Chris Betcher

tl;dr ... just click here and do the right thing. I've done it. You've probably done it too.  You're making some kind of digital product and you needed a digital asset of some sort to use with it. Maybe you were putting together a short video and needed some music for the soundtrack, or maybe you were working on some kind of poster and needed an image to include on it. Fortunately, we live in a world where we have access to amazing digital tools that make it easy to create, as long as you have some raw materials to work with. While it's technically quite simple to just find what you want online and use it, there are some ethical (and legal) questions about just taking anything you find on the web and using it as your raw material. Unless you have permission to use those resources you really shouldn't use them. It's effectively stealing. Thankfully, that's where  Creative Commons comes in. Creative Commons provides a legal and ethical solution to...

On TV tonight I saw an ad from some group that calls themselves the " Marriage Alliance ". I looked at their website which seems to be a thinly veiled attempt to be open minded when really all they want to do is oppose same sex marriage and maintain the unfair status quo... Their site poses a number of open questions about marriage, and while they purport to being just trying to encourage a healthy discussion about the value of marriage in general, it's pretty obvious what their agenda is. They are clearly in opposition to same sex marriage. So, since they asked, here are my answers to the questions on their website... Should children have the right to know their biological history? Yes. As an adopted child myself, I should have the right to know my history if I choose to. Some choose to and some do not. But what's your point?  So what if a child of a same sex couple knows their biological history and where they came from?  You thin...

I just had a couple of thoughts on Chromebooks that I wanted to share. There has been a growing interest in Chromebooks over the past year or so. I ran a Chromebook session at the IT Managers Conference in Canberra earlier this year and there was quite a bit of interest there, and I hear of a growing number of schools here in Sydney that are starting to look at Chromebooks as a possible option for student devices. At PLC Sydney we started with a small set of 10 Chromebooks about 2 years ago, and have been steadily adding more, mainly in our junior school. They have been a major success with students and teachers alike. Easy to deploy and manage. Robust and reliable. Simple to use, and they do most everything we need. You might notice I didn't tout price as the advantage... while Chromebooks are quite inexpensive (around $300 each) I think it would be a major mistake to view them as nothing more than "a cheap alternative" to a "proper computer". Being inexpensiv...

A while ago I realised that my online life was in password hell. I was using literally hundreds of sites and services that required passwords, but they were held together with a confusing mess of old passwords that I'd mostly forgotten, numerous passwords which were being used on more than one site,  passwords that didn't meet the usual complexity rules usually required across the Internet, and so on. I often found myself having to do a password reset just to access a site, and of course that new password became yet another one I had to remember. Or forget. I felt things were a little bit out of hand so I finally took a few steps to clean up my digital life. First, using the same password for everything is an exceptionally stupid idea. Instead, I came up with my own system that helped me create hard-to-guess, but easy-to-remember passwords that I could apply to any site.  Having a clear system for this meant that when I signed up for some new online service I could quickly come...

The following is from an email I wrote to someone who asked if I was going to be presenting at the EduTech conference in Brisbane this year. As you can see, my answer is no, but I think what's important is my reason for saying no. If you're planning to present at EduTech, I hope you consider the effect of saying yes. To be honest, I am not a big fan of EduTech, mainly because I really don't like their policy of non-payment for Australian speakers. I find it quite insulting that they are willing to pour outrageous amounts of money into getting overseas speakers but are not willing to pay anything for local speakers. I think they need to approach this with greater equity and offer ALL their speakers some form of payment, even if the locals just get a token amount. As I've no doubt pointed out before, this is a (very) commercial event run for profit by a professional conference-running company, and yet they expect the vast majority of what they are offering to their cus...

I was looking at school websites tonight trying to find some information I needed and I stumbled across a school that I won't name, but on the front page of their website they made the claim they make of "Best Practices in Education" or "Advanced Learning Environment".  The images that accompanied these claims were of very traditional classrooms, doing very traditional things. Is it that schools simply don't get what those terms mean? Or are they just marketing to parents who don't understand what those terms mean? I'm not sure, but I do know that images like these completely devalue any real sense of best practise or advanced learning environments because the school clearly doesn't know what those terms actually mean. A school is not innovative or modern or advanced or "best practice" because it says so in their marketing brochures. It needs to actually BE those things it claims to be. Adding phrases like that to images like this is si...

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 ...