Chris Betcher

As many of you may know, I'm a big supporter of Creative Commons and the ideals of open sharing. I publish most of my stuff under a CC licence, usually BY-SA, because I think sharing is important and I believe that the world is a better place if we allow others to build on what we do (in the same way that I often build on the influences of others). So, a while back I published a couple of things to the OER Commons ; a site where teachers can upload and freely share their educational resources with others. The general idea is that if you publish to OER Commons, anyone can take your work and remix it and build upon it to create a version for their own individualised use. For busy teachers who all too often find themselves "reinventing the wheel" in the creation of their own teaching resources, it's a brilliant concept. You can also attach metadata to the resources you share to make them more searchable, and even map them to the US Common Core standards if you wish. If s...

I was asked via email recently about Chromebooks and whether I thought they were a good choice for schools. Here is my email response, posted here for anyone that might be interested in reading it... --- I'll start by suggesting that any resistance you get on Chromebooks from tech and IT staff will be made for reasons that have nothing to do with pedagogy. I think you could argue that by almost any relevant measure Chromebooks are CLEARLY a better choice for schools. (which is why they are now the number 1 device in US schools) They are easier to deploy and manage, more secure, more robust, and less expensive. They do everything that a student would need them to do. They integrate directly with Google Apps for Education and are easily shared between students in ways that other devices are not.  They boot fast (under 7 seconds), save work automatically, are completely immune to viruses, and are fast to use. ChromeOS does not slow down over time like other operating systems, and to c...

Well, I think this is exciting news... After 8 years I've officially resigned from my tech integration role at PLC Sydney and, starting on January 1 next year, will be embarking on a whole new career adventure. I have taken up a fulltime position with EdTechTeam as their Director of Professional Development for Australia & New Zealand. EdTechTeam is a California based company but has just started a local subsidiary here in Australia. As "a global network of educational technologists" with a mission of "improving the world's education systems using the best learning principles and technology", I've always been really impressed with what EdTechTeam are about. If you've ever been to a Google Apps for Education Summit , you've already had a small glimpse into the kinds of things EdTechTeam does, but there's a whole lot of other things going on as well! Basically, imagine if you assembled a team of the most talented teachers in the world, w...

I received an email recently from a colleague asking about data sovereignty, and in particular asking about how schools deal with the  need to store all personal data on Australian servers to be compliant with the law. This was my reply... When deciding whether to do a thing - any thing - you need to assess the relative risk. There is NOTHING that can have it's risk mitigated to zero. So while we can have debates about the security of the cloud, the fact is that ANY service is generally only as safe as the password that protects it. It's far simpler to socially engineer your way into a system than to hack it, and it's easier to follow someone through an open doorway before the door shuts than to crack the lock. There are security risks involved with every system. What makes you think that data saved on a server that happens to be geographically located on Australian soil is any safer than data on a server located on the other side of some imaginary geographical dividing l...

Imagine you could visit any place in the world. Where would you go? What would you like to see? What would you hope to experience? Imagine you are learning about India. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to visit the Taj Mahal and explore its wonders? What if your geography class is learning about coral reefs and could go diving in the Maldives or Hanauma Bay or the Great Barrier Reef to see what it’s like there. What would it be like to visit the South Pole, or Niagara Falls or the Palace of Versailles? There are so many amazing things to see and learn about in our world. While we would love to take our students on excursions to learn about the things they can’t experience at school, there are obviously many places that are simply too far away, too expensive, too dangerous or too impractical to visit. Meet Expeditions . Expeditions is a new tool in development from Google that uses the StreetView technology found in Google Maps to take students on virtual field trips to all sorts of exotic and ...

My friend  and prolific blogger Steve Wheeler issued an interesting blogging challenge the other day called A Twisted Pair . He proposed taking two different people with no apparent connection and writing a post about learning that somehow connects the two, which I thought was an interesting idea. Steve proposed a few possible pairs of names on his post to get our ideas started, and although there were many pairings that intrigued me, two that really stood out were both people who have always inspired me - Pablo Picasso and Sir Tim Berners-Lee .  So here goes... There are probably numerous ideas to explore in terms of how the concepts of learning are embodied by these two people. I'll try to begin with the obvious and then see if we can find other connections. Let's start with Picasso. Picasso was an incredibly prolific Spanish artist with a body of work that is profoundly extensive. Over the years his work moved through multiple phase...

During the month of October I'll be riding my bike to help raise money to support childrens' cancer research. It's all part of the Great Cycle Challenge , raising funds for the Children's Medical Research Institute , one of the major research bodies aimed at finding a cure for cancer. I think it's a worthy cause. So many people I know have been affected by cancer. We desperately need to find the solution to this awful disease and it can only be done with research, and research costs money. I've committed to ride 250km this month to raise $1000 for CMRI. So far people have been very generous and the fundraising has gone pretty well so I might revise that goal. I think the 250km will be enough of a challenge, but it would be nice to raise more money. If you'd like to support this great cause, you can head over to my fundraising page at  https://greatcyclechallenge.com.au/Riders/ChrisBetcher and donate whatever you feel works for you. And on behalf of the kid...

Just to finish the story I started in the last post, here's what transpired (just in case you're interested). The good news is that Optus finally found the reason for this blog being blocked on their network and have restored things to normal. You should now be able to access this site, even on the Optus network, but the nonsense I had to wade through to get things resolved was quite ridiculous. After that last blog post describing the problem with my site being blocked by Optus for reasons unexplained, I posted it out on Twitter and Facebook. It's amazing how quickly that gets a response. To their credit, I heard back from Optus's Social Media Team very quickly offering to help resolve the issue. I'm not sure why tech support problems can't just be resolved by calling Tech Support, and why it takes a very public skewering on social media to get any action these days, but apparently that the way it works now. After a series of very promising back and forth tweet...

If you've tried to access this blog lately from the Optus network, I'm going to make an educated guess and say that you haven't been able to. I have an Optus Cable Internet service at home and about two weeks ago I started to be unable to access my blog. At first I put it down to a temporary network glitch and didn't worry about it. But the problem presisted and I started be become a bit stumped as to what was happening. Every other website on the Net loaded ok, but my own blog was inaccessible. I could get to it from work, and from my phone over Telstra 4G and pretty much anywhere except from home on my Optus service. Then last week I got an email from a reader who said that she also couldn't access the blog and, surprise surprise, she is also on the Optus network. Nor could a friend of hers, who is, you guessed it, also on the Optus network. So I put a note out on Twitter to ask who could access the blog and which ISP they were using. 100% of Optus users could not...

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...