Chris Betcher

 Here's a fun little story about some scammy stuff that just happened to me on LinkedIn. I'm currently looking around for either a new role or just some more work opportunities for next year, so I made a post on LinkedIn to say so. Within moments of making that post I received a number of responses from people, mostly recruiters and HR folk. Most of them just hit Like on my post, but one in particular, a young lady named Diamond Alex, reached out to me. According to her LinkedIn profile, this young recruitment specialist was based in Atlanta Georgia. She suggested she might have some opportunities for me and asked that I send my resumé. I did so, and she got back to me very quickly after looking at it. She responded by telling me that my resumé could be improved (something I completely agree with) and that it should be ATS compliant ( Applicant Tracking System , a standard that makes your resumé work better with most HR databases.) So that all sounded very sensible to me....

Back in 2006, when the world was being inundated with a flood of new social and web 2.0 tools, I signed up for a brand new thing called Twitter. It was an interesting, although somewhat bizarre idea: write short text blasts of up to 120 characters, telling the world (or whoever might read it) what you were doing. At the time, Twitter gathered its fair share of ridicule for the inanity of the idea. Critics would claim that nobody needed to know what you were eating for breakfast, or really, to know anything about what you were doing at all. In those early days, Twitter was mostly filled with geeks and tech bros, posting about all kinds of vacuous stuff. Most people I know, including myself, joined Twitter (user number 779,452), didn’t really get it, then left. Like many others, I eventually came back. In those exciting early days, there was no ability to reply to a tweet. There were no images in tweets. There was no search function to find a tweet. Of course that changed over time, and ...

30 years ago, I lost my dad. He was at home with mum after a long day at work, when someone came to the front door and shot him. Just like that. He died several hours later in St George hospital from blood loss due to ballistic trauma. It was an agonising experience for our whole family. We all eventually came to terms with what happened, although I think we all dealt with it in very different ways. Dad was a completely innocent victim in what turned out to be a ghastly case of mistaken identity. To cut a very long story, a hitman by the name of Paul Thomas Crofts had been paid to shoot a underworld gangland figure named Danny Karam , as a warning for some shady stuff he was doing. Of course, there is a whole story behind it and how it came to happen, and the investigations into his murder went on for several years through several court cases and mistrials, but in the end the investigations exposed some pretty big time drug and crime syndicates that were operating around Kings Cross. O...

 I had the opportunity to travel to Pakistan for a second time, this time to deliver the Keynote address at the Schools of Tomorrow conference in Islamabad, hosted by the Beaconhouse Schools group.  The conference had a big focus on the use of AI in education. As well as giving the Keynote, I also had the opportunity to sit down with Umar Farooq, the CEO of local Google partner Tech Valley and interview him about some of the great things that Tech Valley are making happen in Pakistan. Hope you enjoy the conversation. Please leave a comment below if there are specific things that resonate with you!

Over the past couple of weeks, I had the great privilege of visiting Pakistan, and working with over 120 teachers across Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. Like a number of other countries across the Asia Pacific region, Pakistan is making changes to their education systems, with an increasing move to educational digitisation happening in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic. Schools that were thrown suddenly into using digital tools are now starting to rethink what this all means for education moving forward. Google is playing a significant role in this shift too, with Chromebooks and Workspace forming an important part of this new digital landscape, and working closely with Pakistan and other frontier markets across the region. After flying into Islamabad via an extended 21 hour stopover in Doha, Qatar, I arrived at the first training venue to meet almost 40 enthusiastic teachers from the Beaconhouse Schools system. I was really impressed not only with their existing knowledge of Workspa...

If you don’t teach in Australia, it may surprise you to learn that we have specific fonts that must be used in early years and primary education. These fonts are mandated by each state and are a requirement for schools to use when creating resources for young students. The fonts are used when teaching handwriting to young students. If you ARE an Australian teacher, particularly for the early years students from grades K to 3, but in primary school generally, you know that having access to these fonts is kind of a big deal. You are expected to use these fonts to make resources for students, such as worksheets and activities, so being able to install them on your computer is important. For a very long time now, it’s been a bit of an issue that these mandated fonts have not been available in Google Docs. I don’t think I’ve ever run training for teachers where the question about Foundation Fonts in Docs has not been asked. It’s just one of those inevitable questions that comes up every sin...

16 years ago I started a podcast. It was an exciting time for educational technology. For those with long memories, you might recall that there was a huge shift taking place at the time in the way we use the internet, called Web 2.0. For those who were paying attention, this shift changed almost everything about the way we understood the web. It went from a one-way, information consumption experience to being a two-way, participatory experience that spawned a huge wave of ordinary people who were suddenly able to easily produce and publish their own content to the web. Around this time the world discovered blogs, wikis, podcasts, and all manner of innovative web tools designed to help anyone find their voice and connect with an audience. I was curious to play in this new sandpit. Like many others, I started a blog, set up a wiki, signed up for every exciting new service that came along, like YouTube, Twitter and MySpace, and began to explore what this Web 2.0 shift was about, and as a ...

As anyone who knows me will attest I spend a lot of time in Google’s productivity suite, Google Workspace. I have used Workspace (previously G Suite, previously Google Apps for Education) for a long time now. In fact I was even an early user of Writely, the online collaborative writing tool that Google acquired back in 2006 that formed the basis of what later became Google Docs . I currently use Docs on an almost daily basis and have used it as my primary word processing tool for well over 10 years. However, prior to spending a lot of time living in Google land, I did (probably much like everyone else on the planet) use Microsoft Word a lot. As personal computers became a thing in the 90s, Microsoft’s Word and Corel’s Wordperfect battled it out for supremacy, with Word eventually emerging as the closest thing to a “standard” in the world of word processing. Back then I spent a lot of time in Word, and I think I could claim to be fairly proficient with it. Of course there are many word ...

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...