Chris Betcher

I've never really been what you might call a perfectionist. Nor do I believe that it's ok to do a half-assed job of things. It's good to do things right and to the best of your ability, and if I had a choice between doing something badly or doing it well, I'd always rather do it well. But it's also easy to become paralysed with inaction when you feel that something needs to be done perfectly. I saw two examples of this recently... Our school has a very dedicated team of foreign language teachers, and we take our language education very seriously. Many of our students graduate with great proficiency in multiple languages, which I think is pretty amazing. Our languages staff are all deeply passionate about their language teaching and insist that any language should be taught using only the "proper" version of that language... so, for example we teach our French students how to speak Parisian French, and would never encourage them hear "improper" ve...

It's been said that you know when a 1:1 computing initiative is truly working in a school because you stop talking about it. The conversation stops being about the hardware - the computers, the tablets, the wifi, the network, etc. When all that stuff works the way it is supposed to, it begins to fade from the conversations that take place in the school. We stop talking about the devices and start talking about the learning that takes place with the devices. We stop thinking about the infrastructure required to make the technology work, and we just use it, fully expecting that it "just does". A good 1:1 program should be like oxygen. It becomes so ubiquitous that you start to forget it's there. Students and teachers begin to blend the use of technology into their daily routine in a way that becomes so seamless that it feels natural. Taking the technology away would be almost like taking oxygen away. You don't notice it until it's not there. How do you get to th...

It's been a while since I've posted here, which got me thinking about why that might be. I think the obvious answer is that it's just too easy to contribute on other platforms. When I first started blogging I used to post almost every day, sometimes a couple of times a day. It was to share a video or a picture that I found, jot down an idea, or just share a thought. These days, there are easier ways to do that than with a blog. For many, it's Facebook. For me, for a long time, it was Twitter (and it still might be if I could sort out this stupid password issue!) More and more it's becoming Google+, which really is emerging as THE social platform of the future. These services make it so easy to throw an idea out there quickly. And let's face it, for most people the level of engagement you get back on these platforms is probably higher. It's really no surprise that most of us are blogging less often. But having said that, I'm incredibly glad that I started...

I started on Twitter back in February 2007, joining the service as user number 779,452 using the name @betchaboy . At the time, I thought I was already late to the Twitter party but looking back at it now that the number of users has crossed into the billions , I guess that wasn't the case. In the time I've been part of Twitter, my use of it has grown considerably. As I write this, my Twitter account follows 3,931 people (mostly other educators with a nice mix of others thrown in just to keep in interesting), and there are 8,496 people following me. With over 11,000 tweets since I joined, Twitter has been a big part of my learning for the last 7 years. Twitter has been an incredibly valuable tool of connection and learning, and has enabled me to be part of conversations and communities that I never would have discovered otherwise. Twitter has, quite literally, been life and career changing for me. I've written quite a few blog posts about Twitter over the years, some...

One of the most common questions I get asked by teachers is how to include video in their online resources. Whether it's including video clips in Moodle or embedding a video into a wiki or blog, the use of video can be a powerful tool for helping students learn. As someone once said to me "Give me 3 minutes and the right piece of video, and I can teach you almost anything". Working with video has a reputation for being complicated. I remember doing an online video project about 13 years ago with a school in Japan and we were literally air-mailing VHS cassettes to each other each because it was the "simplest" way to get the job done. Indeed, it's true that even just a few years ago, working with video was still relatively difficult... the file sizes are huge, the editing process can be complex, and storing video files for playback on the web has traditionally involved a bewildering array of codecs and other technical-sounding choices. It's all too much fo...

It's clear that there is quite a lot about this thing we call "school" that probably needs to change and that there are many schools around the world that are embracing and leading that change with some really innovative ideas about teaching and learning. However, from what I can tell, innovation and genuine change for the better in education is still rather patchy and relies greatly on the passion and drive of individual teachers, many of whom fly "under the radar" in order to make positive change in their own educational circumstance. There are certainly schools that are, as a single organisation or even a whole system, making giant strides towards reinventing what modern education should be about, but if I was able to randomly drop you into one of the many millions of classrooms around the world to observe what's taking place inside it, I think it would still be fairly hit or miss as to whether you'd find teaching and learning that was modern, contemp...

I'm a horribly inefficient teacher. Honestly. I look around at what other teachers do, and I'm amazed at their productivity and efficiency. They get so much more done than me. It makes me embarrassed at just how inefficient I am as a teacher. I hate to have to admit it but it takes me literally hours to plan courseware, projects and assessments. I'd be a whole lot better if I just resisted the temptation to reinvent everything each year. Can you believe that I've been teaching now for over 25 years and I still haven't really latched onto the idea that I could simply teach the same thing, in the same way, using the same resources that I used the year before. I see so many other do that, and it makes perfect sense. I mean, you'd think that sort of efficiency should be obvious to any reasonably intelligent person, right? Why am I so thick? For example, I spent many hours today designing a new project for one of my classes. I thought my idea for this project was a r...

I was talking to a couple of people today about the way we use blogs with our students.  At my school we have a number of students and classes blogging, and every one of these blogs is completely open and visible to the public web. These folk were asking, with an obvious degree of concern, how we deal with this public visibility of student blogs and what steps were we taking to prevent them being seen by "just anyone". I've tried to convince many people to try blogging over the years. Usually, their biggest objection is "why would anyone want to read what I write?"  Their concern is usually about the huge waste of effort that blogging will be because they don't truly believe that anybody will ever read or take any interest in what they have to write. They imagine that their work will go into the black hole of the Internet where it never gets seen by anyone. And yet, when we talk about getting students blogging on the open web, the usual concern is just the o...

I just left a comment on Larry Ferlazzo's blog Websites of the Day , in response to a post called  The Best Alternatives To Google Reader Now That It’s Being Shut Down . As the title suggests, after Google dropped the bombshell today about closing down Google Reader, Larry was very helpfully suggesting some alternatives. And they are good suggestions of course, but I think this decision to shut down Reader is more far-reaching than just finding an alternative tool. Anyway, I left quite a long comment on the post with a few ideas that were on my mind, so I thought I'd crosspost it here as well, just in case it helps stimulate further discussion.  But please do go visit Larry's original post... Larry, I agree with you... I'm deeply disappointed that Google is shutting down Reader. And as good as these suggestions for alternatives are, I suspect most of them will be fairly poor replacements for Reader... a) Reader is a part of the Google suite of tools. When I'm logged...

On Ozteachers the other day, we were informed that the Draft paper for the new Australian Curriculum: Technologies has been released for review and ACARA, the government body charged with overseeing its implementation, is looking for feedback during the consultation period. Figuring that I should probably know more about this document than I currently do, I thought it might be a good idea to set up a Google+ Hangout On Air, and invite whoever wants to talk about it together for a discussion.  It was also a motivator to get me to actually read the document first! Thank you to those that were able to join in, in particular Bruce Fuda, Jason Zagami, Roland Gesthuizen, Nicky Ringland, and Matt Wells, as well as several others who dropped in and out during the call like Tim Wicks, Maurice Pagnucco and MaryAnne Williams. There was also some good discussion taking place in  the backchannel on Google+ , so visit that too if you're keen to read a bit more. I'm still getting my head aro...