Chris Betcher

According to their corporate fact page , Google’s mission is " to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful " That's a pretty lofty goal when you stop and think about it, yet I find it fascinating to see just how successfully Google have been at achieving this enormous goal. Not just with the obvious "easy" stuff like web search, but with things that are slightly harder, like mapping . Seriously, you have to think pretty big to work on creating an accurate 3D model of the entire planet, populating it with 3D models of every building and structure, overlaying it with millions of geolocated photos and videos and live traffic data and all that other amazing stuff you find in the Google Earth layers! (Oh and while we're at it, let's build some cars with special cameras on the roof and drive along every road on the planet to take photos of what it looks like . Pretty amazing really!) When you look at so many of the other p...

Despite the fact that I know many teachers who would rank Twitter as the most valuable and powerful networking tool they have access to, there are still many more who simply don't "get" the value of Twitter. I've been to lots of conferences over the last few years where the enormous value of belonging to a Personal Learning Network was being touted, and Twitter is nearly always being suggested as the ideal tool for building that network. At one recent conference I asked for a show of hands for who was not yet on Twitter, and many hands went up... my response was "Why not? What are you waiting for? How many times do you need to hear people say that Twitter is the most valuable tool they have, before you actually try it for yourself?" I spoke to a group of preservice teachers recently who were basically told by their lecturers that they needed to join Twitter. Despite the fact that it was being promoted to them as a powerful way to learn and network with ot...

We have an amazing drama department at school. Each year they put on a couple of different productions in the school theatre, and they do an amazing job of it.  This year the senior school students performed a version of the very whimsical (and somewhat bizarre!) story  of Alice in Wonderland. It was a fabulous opportunity for the kids to perform, made especially fabulous by the school's very authentic approach to such productions. It's a joy to watch the students be part of something so professionally produced. It was a particularly joyful for me to watch, as my own daughter Kate had the leading role of Alice. It was a challenging role, performing in every scene and having lots of dialog (including the opening monologue). She worked really hard at rehearsals and when the final productions finally arrived, I was so very proud of her. Photo by Len Elliot

I took part in the Open Content Licensing for Educators online course that ran all last week.  It was run by the team at WikiEducator and was a great insight into the many copyright issues that can be addresses by creating Open Educational Resources using clear and open licensing terms. I know that many educators don't think in terms of "licensing" their work, but really, whenever you make something that can be used to help either you or others teach, it's a "resource" and the way that you indicate how you are prepared to let others use that resource can be considered a "license". The thing that became screamingly obvious as I worked through the online course content last week was that... a) All educators need to get much, much better at MARKING our work (where we're allowed to) with some form of designation that indicates how we wish to share it. We all produce resources, but very few of us consciously consider marking those resources with a ...

Although I've not managed to keep up fully with the Open Content Licensing for Educators course being run by the WikiEducator group this week, I have managed to spend enough time with to do a bit of thinking about copyright, Creative Commons , and what all this stuff means to me as an educator. The course has been a good introductory overview of these issues, although I was already fairly aware of much of  the information being shared. The real value was in connecting with other educators from all over the world and hearing so many different perspectives on how traditional copyright can be so debilitating, especially in the developing world. I certainly don't claim to be an expert on this copyright law stuff, but I have been taking a keen interest in the work of the Creative Commons folk for quite a while now and I try to take every opportunity to promote the benefits of the Commons. Reading through the forums, it's clear that this hasn't been the case for everyone, a...

As a technology integration specialist my job is to help other teachers learn more about technology, but the real spillover is that I get to help other teachers to learn more about all sorts of stuff. Because of this I've come to a much better understanding of what it means to be a lifelong learner, to find true joy in learning for learning's sake, and to be curious about pretty much everything. I love learning, and I find it difficult to understand why others sometimes appear not to. Many schools espouse the values of lifelong learning, but not all have teachers who live those values on a daily basis. We have a new principal in our school this year, and like all management changes it often comes with a great deal of conjecture about what might change, what new ideas will be put in place. Over the last few weeks I've been able to get an insight into our new boss and what's important to him, and to get a feel for where our school might be heading over the next few year...

One of the things I feel quite strongly about is encouraging the responsible sharing of educational content through appropriate open licenses. There are lots of problems created by traditional copyright, and anyone who works in a school knows just how silly the copyright rules can be at times. While I understand the need for content creators to protect their work from being stolen and to protect their right to make a living, there are many times when the rules imposed by traditional copyright just seem completely absurd. I've pushed the idea of Creative Commons for a number of years now, and I try to make sure that everything I produce is published under a CC license. I want to share by default , not by exception, and I can't help but imagine what a better world we'd live in if everyone did the same. It's so ironic that so many teachers are the most blatant abusers of copyright, yet feel so affronted when it's suggested that they license their work in a way that m...

Many people don't realise it, but if you use Google's search services while signed into your Google account (which you already have if you use Gmail) then your entire search history is automatically archived for you, along with statistics about how often you searched, for what, and when. It will track how many times a day you've Googled something, and even displays a little colour coded calendar to show you your overall search patterns. Some people may find the whole thing a little scary, a little Big Brother-ish maybe. Perhaps it is, although it doesn't actually bother me at all. I find it useful to have a complete history of what I've previously looked for, and there have been a number of times that being able to go back through my search history has been very useful. If there are negative aspects to this sort of tracking, then, for me anyway, the positives have far outweighed them. I pretty sure that I  function far more effectively by being able to turn to a se...

I've been following a discussion online about school Acceptable Use Policies for using computers. AUPs are documents that many schools get students to sign which outline the rules for using the computers. Students - sometimes quite young students - then have to sign it like a contract, a sort of in-writing promise that they won't do the wrong thing; visit banned websites, try to hack the system, abuse the equipment, etc . The contracts are usually enforced by people who rarely read the Terms of Service on the websites they visit themselves. My own personal view is that getting kids to sign a document saying they will do the right thing is ‎rarely responsible for actually getting them to do the right thing. The best you can hope to achieve ‎with an AUP-style document is the chance to wave it in their face when they do the wrong thing... but ‎really, what positive thing has that achieved other than the opportunity to lord over them about the error of their ‎ways?‎ (Unless you c...

Rob is a music teacher friend of mine who works in the NSW Southern Highlands, and he dropped me an email this afternoon asking if I knew of any schools who were thinking about using iPads.  His school is moving forward with an iPad trial and he was wondering what resources might exist that would help them avoid "reinventing the wheel". As it turns out, I've been seeing a lot of iPad related information lately so I thought I'd post a reply here on the blog rather than just reply to Rob in an email, just in case some of the information is of some use to others. I'll preface it by saying that I think there are a lot of things in education that could certainly use some reinventing, and maybe this is a good chance to do it. There seem to be a lot of schools looking at how iPads might fit in so it may be a little early to avoid the reinventing and instead take advantage of the opportunity to do some  inventing . While there are plenty of lessons about 1:1 learning to ...