"Look, we just need you all to know that we do NOT trust you.  We've talked about it, and we think that given the opportunity, you will all get up to no good and make poor decisions.  Because of this, we plan to closely monitor your every move and to make sure that you don't get away with anything, ever. We plan to prevent you from doing common tasks that are probably perfectly fine and safe.  However, since we are, after all, assuming that you won't be able to make your own good decisions about those things, we have taken the liberty of making those decisions for you.

Essentially, we think you are all a bunch of thieves, cheats and liars with no sense of morals or ethics, and you probably spend all your time looking at pornography anyway.  We have no intentions of assuming anything other than the worst... as I said, we really just don't trust you.

Thank you, that is all. You may now go to class."

Nah, we'd never do that to our kids, would we?

Now, here's your locked-down school-supplied laptop. Have a nice day.

Related posts:

1. A Policy of Trust and Respect
2. The Trust Gap
3. The Road Less Travelled

I'm one of your customers. I have my mobile phone service with you... the reception is reasonable, at least it seems to be better than most of the other Australian Telcos. You charge a little more for it, but hey, I've tried the others and I don't mind paying a little more for a service that actually works...

But, Telstra, can I tell you what really sucks?

I recently bought a new wifi+3G iPad. It should really be a 4G iPad, but apparently you and Apple can't agree on what the term 4G actually means. So ok, it's still just a 3G iPad, and I guess I can live with that. But I'd like to buy some 3G data from you so I can use my iPad when I'm not in wifi range.

Now, for me, that's not all that often. I'm in wifi at home, and in wifi at work. I could tether to my iPhone's 3G data when I'm out of wifi range (and I often do) but it would be a lot more convenient if I just had a 3G SIM in the iPad itself. So I want to buy an iPad 3G data service from you. I don't think I'll need much, probably no more than a few hundred MBs each month to be honest. Some months may be way less - possibly even no data at all - and other months might be heavier usage. I don't know for sure.

I'd LIKE to be able to buy a decent chunk of data from you - maybe a few GBs - and just use it till it runs out. After all, if I pay you for it, I should be able to use it till it's gone, right?

Apparently you don't see it that way. You let me buy data from you, and then after 30 days you just let whatever is still left over expire. Just like that. Gone. Don't you think that's a bit unfair? I mean, I bought that data. I paid for it. Why do you need to expire it at the end of 30 days? Why can't I just keep using it till it runs out?

When I asked the customer service rep on the phone why this was the case, the probably-accurate but rather-brazen answer was "Because we're a business and we need to make money". Bravo Telstra, nice way to put the customer first.

This policy that all of the Aussie telcos have of selling data to customers and then insisting it be used in a limited period of time is a rort. An absolute ripoff. In any other industry you wouldn't get away with it. Imagine if I filled my car with petrol and then didn't drive it much that week, but at the end of the week the remaining fuel in the tank just "expired" for no reason other than it was now the end of the week. Fair? I think not. And yet, that's what you do with my 3G data.

I'm not sure I understand the logic of why you feel the need to expire my unused data at the end of 30 days. If I'm using my iPad a lot that month, there's a good chance of me running out before the 30 days is up anyway, and I'll probably just buy more from you. Win-win.

And if I don't use all the data that month, then it hasn't really cost you anything anyway, since I've already paid you for data that is still sitting there, unused. Sure, I will use it eventually, even after the 30 days are up if you don't automatically expire it on me. Maybe I'll run out of that 3G data halfway through the next 30 day period, and then, guess what, I'll probably buy some more from you. And instead of being a resentful customer who hates you for ripping me off by just taking away something I've already paid you for, maybe I'll end up being a happy customer who loves you for being so fair minded.

Maybe I'd even tell my friends how wonderful you are because you treated me fairly and allowed me to use the data I bought from you in a timeframe that worked for my needs, not yours, and maybe when I do buy more data from you, I won't do it  begrudgingly, thinking of you as a pack of bastards who are just out to rip me off.

Or maybe if you created a policy of treating customers like me with enough respect to let me use what I've paid for when it runs out, not just at the end of some arbitrary 30 day period, you might just be surprised at how many other customers would be interested in being treated the same way. Maybe even those hard to find New Customers.

