Chris Betcher

Like many schools around the world, our school has used the Microsoft Office trio of Word, Excel and PowerPoint for many years. Most of us know Word, Excel and PowerPoint well enough for our daily tasks. Although some of us might be willing to admit we probably don't use it to its full capacity, we've been using it for so long that we don't stop to think much about what, if any, alternatives might be out there. Don't get me wrong, Microsoft Office is an amazing piece of software. Like you, I've grown up with it and watched it evolve over many versions and seen lots of features get added over the years. If you really know what you're doing with Word, PowerPoint or Excel, you can make documents that are quite amazing in their complexity. And then along comes GoogleDocs, or Drive as we now call it. From humble beginnings as an online word processor called Writely , the Google Drive system has also evolved and changed and grown over the years. Sure, it's not the...

When I lived in Canada for a while, I was always a little bemused by the Canadian approach to speed limits. The maximum allowed speed limit on the QEW and the 400-series roads around Toronto is 100km/h and yet if you actually do that speed you just about get run over. The locals routinely cruise the highways there at 120-130km/h and there's no issue. I like to drive fast too, but it used to frustrate my sense of logic when I'd ask my Canadian friends why they didn't observe the speed limit. "Oh, it says 100," they'd say, "but nobody actually drives at 100, we drive at 120." "Why don't they just raise the speed limit to 120", I'd ask. "Because then people would just do 140" came the reply. Apart from being a really strange view of human nature, I'd then ask, "Why don't you just post the speed limit that you actually want people to observe and then enforce that, instead of having this vague gray area where peopl...

As a keen Scratch user (OK, Scratch fanboy) I was rather excited to find that Scratch 2.0 is now in public beta for anyone to try out. I really like it and think it has some major improvements over the older Scratch 1.4. To help explain the changes, I made this video that takes you through some of the new features and explains some of the new UI design. You can only log into 2.0 using a Scratch account created prior to January 26, although you can still use it without an account. (You just won't be able to share your projects on the Scratch website yet) A huge cheer to Mitch Resnick and the team at MIT for their work on this... Scratch is a fantastic resource for education and it leads the way as a tool for teaching computational thinking to younger students.

In 1963, when I was born... Television was delivered over the airwaves. In black and white. We had four channels to choose from and we had to get out of our seat to change them. And we hardly ever heard a swear word. Radio was only available using an AM signal. In mono. If you didn’t like the song that was on, you could switch to the other station. If you wanted to listen to music on the go, you had a small transistor radio with a tinny speaker or a single earpiece. And if you wanted to hear “your show”, you had to listen while it was being broadcast. Newspapers were printed on paper and printed every 24 hours. The time between a story happening and us finding out about it was often several days. Which stories made it into the newspaper was decided by an editor somewhere. The text on the page was made by rolling ink across the tops of slugs of lead in shape of letters, assembled to make sentences, and then pressing those inked letters against paper. The paper was then folded, cut, bund...

For a while now I've been really keen to get my hands on one of the new Chromebooks but they have been as scarce as the proverbial rocking horse poop. I played with the original CR-48 units at the 2011 Sydney Google Teacher Academy , and although I thought they were a brilliant concept, troubles with the wifi at the time (at Google HQ of all places!) had me going back to my MacBook Pro sooner than I planned. The basic concept of a Chromebook is a computer where the operating system is basically just a browser (although I don't think it's really fair to refer to Chrome as "just a browser".) Still, by minimising the operating system to little more than a support system for the web browser, it really enables the web to emerge as the platform. With most of the data stored away from the machine - in the cloud - it means that users don't have to worry about locally stored data. With the "software" on the machine really just being web services on cloud-ba...

At the recent Google Apps for Education Summit held at MLC School in Sydney, details for the next Google Teacher Academy were announced. Rather appropriately, the next GTA will be held in Sydney on May 7/8 at the Google Offices in Pyrmont. Full details and a link to the application form can be found at http://www.google.com.au/edu/teachers/google-teacher-academy.html It's a great couple of days and although it can certainly be a bit of a brain dump and information overload, you'll have the opportunity to network with other passionate and dedicated educators, meet with some of the local Sydney Google staff, become a part of the very active Google Certified Teacher community, and join in some fun social events as well. The event is open to people from all over the world... at the last Sydney GTA in 2011 we had participants from the US, Guam, France, Russia and other places. People come from far and wide to attend the GTA. Of course, I happen to think it would be nice to grow the ...

I'm a big user of Google's tools. I like what they offer and I like that they just keep getting better and better. When my school moved to Google Apps for Education at the end of 2011 we were generally happy with what was on offer, but there were things that we wished were just a little better, a little more polished, or had just a few more features. Over the course of 2012, some obvious things happened: Gmail got a redesign, Drive was introduced, editing of Docs on mobile devices came along, and of course Google Plus. But there were lots of smaller, less obvious, things that came along too: more fonts were added to Apps, the Research tool was added to Docs and Sheets, the Equation Editor got a boost, and so on. Unless you're on top of it, many of these improvements were easy to overlook. Over the course of the year many of the things we complained about in January were fixed, improved or added to by December. Google's tools just keep getting better all the time. When ...

It's that time of year again. Time to submit nominations for the 2012 Edublog Awards . There are those who criticise the idea of giving out awards for educational blogs as being a bit silly, or a bit unnecessary, or a bit selfserving, or a bit self-indulgent. They complain that the voting process is flawed, or that it's just a popularity contest, or that it promotes the wrong kinds of values.  Some complain that it's just a chance for gratuitous self promotion, both for the bloggers themselves and for the companies that promote educational blogging. I'm not one of those people. I think anything that supports, encourages and promotes the use of blogs in education is a good thing. Blogs are all about writing, sharing, thinking, pondering. Writing a blog forces you to clarify your thinking, state your position, defend your point of view. Blogging is a way to connect with others, debate ideas that matter to you, build a community of learners and be part of a bigger conversa...

I was recently given the privilege of giving a short keynote talk for the upcoming Flat Classroom Project cohort. The Flat Classroom Project is a wonderful professional learning program run by Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay which focuses on getting teachers and students working together on global collaborative projects - connecting classrooms around the world to work together. Julie contacted me recently to ask if I would be interested in doing it and I jumped at the opportunity. I was fortunate that I started doing some really full-on global collaborative projects with students back in the late 1990s, thanks to a program that was run by AT&T called Virtual Classroom. Although the format of the VC program was meant to be competitive - teams of three classrooms from around the world worked together to build a website on an agreed common theme - the essential principles of working together online were very much ingrained into my brain over the three years we worked on these project...

It's always good to celebrate creative successes. This is one of those times. When I first met my partner Linda she had started working on the novel she always wanted to write. That was six years ago, and the novel has certainly had its stops and starts over that time. Writing is not always an easy thing to do, and there were times when life just got in the way and it became difficult for her to keep moving that cursor to the right. However, I'm pleased to say that over the last few months she's really pushed herself to finish writing the manuscript, and over the last few weeks it's been through seemingly endless revisions and edits, fine tuning of words and sentences, and onto the final processes of typesetting and preparation for publication. I'm proud to say that Linda's first novel is now finished, published and available. The novel, eloves me, eloves me not , is a contemporary love story in which 39 year old Kayte Wexford realises that she still hasn't ...