Chris Betcher

I've been doing some work recently with a school that's using iPads with their kids, and was asked to give a talk on the topic "The place of iPads in teaching and learning". This post is just a bit of thinking out loud about that question. Let me start by saying that I think the iPad is an amazing piece of technology. I dispute the common claim about iPads just being "consumption devices". That's a load of nonsense. Used wisely, iPads open up incredible opportunities for creativity. This point was driven home during my recent 365 project, The Daily Create , where I made a creative "thing" every day during 2014. Although this project wasn't specifically based on using an iPad, the truth is that at least 80% of what I came up with over the course of the year was made on an iPad. Whether it was photo editing, making graphics, editing movies, composing music, building animations and 3D objects, or even just writing, the iPad was a perfectly cre...

I haven't seen an actual paper credit card statement for a long time because I've banked electronically for years, but I switched banks recently and they just sent me my first credit card statement on this new account. I was really pleased to see a prominent section on the statement (mandated by government legislation) pointing out just how long this bill will take to pay off if I were only to pay the minimum amount. I think this is a great thing for developing financial literacy, as I'm always shocked at just how little some people know about money, especially credit, and how little they understand its impact. On my credit card's closing balance of $1898.20, it tells me that even if I spent nothing more on the card, and just paid the minimum required amount each month until it was paid off, it would take me 18 YEARS 6 MONTHS, and would accrue $4,348.57 in interest! I hope we are teaching this stuff to kids at school, so they don't fall into the "free money...

There is an advertisement on TV at the moment for an Australian car insurance company that encourages drivers to download an app to their phone to find out who is " Australia's Best Driver ".  When you download and install the app it starts by asking you a few questions...  your name, gender, email address, home address, etc. Then it keeps track of your driving using GPS location, timestamps, speed tracking, etc for at least the next 300km. In fact, it even defaults to an autostart mode so that you don't have to remember to turn it on. Every so often it will check in with you to make sure that you are in fact the driver of the trips it's been tracking. Then it scores your driving style in an attempt to find out who is the best driver in Australia. Think about it. As well as knowing exactly who you are, it knows how fast you're driving, when you're driving, where you've been, who was driving and how long for, and even what your phone was doing as you dr...

Here's the follow-up from my last post about the copyright claim that YouTube made on a video I made using a Creative Commons soundtrack. You can read the previous post for the start of the story if you're interested. Since then, I've had conversations with several people about the issue. One was Jeff Price, the CEO of Audiam . Audiam was listed by YouTube as the entity responsible for policing the claim. Audiam is a service that musicians can use to track the use of their music in YouTube, although I think they also monitor Spotify and a few other streaming services as well. Basically, when a musician signs up to use Audiam's services they upload a sample of their music which gets passed on to YouTube and fingerprinted. Fingerprinting is a process whereby the track can be compared against existing tracks to see if it matches, thereby identifying the copyright status of the music. If a match is made, YouTube flags it as a copyright violation and that was the problem I ...

A few weeks ago I got home from a short holiday in Bali. We had a great time, and managed to collect a few snippets of video along the way using a GoPro camera. A few days after I got home I managed to stitch a few clips together into a little video summary of the holiday using my own footage and some Creative Commons music that I sourced from Jamendo, one of of my favourite sources for CC-licensed music. I used a happy little track called " 8_Happiness AC2 " by an artist called " Music for your Media ". The track was licensed under a CC BY-ND-NC licence - meaning that if I attribute the artist (I did), don't modify the music (I didn't), and not make money from its use (I'm not), I was welcome to use it. That's the nice thing about Creative Commons licensing; the terms and conditions of use are clear, explicit and fairly unambiguous. Or so I thought. After I edited the video - all 2 minutes and 52 seconds of it - it was published to YouTube. The ne...

I was at the ACEC Conference in Adelaide recently where I bumped into the ABC Splash team and got chatting with the wonderful Annabel Astbury. We were talking about getting kids coding and the importance of digital technologies in schools. One thing led to another and I was given an opportunity to write a series of three blog posts on the importance of coding for children as part of ABC Splash's buildup to the Hour of Code. If you'd like to read them you can find them here... Part 1 - More than a Game: Why Coding will help kids for life Part 2 -  Programs to help students with key coding concepts Part 3 -  Coding: something for everyone (and here's the proof!) As well as these three written posts I was also interviewed for a video series on the importance of coding, which was released as part of the Hour of Code promotions. Thanks to Annabel and the team for the opportunity to contribute to what I think is a very important conversation to have. Our cu...

You hear of so many security compromises and hacks these days. There are major security breaches happening, with millions of passwords being stolen and used to steal or damage your stuff. So what can you do about it? With so much of our lives now being lived in online spaces, losing a password, losing an account, having someone get into your stuff online,  would be a nightmare. What would happen if someone got into your Google account? Your Facebook? Your bank account? I lost my original Twitter account (betchaboy) last year after a password breach and have never been able to get it back. These security breaches DO happen. The best thing you can do to protect yourself is to turn on Two Factor authentication. Sounds complicated? Its not. It basically means that there are two passwords required to get into your account instead of the usual one... there is the normal password that you usually use, plus a second one that changes every 30 seconds or so. Even if the bad guys were to get your...

The following press release  was written by Dr Jason Zagami, president of the ACCE, in response to the recent review of the Australian Curriculum. This review, undertaken by Ken Wiltshire and Kevin Donnelly on behalf of the Liberal government makes a number of recommendations that are hard to understand in their inconsistency and lack of vision. Here is Jason's press release. Please spread it around. For immediate release Australian Council for Computers in Education has deep concerns with inconsistent support for school computing in the government's response to the Review of the Australian Curriculum ACCE has considered the Review of the Australian Curriculum Report and Supplementary Material, and is deeply concerned by some of the recommendations being considered by the government in the Initial Australian Government Response. While ACCE acknowledges concern about a perceived overcrowding of the primary curriculum, there are many ways to address this other than a return to ...

Bless me father, for I’m about to commit an act of heresy. Whenever I say what I’m about to say, I get a reaction that ranges from raised eyebrows to outright hostility and arguments. But I’ll say it anyway. I don’t like the hashtag chat format on Twitter. And I don’t like the timed presentation format used for Teachmeets. There. I said it. Maybe I’m just becoming a cranky old man as I get older, but I don’t like either of these formats and for much the same reason. I find they dumb down the conversation. I know that both of these formats are very popular at the moment, and I know that many people seem to like them. But I just can’t warm to them, and I wanted to write this post to explain why. Feel free to condemn me in the comments. Let’s start with Twitter hashtag chats. That’s where you pick an abbreviation, slap a hashtag in front of it, set aside an hour or so, and off you go. Instant “conversation”. I know this form of conversation on Twitter is insanely popular right now, but I ...

In 2013 Google released Hummingbird, perhaps the most significant update to their search algorithm since the search engine launched. From the Search Engine Land blog, here's how they describe it... "On September 26, Google announced a new algorithm impacting more than 90 percent of searches worldwide. They called it Hummingbird. Google’s Amit Singhal later said it was perhaps the largest change to the algorithm since he joined the company back in 2001. Hummingbird allows the Google search engine to better do its job through an improvement in semantic search. As conversational search becomes the norm, Hummingbird lends understanding to the intent and contextual meaning of terms used in a query." http://searchengineland.com/google-hummingbird-the-keyword-what-you-need-to-know-to-stay-ahead-175531  In plain English, this means that the conventional wisdom of the way we teach search - identifying important keywords, eliminating unnecessary terms, removing the conversational p...