Right now, you are getting my money for two 3G data plans, one for my phone and one for my iPad. But, frankly, the iPad data is a bit of a ripoff. Not because it's a bad service or I don't want to use it, but because you seem to feel that it's ok to charge me for a product and then, if it is partly unused after 30 days, you feel it's ok to just take that unused part and make it vanish, even though I've paid for it.

You see Telstra, there's nothing fair about selling someone something and then just expiring whatever they haven't used at the end of 30 days. It sucks. You might be able to get my business, but you get it begrudgingly and you don't win me over as a customer. I may give you my business today, but as soon as an alternative comes along, I'm out of there because you've not done anything to earn my loyalty to your brand.

Eventually, when the resentment becomes bad enough, I'll decide that I really don't need 3G data on my iPad that much anyway, and just go back to tethering on my phone's data plan. And then you lose me completely as a customer for that second data plan. The irony is that if you just let customers buy data and use it till it's gone, you'd keep me. You'd have happier, more loyal customers, and probably more of them, who would gladly top up their data plan again and again because you'd be offering a service that works on their terms, not yours.

Have you ever stopped to consider how many potential customers you don't get because of this short-sighted approach to providing a 3G data product under fair and reasonable terms?

Here's a tip. Treat your customers with respect. You have a good product technically, but your customers don't love you. They endure you. They tolerate you. They stay with you because you are less worse than the other telcos. If you treated us with more respect by recognising that when we pay you for a product we deserve to be able to use that product until it's finished, you'd probably find a whole lot of new customers that you never knew existed and a whole lot of existing ones that felt far better about doing business with you.

Think about it.

Related posts:

1. The shocking cost of international data
2. Data Projectors for Dummies
3. Data Projectors for Dummies

Some background. On February 14 this year, I asked my beautiful partner Linda to marry me. She said yes. Yay! So we are planning a wedding. In fact we are planning two weddings, one in Canada and one in Australia. As you can imagine, there's a fair bit of expense involved in doing that.

Then a couple of weeks ago, Linda spotted a contest on Facebook where you submit a photo or short video, and get people to vote for you. As most of you know, I haven't always been very complimentary about my Facebook experiences, but just to support Linda I reactivated my dead account so I could cast a few votes.

Long story short, we've ended up doing ok in this contest, in fact for much of the last few weeks we were leading. Unfortunately, right now we are not leading, and have dropped back into third place. The people in number two spot will, I assume, get disqualified since they have submitted copyrighted material, so I'm not too worried about them. But the people in first place are on a real burn and are adding votes VERY quickly...

Normally, I'd just shrug it off and say it's all just a bit of fun. No reason to take it too seriously. But the first prize is $10,000. Yes $10,000! I probably don't need to tell you just how helpful that would be for making wedding plans!

So here's what I'm asking - partly because I'd obviously really like us to win, and partly because I'm really curious to see just how much a network of people like you guys might respond to a request like this.

Could you vote for us. Please. I look at it this way... we are trailing by about 1100 votes. According to Feedburner, this blog has about 1100 subscribers. If each of you voted just once we would be back in the race. If each of you voted twice, we would be hard to beat. If each of you voted just three times, we would be planning the wedding(s) that Linda deserves.

So what do you say? Would you vote for us? Please?

Here's the link... http://goo.gl/QRN3u

Yes, you need to be a Facebook user, and yes you need to Like the page temporarily to cast a vote. But it's easy and quick. And you can vote once each hour, as many times as you like. Just 2 or 3 votes from each of you would make a huge difference.

I'd REALLY be grateful. And I'd love to be able to tell this story about how, when I needed it, the network really delivered.

Thanks!

PS. I should mention the contest closes at midnight on Saturday March 31 (Sydney time). So if you want to help us out, just be aware that you've only got a short window of time to do it.

Related posts:

1. Name that Network

It started out with a simple tweet from my buddy Kim Sivick in Philadelphia.  It started a conversation that went something like this...

Do I know anyone who might make a quick Welcome to Australia video?

I sure do.

And besides, I owe Kim a favour. When I was running blogging workshops with our staff last year I was hoping to tap into the experiences of some very blog-savvy educators by getting them to Skype in and talk to our teachers about the realities and the practicalities of using blogs in the classroom. When I asked for volunteers on Twitter (where else?) Kim Sivick  was one of those who generously responded and agreed to spend time talking with us to share her expertise.

I also got to meet Kim in person at ISTE in Philadelphia last year too, so it was nice to "close the loop" on our virtual meetups.

