Chris Betcher

Last weekend, I was in Yokohama doing some workshops with Kim Cofino for various groups of teachers in the Tokyo/Yokohama area, including the current COETAIL cohort. It was a heap of fun, and I'll write more about that later. On Monday, I spent the day running PD for staff of Yokohama International School , and I was asked to do a short presentation to get things started. The brief was just to present "something inspirational", whatever that meant. To be honest, my mind was drawing a complete blank and was quite lost for an idea. I went back to the hotel room on Sunday night - my last night before returning home to Australia - and started working on my presentation. I was really quite stuck for an idea, but I was also keen to get it done so I could go out exploring some of the Japanese sights on my last night there. I got to the point where if I stayed in the hotel room working I knew I wouldn't see anything so I just decided to go out exploring anyway and hopefully...

It’s an interesting sign of how this connected world we live in actually works when I see people coming back to revisit an idea that was floated months earlier, still mulling it over and willing to come back and re-clarify things again in their own head, which in turn helps others (like me) to re-clarify things in mine. I'm referring to a post called Unlearning, Relearning, Learning by Graham Wegner, who was in turn responding to an earlier post written on this blog back in May this year. The conversation had basically turned to the idea of how people learn. Graham referred to another post from Dean Groom, where Dean talked about the idea of people being able to learn on demand, when they need it, by accessing the wealth of available online resources that are scattered across the Internet, produced by the millions of members of the online community. This mass-sharing has produced what Dean referred to as "the scattered manual", where the instructions for doing pretty mu...

It's been a big few weeks. I'm currently writing this while flying in an Air Canada Boeing 777, seat 40J, somewhere just south of the equator and slightly west of the International Date Line, chasing the sun around the globe on my way back to Sydney. I've been in Canada for much of the last few weeks, visiting our Canadian family and friends, something I wish I could do more often. But for three days I managed to slip away down to Philadelphia PA for my first ISTE conference . If you know me, or read this blog at all, you may know that I tend to get around to a few conferences in various places, but the ISTE Conference (and prior to that, a NECC) has eluded me so far. For whatever reasons, I haven't been able to get to this event so when the opportunity came up this year I jumped at it. And I'm glad I was able to… it is an amazing event. In thinking about ISTE 2011 to decide what to blog about it, there are a few notable things to mention, but for me, one really st...

I’m writing this from the Novotel Twin Waters Resort on Queensland’s beautiful Sunshine Coast.  It’s a hard life, I know, but someone has to do it. It’s been a spectacular day here, and I’ve managed to fill it with a bike ride along the beach, drinks at the bar, and lazing around the poolside area, so it hasn’t really been too hard to take. No need to feel sorry for me. I'll be ok. But it hasn't all been just lazing around the pool and soaking up sunshine... The real reason I’m here was to take part in the first Interactive Teaching and Learning Masterclass conference, run by the good folk at IWB Net. I had the privilege of being involved as a presenter, leading one of the Cohort sessions and doing the keynote on the  Saturday. The ITL Masterclass conference attempted to be different to a typical conference. Most traditional conferences have a pretty standard format… There is a keynote address in the morning, followed by a series of workshops or breakout sessions that are al...

By default, your computer's drives usually have creative names like "My Computer" or "Macintosh HD". Home wireless networks usually have equally uninteresting default names, like "linksys" or "netgear", or that ultimate of all default SSID names, "default". USB Memory sticks and portable USB drives often have even less interesting names, usually based on their brand, or a series of random characters. Some people give their computing equipment names that make them a little more interesting, or at least a little more unique and personal. I've seen people use names of planets, Greek gods, fictional characters, and many other esoteric collections as the source of inspiration for the names of their networks and computing gear. I once worked as the network manager in a Catholic school where all the servers were named after saints. IT geeks often have an unusual sense of humour, and it commonly shows up in things like this. As I was ...

I just read a post on a mailing list where the topic touched on teachers that struggle with technology.  The phrase that really got me going was something about making allowances for teachers who don't like or understand technology ( whether they are new grads or close to retirement) and how this is all a bit hard for them. This is something I feel really passionate about so I have to say it... Technology in schools is NOT a new thing. I just cannot accept excuses about technology being optional, whether it's from someone who is new to teaching or others who are close to retirement. There are children in those classrooms every day who deserve the best education we can offer them, and it is completely unfair if that education is less than it should be because someone wants to pick and choose which aspects of their job they feel are important.  No child should have to put up with out of date learning experience just because their close-to-retirement teacher is "taxiing to th...

He rolled his eyes and tried not to look distrustful. "I'm not sure about all this 'cloud computing' nonsense . It seems to me it's just a passing fad and a huge security risk.  I'd never trust my important stuff there. I'd only put my files on my own computer. I like to know where they are so I can get to them when I need them." His friend responded with a wry grin. "Do you have a bank account?", he asked. The cloud sceptic replied, "Yes, of course I do." "Well... what do you think that is?   Do you think your pile of money is sitting in your very own little personal vault somewhere with your name on it?", he smiled. "No", he continued, "your money is nothing more than a record in a computer database, a series of 0s and 1s kept on a server somewhere as a series of magnetic codes. You don't know where your money is kept or what sort of machine it's kept on, or who maintains it, or how often it's...

We all see the world through our own personal lens. Consequently, we all form our own opinions about the world and depending on the sorts of experiences you've had in the past, your view of the world and how it works can easily be coloured by those experiences.  Sometimes, we form opinions about things based on experiences that are limited or incomplete or biased one way or the other, and the interesting thing is that we still believe those opinions are correct, even when they can be completely wrong. There's a lot to be said for real expertise. One of my favourite examples of pitting a narrow opinion against broad expertise is from the movie Cool Runnings .  In one scene, the team coach Irving Blitzer (played by John Candy ) is having an exchange with Sanka Coffie (played by Doug E Doug ), where they are arguing about who should be the driver of the bobsled. Sanka is a Jamaican pushcart champion and sees himself as the obvious choice. But Jamaica is ...

There was an interesting article in The Age newspaper the other day titled  Teachers Online eLearning Mocking Fears , which was basically about some tensions being felt at some Australian universities between students who were asking (or demanding) that lectures be recorded and placed online , versus lecturers who were resisting this idea because they feared that students would capture, remix and republish their mistakes using social media.  The lecturers in question did not want their "mistakes" being made public to the world.  You can read the whole article for yourself. But to me, it begs the following line of reasoning... IF the nature of a "lecture" is simply the delivery of information... AND the students want to be able to watch a recording of the "lecture" at their leisure... AND lecturers are concerned about producing a "perfect", mistake-free lecture... THEN why don't lecturers just create a prerecorded version of the lecture, wit...

Thanks to everyone who came back to me with such positive responses to the last two posts... it's great to hear that other people were also able to benefit from some of the things I learned about Google Calendars recently. This final post will just tidy up a few loose ends and give you an idea of some of the extra things I'm doing with my calendars now they are set up the way I wanted them.  It's working far better than I anticipated, and certainly far better than Apple's MobileMe service ever worked.  And did I mention that Google Calendars are free? (I'm pretty sure I did!) We've touched on Gmail, Contacts and Calendars, and looked at how these can be synced to your iPhone and iPad. Naturally, they can also all be synced to your Android phone and tablet if you have one of those. But what about Tasks? In the spirit of GTD , it would really help to be able to have a decent task (ToDo) list that also worked with the rest of my digital (Google) lifestyle. Gmail d...