Chris Betcher

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 ha...

 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...

Last November Google announced that it was making its Gemini chat app available to students aged 13+. This means that while it's still not for use by primary age students, it is, generally speaking, available to most high school students. It's worth pointing out that what users aged between 13 and 18 will get when using Gemini is different to what 18+, or adult, users will see. Google refers to this as the Gemini Teen Experience . I had a few questions about how to configure this in the Google Admin Console, but after a bit of playing around, I finally worked it out so thought I'd share it here for anyone else who might be trying to configure it. The question I had was "how does Gemini know who is over 18 and who is over 13, and how does it deliver a different experience to them?" I was assuming that admins would need to somehow identify the 13+ year olds and put them into a special group or something. Turns out it's simpler than that. Before th...

 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...