Kim's idea was deceptively simple. Get our kids to make a short video about a virtual trip to Australia, and in return her classes would make a video about a virtual trip to Philly for us.

With virtually zero planning, I dropped into one of our Year 2 classrooms and asked the teacher there, Lisa, if her kids would like to make a video for these students in Philly and she jumped at the chance. In no time, Lisa and I had a bit of  a brainstorm on what sorts of things we might do, and she started working with the kids to write a script using GoogleDocs. The script gradually evolved and took shape over the next few days.

I'd been wanting to do some work with chromakeying, or greenscreening for a while, but had just never gotten around to it. It wasn't something I'd done before, but I suggested to Lisa that if we shot the video of the kids in front of a greenscreen, then it might be fun later to try and drop in the images of various parts of Australia as backgrounds. She thought that sounded pretty cool, so I went to our IT Director and asked if I could buy an inexpensive greenscreen kit. It was one of those things we'd talked about buying for a while, but never quite got around to it. With a reason to need it now, we went online and ordered it on the spot.

When it eventually arrived we set up a date for the shoot. The classroom was transformed into a studio for the morning with lights, camera, and plenty of action. I used iPrompt Pro on my iPad to transfer the script, and then held it up just under the camera lens as a  scrolling teleprompter so the kids could read the script as naturally as possible. We shot it on a Sony HiDef camcorder at 1080i/50. It took a few takes to get things right, but the kids really worked hard to do it was well as possible. Being able to repeat a section over and over in order to get it right was a valuable part of the learning experience.  When it came time to shoot, we all had fun calling out things like "Quiet on the set!" and "Rolling!"  and "Action!", and running things just like a real movie set. I think the kids had a lot of fun recording it.

I took the footage back to my desk and dumped it all onto my MacBook Pro to ponder out the best way to edit it.  Although I definitely do want to get the kids doing more video work themselves, getting them to edit the footage was not really the learning goal for this particular exercise... it was all about their performance for the camera. After some experiments with iMovie I eventually decided that I'd cut it together with Premiere Pro instead. Premiere Pro was certainly not a program that I knew well, but this seemed like a great chance to get cosy with it. I'm glad I did... it's a very impressive NLVE tool and I like it a lot more than Final Cut Pro 7.

I always try to make sure we set a good example for students regarding copyright, so it was important that all the background images were available under a Creative Commons licence. I think it's really important that we demonstrate to our students that you can actually make worthwhile digital media without continually breaking copyright law. All the background images are CC licensed, as are the two pieces of music that I included, both from jamendo.com. The two videos were not released under CC, but using their YouTube contact address I wrote to the owners of both and both were more than happy for us to use their clip. One even offered to send us the hi-def footage! Most people are pretty generous if you just ask. Remember, Copyright doesn't mean "you can't use it", it just means "you can't use it without permission", so if it's not CC, then do the right thing and get permission! It's just not that hard. (Publishing works under a Creative Commons license makes it much easier of course because it's essentially an "up-front" permission which is pre-granted as long as you stick to the uses stipulated by the copyright owner)

After a couple of days of editing over the weekend, I did the final render to a 720p .m4v file and uploaded it to YouTube as a private link so the Philly kids (and our kids) could see it the next day.  Here's the finished product...

Click here to view the embedded video.

It always nice to ceremonialise things that are a bit special, so we set a date for a premiere screening and invited all the Year 2 mums and dads in to watch. When the Year 1 Philadelphia kids watched it, they all wore Aussie bush hats and set up their classroom like the inside of a plane to watch the video.  We had our screening this morning and the movie played to a packed classroom of excited Year 2 students and their parents. Proud parents. Excited kids. Performing for a real audience. Making opportunities to create and practice and iterate. Immediate feedback. And lots of fun and laughs. An authentic learning experience?  You better believe it..

Kim tells me that her kids are working on the sequel for us, showing us their virtual trip to Philadelphia, so we are looking forward to that.

Lisa, our Year 2 teacher, now keeps asking me when we can do our next global project, and is coming up with lots of cool ideas for how it will fit into next terms syllabus.

Overall, I think I'd consider this whole thing a win, wouldn't you.

