Chris Betcher

I read an article today in an educational newsletter about keeping your accounts safe with a strong password.  It suggested a range of sensible things like having at least 8 characters, using a mix of uppercase, lowercase, numbers and special characters, and not reusing old passwords.  All pretty good advice. I hear a lot of people expressing concern about the security of "the cloud".  They worry that their data could be compromised if kept on a server they don't own themselves, or a server that is located somewhere else, possibly even in another country.  They express concerns about data breaches from hackers, security breaches of data centres, or even data being accessed by foreign powers during a government uprising. Is any of this possible?  I suppose so. Anything is possible. Unlikely perhaps, but possible. If it's true that anything is possible, and we want our data to have zero risk, then we need to not keep data anywhere. The only sure way to have no ris...

Google Slides is one of my favourite G Suite tools. Its versatility and ease of use offers lots of amazing visual possibilities for students to present their learning in creative and interesting ways.  Here are 10 tips for becoming a Google Slides wizard... 10. Master your design with Master Slides Did you know that you can make a single change in one place that then changes on every slide?  Whether you want to add a graphic to every slide, reposition a textbox on every page, or change the font through your entire presentation, you can do it on the master and it will update on every slide. Click on Slide >Edit Master, then make your change to whatever type of slide you want changed. It’s like magic! 9. Voice Type your speaker notes Typing is so 2019! So instead of typing all your speaker notes why not just talk to your computer and have the words magically appear in the notes section below the slide?  No special microphone or training required, just select Tools >...

Over the past few years I’ve run a lot of professional learning workshops for teachers. It’s been a joy to be part of the learning journey for educators as they discover new ideas for making a difference to the kids they teach. I couldn’t count the number of workshop sessions I’ve run, or the number of ideas we’ve shared, but it’s quite a lot. And even when I’m training on the same topics over and over again, every workshop is still different because of the collection of people and personalities in the room. There is, however, one disturbing characteristic that too many of these workshops have in common, and that is the complete predictability of people who register to attend a workshop and then simply don't turn up. Even when workshops are offered as part of a conference that people have paid good money to attend, you can still predictably count on a no-show rate of around 5% to 10%. There are no doubt some valid reasons that people might pay to attend an event and then not show u...

Here’s something I’ve noticed about people. Most people love the familiar. They find something that they like and they get used to it. On the surface that would seem like a logical idea, and while it’s certainly ok to like having favourite things - after all, that’s what makes them our favourite things - the problem is that we can get so attached to those things to the point where we never discover alternatives to them. And this means we sometimes become blind to the alternatives, the potential opportunities they offer us, or the idea that we could perhaps like other things even more. It’s good to be able to identify the ideas, objects and things we are most attached to, and then deliberately make an effort to look around and see what other alternatives exist.  For example, if you normally go to a church, you could try visiting a mosque. If you normally choose McDonalds, try a Hungry Jacks instead. If you normally drive, try walking. If you don’t like to dance, take a dance class....

I recently gave this keynote talk at the EdTechTeam Cape Town Summit, titled "Imagine the Possibilities". I've actually given this talk a number of times at Summits and other events all over the world, and this is likely the last time I'll use it, so I'm posting it here just for posterity.

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...