Chris Betcher

Thanks to lockdown in Sydney I haven’t been out of the house a lot over the last few months, but this morning I took my drone down to Scylla Oval at Como to get some air time. As well as being a fairly scenic part of Sydney, it’s also an area with no airspace restrictions for drones as it avoids the flightpaths for both Sydney and Bankstown airports, and is outside the 3NM limits for both of them, so there are no annoying geo zones to have to unlock. As well as just getting out of the house, enjoying the sunshine and having some air time, there were two new reasonably nerdy drone things I wanted to try out. One was the new livestreaming feature in the latest release of the DJI Fly app (v1.4.12, in case you’re interested) where the drone camera can send its feed directly to YouTube. This is pretty easy to set up just by going to your YouTube account and from the Live Streaming page, grabbing the stream URL and unique stream key, appending them together like so, rtmp://a.rtmp.youtube.com...

I saw my first Chromebook, the original Cr48, over 10 years ago. I’ve deployed them into my own school with great success. And I now use them as my primary computing device every day. As a Mac user for many years, an occasional dabbler in Linux, and a Windows user for many more before that, I found the simplicity and ease of use of ChromeOS a refreshing and welcome change. Despite initially seeing a Chromebook as an easy alternative for a bit of web browsing, it took me a while to get to the point where I could see it as a viable option for my primary computer. Despite finding myself regularly using my Chromebook to present at conferences and workshops, I’d bring my MacBook along “just in case”. Eventually, after a lot of travelling around the world carrying two computers, I realised that I almost never used the Mac anymore, and I actually preferred to use the Chromebook. I still remember packing for a trip one day, and looking at my MacBook on the desk and thinking “should I or should...

Over the years, one of the common questions I have regularly heard being asked by schools that are in the process of moving from one technology platform to another is about the choice of substitute apps. I’ve heard it when I’ve been in schools that made the switch from Microsoft to Google – “But the teaching program says we have to use PowerPoint! I can’t use Slides!” or “But I can’t use Docs, all my stuff is in Word!” I’ve heard it when people switched from one type of phone operating system to another – “I used to use iMessage on my iPhone, but there’s no iMessage on Android! Now what?!” I recently heard someone ask what Chromebook apps they could use to replace the apps they used to use with their iPads – “I need to know what apps to use on the Chromebook to teach robotics!” Asking what apps should be used on a new platform to replace the things that you used to do on the old platform seems like a valid question. Certainly if a school is moving from iPads to Chromebooks, or Google t...

Google Meet has undergone a number of changes recently to the way video calls can be made more secure for teachers and students. This video is a thorough guide to making sure your Meets are as safe as possible, by explaining everything you need to know, from the necessary admin-level settings, to the in-call settings like Host Controls and Quick Access settings. It goes into a fair bit of detail, including the important changes that need to be made in the admin console in order for the other settings to be effective.

Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know, and just seeing some examples of what’s possible is a big help. To help you see the possibilities of Google Forms, here are two different examples that I hope you’ll find useful.  Did you know that there are actually 11 different types of questions you can ask with a Google Form? It’s not all just about Multiple Choice!  Understanding Different Question Types in Google Forms  This first one is a Form that has examples of every type of question that you can create with a Google Form, as well as some additional variations.  As you can see, there are LOTS of ways you can ask questions in Forms, and the real skill is making sure you are selecting the most appropriate question type for the type of information you want to collect.  Quiz Questions Galore  Of the 11 different question types, 7 of them can be set to automatically check the responses, making them ideal for creating self marking quizzes.   This...

So many times in schools I've heard people defend their choice of software for students by trotting out the old "industry standard" argument. They reason that schools should have their students using certain pieces of software because "it's what the industry uses". Aside from the fact that most of the people making these claims are often career teachers who have never worked in an industry outside of education, they often also neglect to condider that not all industries are the same. There is often a bizarre kind of expectation that all students will end up working in the finance/legal world of a bank or a lawyer's office, or in a narrowly defined "creative industry", both places where, yes it's true, you will sometimes find an incumbent piece of software that has been in use there since God was a boy. If I may tell a couple of stories to make a point… Story 1 When I was still teaching (computing subjects) one of the tasks I would get my ...

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are driving a ton of innovation in computing at the moment. AI is showing up in nearly every major technology, and seem to give our machines the impression that they are almost human, almost intelligent. But remember it's called Artificial Intelligence for a reason - it's artificial. While these technologies might seem mysterious and scary, they are like most things in technology - easy to understand if you have a basic idea of what's going on. This video aims to unpack the core idea behind Machine Learning - that if we can provide a machine with enough examples of something then it will eventually be able to recognise and draw conclusions for itself. Links to things mentioned in this video Quick, Draw! AutoDraw Teachable Machine Google's AI Experiments Have fun exploring! If you end up making your own experiments in the Teachable Machine, please leave a link in the comments below!

I was cleaning out a drawer in my home office this morning and found this collection of old USB memory sticks dating back quite a few years. Remember those days when you thought you were so cool because you had this little storage drive full of all your stuff in your pocket? I recall working in a school back in those days where we actually mandated that every student had to have a "USB"*, such was the apparent importance of these things. The intention was for students to keep their personal data safe and secure, but we used to constantly find them left behind in the USB ports of the classroom computers after a lesson. Or they would sometimes mysteriously just stop working. Or the kids would lose them. USBs may have been cool, portable and handy, but they were about the most insecure method for managing data I can think of. *(Side note: Calling them simply a "USB" seems stupid to me, because USB - or Universal Serial Bus - is a data interface standard, not a name fo...

It seems that yesterday's post where I listed some of my favourite extensions was quite well received, as I had a number of people contact me to say they found it useful. So I thought I'd add a Part 2 list with a few more. Remember, there are literally thousands of amazing extensions available in the Chrome Webstore, so do take the time to have a browse. In the meantime, here are a few more, again in no particular order... PixelBlock - Sending an email which includes a graphic is a technique that some companies use to track whether you open their email or not. Sometimes they do this sneaky thing where they hide an invisible single pixel in an email - you can't see it, but it helps them track you. PixelBlock does exactly what it says, and blocks that invisible pixel. Google Calendar - Gives you a nice glanceable preview of your Google Calendar, from any webpage, without needing to open your actual Google Calendar. But if you do want to open your actual Google Calendar, ...

One of the nice things about Chrome is how easily it can be enhanced with powerful and useful extensions. Extensions give the Chrome browser additional "superpowers" that it doesn't have by default, giving you the ability to add some really useful extra features to Chrome to suit the way you use your computer. Here are some of my favourite extensions, in no particular order... Extensity  - The one extension to rule them all, Extensity is an extension manager that gives you the ability to easily enable or disable your extensions. I find myself installing far more extensions than I really need to use at any one time, so I like to turn off any that I don't need to use right now. It's as easy as clicking on their name. Extensity also has a "master switch" to turn them all off, which is handy for those few times when you might need to troubleshoot some rogue extension that could be causing trouble. Text Blaze  - A amazingly useful text expander that can take ...