Related posts:

1. Ideas for End of Year Slideshows
2. Year 3's First Voicethreads
3. Thoughts on the Sydney Motor Show

I often think that the conventional wisdom we give kids amounts to "go to school, get a good education, get a good job and work real hard", and it's something that has always bothered me. As adults, parents, and especially educators, we talk a lot to our older kids about the idea of "getting a job", and we prepare kids really well to be employees. We teach them at school how to write a job application letter, and how to prepare for an interview, and about the expectations that employers might have of them. We tell them to be careful about what information they put online about themselves because it may one day be Googled by a potential employer. We build a paradigm in kids' heads that we are preparing them to be outstanding employees. And whether we talk to our kids about having a job, or a career, or a vocation, so often it's still couched in the general idea that they will be working for someone else, operating on someone else's goals and priorities, relying on a paycheck from someone else. In most schools we manage to build "good employee" mentality really well.

What I think we don't do so well it to build entrepreneurial thinking. We often don't do a terribly good job of preparing kids to follow their dreams in any sort of independent, entrepreneurial way. We focus so heavily on teaching them to be good employees that we almost never teach them to be business owners. We teach them how to write a resumé, but not a business plan. We teach them how to sit for an interview but not how to create a start-up. I've never heard a careers adviser tell a kid to start their own company. Despite the fact that we educators talk a lot about developing "independent thinkers with a love of life long learning", it's quite amazing how well we train them to be compliant rule-followers that are good at fitting in to the expectations of the system.

For many students, the $20,000 it costs them to get a undergraduate degree would be better spent as startup capital in a venture that allowed them to follow their passions. But most of them never even consider that option... we do a pretty good job of educating that out of them.

I'd love to see kids leaving school with a greater understanding of the real options that lie before them and more of a sense that they should be following their dreams and their passions, and that doing that might not always mean further study or going to work for "the man".

PS: This post started out as a comment on a blog that my principal recently started writing. Pop over and take a look at the post that triggered this one at http://paulburgis.com/?p=54.  I thought I'd repost my comment here, but do check out Paul's original thread and help create some traffic over there. Ta!

Related posts:

1. Working around the System
2. Ways of Working
3. It's actually working…

After the move to Gmail and Docs however, these same keyboard shortcuts no longer worked, making the potential move to Google Docs seem like a bad idea for language teaching. "It's ridiculous that Google Docs can't do such basic things when it's so easy in Word and Outlook" was the general consensus.

Searching for a solution online revealed that we were not the only ones who were struggling with this issue. Lots of people were complaining about the poor diacritical mark support in Google Docs. "If Google Docs is ever to be a credible alternative to Office, they really need to fix this!"

After Googling around for a solution, the suggested workarounds were (in my opinion) unsatisfactory from a user perspective (and hence me taking the time to write this blog post... hopefully this might be helpful to someone else trying to solve the same problem). The suggestions were...

Technique 1: Use the Insert > Special Characters option in Docs. Not only is this method really messy and cumbersome, it doesn't solve the problem of typing a message in Gmail, where inserting special characters is not an option.  Not useful.

Technique 2: Use Alt Codes... basically you hold down the Alt key and type the 3 or 4 digit code for the character you want. Apart from being an extremely engineering focused solution rather than a user experience focused one, the Alt Codes only worked when using the numbers on the numeric keypad of a keyboard, and not when using the numbers from the top row of the keyboard. Given that almost our entire school userbase uses laptop computers, this would have involved typing Funtion+NumLock to turn the numeric keypad on, then holding down Alt while typing the 3 or 4 digit code, then typing Function + NumLock again to turn the regular keyboard back on.  That's 8 or 9 keystrokes to type a single character! Hardly an elegant solution.

Both of these "solutions" were unacceptable to me.  I could not seriously expect a user to go to all this hassle just to type a single character, and in any piece of French text there were likely to be many of these characters needed.  The fact that Google Docs was so crippled in this regard was very annoying.

Then I tweeted about it, asking if anyone had a solution to the problem of typing these diacritical marks. Alex Guenther replied to say that it worked fine and it was really easy on a Mac, just type Option + the letter. I tried it on a nearby Mac and yes, of course it worked... right there in my open Google Doc!

Hang on... if the Mac can type these characters into the Google Doc, then it can't be a problem with Google Docs. The problem has to be with the way the text input to Google Docs is being implemented within Windows itself.  As it turns out, the fact that we used to be able to use Windows keyboard shortcuts for these characters in Office applications, but now not in GoogleDocs, had nothing at all to do with the change to GoogleDocs... it seems that the Windows shortcuts won't work in ANY environment outside of Microsoft's own Office tools. The Mac, on the other hand, handles the text input for characters at the operating system level, not the application level... which is far more sensible.

