Chris Betcher

Dear Internet, I could use some of your help if you have a moment. I've been fortunate to have been asked to present an extended workshop at the Learning 2.012 Conference in Beijing China in a few weeks. It's very exciting. I presented at the Learning 2.010 conference in Shanghai two years ago and it was totally awesome, absolutely one of the best learning events I've been part of . The session I'm running this year is called Creativity and Innovation in the Classroom . It's a big topic that could really go in any number of directions, which is both exciting and scary at the same time (made even more scary by the possibility that we might not have any Internet access that week in China!) Obviously I feel as though I have something to contribute on the topic or I wouldn't have suggested it, but I would really love to tap into some of your collective wisdom. I'm a big believer in the wisdom of the crowd, and I'm hoping to pick your collective brains a lit...

A couple of years ago, I coauthored a book about teaching and learning with interactive whiteboards. I'm not going to debate the pros and cons of IWBs here, but believe me when I say I can see both sides of the arguments for and against them. Regardless of your opinions about the worth of IWBs, I was pleased that the book was able to focus on the importance of quality teaching, and I think we made a pretty solid point in the book that any classroom technology is only as good as the pedagogical expertise being applied to its use. It was an interesting exercise, as I'd never written an actual book before. As this type of niche book goes, it's been reasonably successful. It sold out of its first, and then second editions, and has now been reprinted several times. It got some excellent reviews. The company that published it, ACER Press , tells us that it's actually their number one selling book, so it's rather nice to know that it's been well received by so many pe...

About 5 years ago, there was an incident in Adelaide where a classroom blog and the South Australian Department of Education and Children's Services had a bit of a falling out.  It was well documented at the time, so I'm not going to rehash it here, suffice to say that it was a bunfight at the time and as a result there was significant tension between the educational blogging community and the Powers That Be in South Australia. Like many other bloggers, I expressed my thoughts on it at the time. I spoke to the person who was directly affected by the dispute, as well as a number of other people in the know. Eventually, everyone involved tried to take what they could learn from the situation and we all just moved on.  Life is too short to be dragged down by that stuff. However, over the last few weeks I've had some idiot posting abusive comments on this blog expressing (quite forcefully) their opinions on that situation from 2007. They have been abusive and rude to me perso...

I posted this on Google+ last week... Do you teach in a school that uses tablets? (iPads, Android tablets, etc) Have you been involve in planning the rollout and implementation of a tablet program in a school? Do you have thoughts about how suitable tablets are for education? Do you have any success stories to share? Warnings to give? Come along and join in the conversation as we take this opportunity to learn from each other about this fast growing area of educational technology. Here's what happened.  It's a long recording (1:18:00) but has lots to think about... Thanks to everyone who joined us, both in the actual Hangout and also in the live stream.

The recent decision in the Apple/Samsung debacle has really got me thinking about a few things. If you read my last blog post you'll know that I feel somewhat disappointed in Apple's seemingly bullying behaviour towards a competitor. I suppose I feel like this because I have had such a high opinion of Apple for so long and this is just not what I expected from them. The hashtag #boycottapple was trending globally on Twitter for a while this morning so clearly a lot of other people were equally unimpressed with the whole thing. Realistically, I know it's more complicated than that. The fact is that Apple is a company, not a person, and companies are ruled on business decisions, not emotions. There is no doubt that Apple brought amazing innovation to the phone business with the release of the first iPhone and that numerous competitors immediately changed their design ideas in order to compete. And yes, quite a few of them probably copied some ideas. I also understand that Ap...

I'm feeling disillusioned and sad today. When I was much younger I met someone that truly amazed me. They were young at the time too, full of interesting ideas and brilliant thinking. They were different to everyone around them and they stood out because of their genius. I loved being exposed to their thinking, and they made me see the world differently. They let me explore the world in ways I hadn't really considered before. Looking back, I think I could even say their ideas have shaped my personality in ways that I probably wasn't even aware of, and I ended up choosing a career path based on the passion they instilled in me. They always impressed me. They had attention to detail that was astounding. They inspired me, and millions of others too. They came up with incredible ideas that were brilliantly different, and they had a profound influence on the world around them. Of course, they had influences of their own too, and they were often shameless about taking the seeds ...

When students at our school get to Year 3 they are given their own school email account. We are a Google Apps for Education school, so the email they get is a rebadged Gmail account, and part of my role is to teach them to use it. We do lots of work on digital citizenship and we try really hard to give our students opportunities to be responsible members of the online world, but at the point they get their email we really just want to make sure they know the mechanics of using it... how to compose a message, how to reply and forward, the difference between cc: and bcc:, etc. In those early days of getting their gmail account I really just want them to get the hang of it by using it. Around the same time as they get their email account, they also do a thematic unit of work about national parks where they look at several of Australia's most prominent national parks and learn about what they are and what they do. I had a bit of a wacky idea for integrating the use of email into their ...

Olympic sports commentators have always annoyed me with the "how do you feel?" question immediately after an athlete finishes an event. It's such a shallow, inappropriate question at that moment in time. Regardless of whether you just won a gold medal or a grand final, the typical answer is both inadequate and self-obvious. You feel great. Amazing. Exhilarated. Overwhelmed. Whatever adjectives you offer at that moment all probably fall short of communicating the real emotion of winning. But I find the most irksome question is when the sports commentator asks the winning athlete "did you ever dream you'd be here winning a gold medal?", as though the athlete was somehow unexpectedly caught by surprise with their win. Such a question shows a complete lack of understanding of what it takes to reach the pinnacle of sporting success. The drive, the focus, the goal setting, the early morning training, the daily practise, the sheer dedication to achieve at the highe...

With the impending release of Mountain Lion , Apple's new version of the OS X operating system, I've been giving some thought to whether I'll bother upgrading or not. I am, or at least I used to be, what many would refer to as a Mac Fanboy. I still think Apple builds the best consumer computer hardware on the planet, and, so far anyway, OS X is probably still the best desktop/laptop operating system currently available. A few years ago I would not have included the "probably" qualifier in that last sentence, but lately I'm feeling more and more disenfranchised with Apple and their litigious nature and walled garden approach to creating customer lock-in. It's not that I don't like their products. I do. I have several Macs, iPads, iPhones, and Apple TVs. Walled garden or not, they build beautiful products that -  for the most part - do exactly what they claim... they just work. While I don't always approve of their proprietary attitude to the way the...

I was cleaning up my home office recently and I found a couple of installation disks for Apple's OS X Tiger operating system, 10.4.7. They must have come with the Macbook Pro I bought back in early 2006, and since that time I've upgraded  several times, to 10.5 (Leopard), 10.6 (Snow Leopard), 10.7 (Lion), and in the not too distant future I'm sure I'll make the move to 10.8 (Mountain Lion). Because I have absolutely no need to keep the OSX Tiger disks, I figured I'd sell them on eBay. After all, they might be of some use to someone with an older Mac who wants to stay on that older version of the OS, or who possibly has lost or damaged their original disks. I listed them online for $1, eBay's minimum bid, and hoped that they  might be of some benefit to someone, somewhere. Less than 24 hours after listing them, I get an email from eBay telling me they had to pull the ad after getting a takedown notice from the Business Software Alliance . "Your item was remo...