Chris Betcher

When I started writing this blog in 2006, I was living in Canada on a teaching exchange.  It was a big year for the social web, with blogs, podcasts and the birth of the Web2.0 really hitting the mainstream of public consciousness that year, and it was good to be in the North American time zone to be fully immersed in the revolution that was unfolding.  I'd dabbled with blogs a little in 2005 when I was encouraging some of my students to use a blog as a diary to document some of their Year 12 major works. But this actual blog you're reading now was born on August 26, 2006, partly as a way for me to jump into the idea of blogging to explore what it was all about, and partly to start documenting my own thoughts and ideas. During the first few years I blogged a lot, about all kinds of random stuff.  But gradually I started to find my voice, a voice that felt authentic. My posts became more focused on things that mattered to me both personally and professionally. I learned to...

Hi Duo, I recently cancelled my 7 day trial of a Super Duo family plan. I received your follow up email inviting questions or comments, so here we are... I've been using Duolingo for quite a while now (my streak is a little over 2500 days) and I certainly understand that it's a good app that can potentially help one learn the basics of a language. Using Duolingo I learnt Esperanto to a point of being able to read it reasonably well, although I still struggle to use it in any sort of real conversational way (I also joined the Australian Esperanto Federation, so that helped a bit). I've also dabbled with Portuguese, Japanese and Italian, enough to have some of the basics down for travelling, although I'm far from being able to talk in these languages enough to have a conversation. While I like Duo, and find it useful for the basics, I can't see it ever being enough to make one conversational in a language without additional outside support. When I started using Duo se...

I've always been a big fan of Google Workspace, right from the beginning.  I like the way it works, the way it's cloud-based, accessible from anywhere, and collaborative so that files can be shared with others. I think Google has done a great job of building a set of tools that are accessible, easy to use, full featured and that just works as you would expect.  Starting with Google Docs (back when they bought Writely) and expanding the suite over the years with a presentation tool (Slides), a spreadsheet (Sheets), a website builder (Sites), and so on, the whole suite of tools has came to have everything you'd expect. Unless you expected a video editor. That was always the missing part of the puzzle for me. I remember years ago I got a call from a friend at Google asking if I'd like to do a Chromebook pilot at my school. We were a heavily Workspace school, but our computing devices were all Windows machines, so we would have been a great candidate for Chromebooks.  My fi...

Google released updates to their existing tools all the time, but it is not often that Google releases a brand new tool.  However, they just did that with Class Tools. Built specifically for educators and schools, Class Tools provides a simple way for teachers to manage workflow, hand work to their students, and maintain some degree of control over how the students interact with that work. It's no surprise that keeping (some) students on task can be challenging, and Class Tools aims to meet this need with a Focus Mode that locks students into only those things that the teacher has asked them to work on.  The teacher selects the students, or groups of students, selects the work they want done, and then pushes that to student devices for a specified period of time. Let's just talk about the devices aspect.  One of the requirements for Class Tools is that both teachers and students need to be on a managed Chromebook, that is, a Chromebook enrolled into the school domain. Fo...

I've had a Wordpress blog for well over 10 years, hosted by GoDaddy, and managed by me. It's been great, and I've enjoyed the opportunity to become familiar with Wordpress. It's a great platform. But it's also not cheap. Although Wordpress is open source software, you still need to host it somewhere, so that usually means taking up a hosting plan with a commercial hosting provider. I've paid GoDaddy to keep this blog up for well over a decade now, and have gladly just worn the cost. However, it's always been tempting to move everything across to Blogger, this free blogging platform from Google. I know that there's a degree of risk in doing that, given how many of Google's products end up in the Google Graveyard , but I feel that Blogger still has a lot of life in it, and don't really think it's going away anytime soon. Wordpress is definitely a more permanent and safer option, although the trade-off is that it's expensive. However, I had...

 A short while back I was asked to speak at an event about ways that we can prepare students for the future of work. I was still working at Google at the time, and I thought there was an angle to the question about preparing students for the future of work that is sometimes overlooked. Here was my response... I need to start by pointing out that there have been two systems that have influenced my own perspective on the future of work, and the education system is only one of them. The other one has been in “the workplace”, or the enterprise, or business, or whatever you want to call it, in the work I’ve done outside of schools for the last decade or so. I think it’s worth calling this out because as much as schools like to prepare students for “the future of work”, schools are also filled with people who often have only experienced what work looks like inside a school .  I think I can say that what work looks like inside a school and outside a school can look very differe...

 When Web 2.0 and the explosion of the social web happened back in 2006, I was all in on it. I signed up for everything I could try, out of an excited curiosity and a hopeful expectation that the social web had the power to bring people together in ways that were previously impossible. I reasoned that the more we could connect, and the more we could build community with others regardless of where they were in the world, the better our world would be. And for many years, I passionately believed that was the case. Like so many others, my world expanded and I got to know many more people. Cynics would say people you meet online are not really "friends", but that was not my experience. I have many real friends as a result of online connections. I've gotten to know many people I first came into contact with thanks to the social web, and many of those in person. I've shared meals and drinks and travel and adventures with people that I met as a result of online connecti...

"What do you get with Google Workspace for Education Plus, and is it worth paying for?" It's a good question, especially since there is a totally free version of Workspace called Fundamentals which any school can use at no cost. So it's not surprising that schools would want to know exactly what comes with the Plus edition in order to decide whether it's worth paying for the upgrade. Google does provide a comparison page that lists out what you get in each of their Workspace for Education editions , but I find it leaves out many of the finer details. Details that I think makes a difference, so in this post I am going to run through all the additional stuff you get in Workspace Plus, so you can decide if it's worth it for your school. (Spoiler alert, I think it probably is!) This post is a follow-on from my previous one about the history of Google Workspace , and how we got here. I think it's useful to set the stage for what you're about it r...

Lots of educators use Google Workspace at their school, but many are unaware that Workspace comes in three different editions, each with a slightly (or substantially) different set of features. The three editions are Fundamentals , Standard and Plus . In a future post I want to unpack the additional features in the Plus edition of Workspace and explain what you get for your money that's additional to the other editions. Before we go there though, let's have a quick history lesson to put this all into perspective. Google began providing cloud based software to users way back in 2004 with the release of Gmail. Two years later in 2006, they added a calendar and a beta version of an online word processor based on the acquisition of Writely, and which came to be known as Google Docs. They also added Google Spreadsheets (which would become simply Sheets) and Google Docs Presentations (which would become Google Slides) in 2006, and gradually kept adding tools to the suite. Thes...

I just made the final post I'll ever make on Facebook. I'm ready to close the door on Zuckerberg and his cronies once and for all. I've also downloaded all of my content from Facebook, everything I've ever put there. The process is easy (although not exactly obvious) and you get all your historical content in a self contained html package that can be browsed offline. I've been reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Willams , the book that Meta tried to ban , where she lays out an insider's story of the incredible hypocrisy, lies, immorality, lack of ethics, and general cluelessness that Zuckerberg, Sandberg, Kaplan, et al have inflicted on the world. I highly recommend the book. So many examples of unethical, greedy and self-interested behaviour by the billionaire class, people for whom enough is never enough.  I have never been a big user of Facebook, because I've never really trusted the people behind it. But Wynn-Willams' revelations about the inner w...