Chris Betcher

Chromebooks have become (and continue to be) an important computing platform in many schools across the world. With speed, simplicity, and reliability as their goal, many schools have adopted Chromebooks as the ideal computer for students. A low price is often touted as the reason for their success, but I think low price is simply a benefit, not a feature. While it’s nice that Chromebooks are relatively cheap, to see them as simply “cheap computers” is to entirely miss the point. Chromebooks are succeeding for many other reasons that go far beyond price. One of the myths about Chromebooks is that they are not very good for working with rich media such as audio, video, and graphics. While GSuite gives us marvelous tools for the core functions of word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations with Docs, Sheets, and Slides, there is clearly much more that we’d like students to be able to do with these machines. Obviously, because of the way Chromebooks are designed to work, a stable Int...

I've been asked to present a keynote and workshop at the National Education Summit in Melbourne in August. The organisers of the event wanted to do an interview and ask a few questions as a way of promoting the event, which I did via email. This has been published elsewhere, but I thought I'd crosspost it here for the record. 1. What are some of the important messages for teachers in your presentation ‘The Track of the Storm’ at the National Education Summit in Melbourne? The title "Track of the Storm" was inspired by Part 3 of Charles Dickens' novel, "A Tale of Two Cities". The book opens with the famous lines ... It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we...

March is month three of my Beyond Belief project, and I was sitting at home debating which religion I should check out this month. As if by some kind of divine intervention, my doorbell rang and I answered it to find two ladies standing there. It’s as though religions are now being delivered to my door, like some kind of divine Deliveroo! They introduced themselves as Sandra and Beverley., and they thrust a brochure into my hands and asked if I knew about Jehovah’s plan for me.  I said I didn’t, and that I was a confirmed atheist, but that I was doing a project this year to learn about 12 different religions in 12 months. I suggested that they should tell me all about theirs, which turned out to be the Jehovah’s Witnesses . They were a little taken aback (in a good way) at the idea of someone trying a different religion each month and said they wished more people could be more open minded about religion. We stood at the door for quite a while discussing what the Jehovah’s Witnesse...

This is part two of my Beyond Belief project, where every month during 2019 I plan to experience a different religion that I know nothing about. This month its Sikhism . I have to admit, this one I knew absolutely nothing about. There is a large temple-looking place not far from where I live so I dropped in the other day to see what it was about. Turns out it is a gurdwara, which is a temple for Sikhs. The only thing I really knew about Sikhs was that they typically come from Northern India and they wear turbans (at least the men do). I'd never really thought that being Sikh was a stand-alone religion, and just assumed it was some offshoot of Hinduism. That's definitely not the case. When I dropped into the gurdwara to take a look, there was a guy with a beard and turban near the entrance measuring up a noticeboard, so I approached and explained that I am trying a different religion every month this year. He put down his measuring tape, then spent the next 90 minutes showi...

Here we go with part one of my Beyond Belief Project , where I plan to experience and learn about a different religion every month for all of 2019. I'm a little late posting this one, as it was for January, but better late than never. I spent nearly five week in Bali over the December/January period, so Balinese Hinduism seems like an obvious place to start. As part of Indonesia, a predominantly Muslim country, Bali is a religious outlier with nearly 85% of the island's population identifying as Hindu. Its version of Hinduism is a little different to that traditionally found in India, which is polytheistic (believing in many gods), and it has quite a different feel to the other Muslim parts of Indonesia. Balinese Hinduism claims to be monotheistic, with only one god, although it seems to me that in practice this is not always the case, based on so many different statues I saw everywhere. There were statues of Vishnu and Ganesha and many, many others that I didn't recognis...

For a couple of years now I have tried to take on some kind of interesting project each year. In the past it's been relatively simple things like doing a 365 project where I take and post a photo every day, or take one second of video every day, or even a daily creative challenge where I tried to make something creative every day for a year. For someone who can get easily distracted, the act of developing enough discipline to do something every single day has been quite a challenge, but for most of these projects I managed to stick to it all the way to the end of the year. Regardless of what the project is for the year I usually I learn a lot about the world and about myself. And it's been surprising that some of these daily projects have opened all kinds of interesting doors for me that I could have never foreseen. The daily discipline has paid off in other ways too. I'm trying to learn a second language at the moment - Esperanto - using the Duolingo app , and I've su...

You may (or may not) have noticed that I barely spend any time on Facebook these days. Today is the first time I've logged in for quite a while, and although I have definitely missed hearing what some of you have been up to and keeping up with your goings-on, I have to say I have really not missed "the Facebook experience". I've always had a bit of a love/hate relationship with Facebook... I know there can be some great stuff happening there, but I was increasingly finding Facebook as a huge time suck that was stealing more and more hours of my life for very little real return. I, probably like you, have spent far too much of my life liking and commenting on other people's posts, watching inane videos, or observing some of humanity's ugliest sides in many of the discussion threads. I was becoming more and more disenchanted with the whole Facebook experience, so I just decided to stop using it. If you've read my blog you will know that I've got to this ...

For many years, we had a beautiful Golden retriever named Buzz.  He was a really lovely dog. We got him through Golden Retriever Rescue NSW and he was pretty special to us. He eventually  became quite old and unwell, and we had to put him down last year just before Christmas. I was a little surprised today when I saw an article on a French news site about a Golden Retriever . It was a fairly sad story of a Golden who went to the vet for an operation and was accidentally euthanised. Whilst it was a sad story that brought back some painful memories of the night we lost our Golden boy, I was a little surprised that the photo being used was one of my own, taken of Buzz a few years ago. Because I believe in sharing as a default, I published the photo on Flickr under a Creative Commons BY SA licence, as nearly all of my photos are. So this French news site has every right to use my photo as long as they respect the CC guidelines under which I published it, namely the BY (Attribution...

Like you, I have also been inundated with updated privacy policy emails lately in the wake of the new GDPR rules ( General Data Protection Regulation ). Everyone wants to tell me what they are doing to protect my data. To be honest, it's not something that's been bothering me, but thanks for clogging my inbox anyway. It gets silly... I've heard that some schools are using GDPR as an excuse to avoid having things online, such as refusing to post photos or student work, not allowing students to use online services, etc. I've even heard it suggested that you can't read blogs anymore as it infringes on the GDPR rules! I am pretty sure that was not the purpose of GDPR (and we certainly should not allow some rule designed for the European Union to be affecting schools as far away as New Zealand!) I also heard that some bloggers are adding GDPR compliance statements to their blogs for fear of breaking the rules. Which I think is ridiculous, but here goes... This blog does ...

It seems like it wasn't that long ago that the music industry was still resisting any attempt at allowing consumers to access music in any way other that buying CDs. So many other industries have been disrupted by digital technology, and while a few notable ones stuck doggedly to their "principles" until they literally vanished (I'm looking at you Kodak and Blockbuster), most industries either embraced the disruption or eventually waved the white flag and gave in. One of the industries that probably should have most logically embraced the opportunities of being digital was the music business. After all, with a product that is essentially just a collection of digital bits, the decision to move those bits directly to consumers via the Internet should have been a no brainer. Yet the record company cartels fought the inevitable digital transition for years.  Rarely have I seen such a group of people with so little vision for the future be so obstinate about protecting the...