alternative to commercial software such as Windows and Office.  I recall he made ...

As you may have noticed, Facebook has been copping a great deal of flak in the media lately for recent changes to its privacy policy. There is growing evidence that Facebook as a company has few scruples or ethics when it comes to the way they view and use your personal data. The company has continually “baited and switched” the privacy settings in Facebook to the point where they have become so confusing and complex that few people truly understand them. There are something like 50 choices leading to about 170 different privacy variations possible, all needing to made in multiple locations in Facebook, with very little consistency or “expected behaviour” between them... consequently, there could be significant parts of your personal data that is being made public without you realising. Facebook seems to be working on the principle that most users never look at the default settings or take the time to think through their options. The most recent changes made to their privacy polic...

Here's a little piece of news about the book that I wrote with Mal Lee last year, The Interactive Whiteboard Revolution: teaching with IWBs .  We've just been informed by the publishers, ACER Press, that the original print run is now completely sold out and they are going into a second print run. Apparently there are even back orders, and the book has been one of the best selling books in their catalog this year. Who'da thunk it? It's true that Interactive Whiteboards can be a controversial topic. There are plenty of people who see them as a useful technology for teaching and learning, but there are also plenty of others that don't (and are quite vocal about it!) One of the things I think we tried really hard to do in the book was to consider this controversy and take a sensible and level-headed approach to what IWBs do and don't do well.  I certainly don't think I wrote it as an IWB fan-boy and I hope we managed to present a reasoned, common-sense, brand-ag...