Ah ha! The penny dropped... If that's the case, maybe we just need to get something like TextExpander, a neat tool for the Mac that allows you to create customised, system-wide keyboard shortcuts. Once you define your shortcuts you just type those few keys and the text expands out to reveal the full version of the text... so, for example, a shortcut such as "ilu" could be defined to expand out as "I love you", and be implemented at the system level and therefore work using ANY application on the computer.

Something like that might solve the problem... if we could have a system-wide keyboard shortcut that took a set of simple user-defined keystrokes like a` and converted them to à, would solve the problem nicely.  Unfortunately, TextExpander is only for the Mac.

A quick search using [windows equivalent of textexpander] turned up this article from LifeHacker which mentioned a Windows alternative called Texter. Even better, it is an  GPL licenced tool, so it's free! We installed it and after adding a whole collection of French keyboard shortcuts, it works a treat!   We can now open a Google Doc, or any other application, and the shortcuts work nicely.  They can be a wee bit laggy at times, but the important thing is they work!

So, if you're a Windows user who needs to enter French diacritical marks in Google Docs (or any other web application) the best solution seems to be to use a text expander style program to create customised keyboard shortcuts that work on the system level.

Here's the interesting kicker to this story... In my initial frustration of thinking this was a Google Docs problem, I sent off a support ticket to Google's eSupport team, complaining that not being able to enter accented characters into their software was a problem that needed to be addressed but thinking that, realistically, nothing would come of it. After all, this is Google right? The big faceless behemoth that worships the cult of the algorithm.

Over the next hour or so we worked out the solution using Texter mentioned above and realised that it was Windows that was the cuplrit, not Docs. But imagine my surprise when I got a call from Nicholas, a Francophone Google employee in Montreal Canada, who was calling me directly to help sort out our problem. We chatted for a while about the various options and I explained to him what we eventually did, but simply getting a call directly from the Big G was quite the surprise.

Sorry for blaming you Google Docs. ilu.

Related posts:

1. The Sydney Google Teacher Academy
2. Doodle 4 Google

Me:  Hey, have you ever thought about starting a class blog?  You can use it publish what happens in your classroom, put up all the cool things your class does, and share it all with the world. What do you think?

Them: Are you crazy? Why would anyone be even remotely interested in reading about what we do? And anyway, no one will ever see it... they probably wouldn't even be able to find it!

And then, eventually, they do start a class blog. And pretty soon the conversation changes to this...

Me: Hey, you should post up those photos of what your class did last week on your class blog. And what about that video you made with the kids? How about we post that on YouTube?

Them: Are you crazy? You want me to put that stuff with the kids online where everyone can get to it? It's way too dangerous! I don't want the whole world seeing it!

So which is it? When we post stuff online are we putting it somewhere where no one will ever find it, or are we putting it somewhere that the whole world can see it?

And which is worse?

Related posts:

1. Putting a Face to the Mind
2. 11 Things that make a Difference
3. Little Things that make Apple great

I believe that the biggest improvement we can make to our schools is to be fussier about who we allow to teach in them.

I look forward to the day where the teaching profession is non-unionised, and underperforming teachers who have lost the passion and spark that our students so deserve are able to be relieved of their duty.

I hope we find ways to identify those teachers who cannot teach, or have lost interest in doing it well, or who see what they do as a paycheck rather than a calling, and find ways to respectfully but firmly move them on, as they have no place in today's classrooms.

I want to be a part of a teaching profession where you need to reinvent yourself every year, where having interests and skills outside "the system" make you better at what you do, and where we don't confuse "20 years of experience" with "1 year of experience, repeated 20 times".

I want an educational system where students experience the joy of learning from teachers who are still themselves joyful about learning.

I want my own children to be taught by passionate, caring teachers who lose sleep at night wondering how to be better at what they do. And I want to be one of those teachers for other people's children.

I think we owe these things to the next generation.

No related posts.

During 2011, our school had the opportunity to apply for an AGQTP grant. This grant program is funded by the Australian government's DEEWR as part of the NSW Quality Teaching Program and, in the case of our school, administered by the AIS. Its goal is to help teachers develop their own professional learning through the creation of action research projects. Our principal asked me to put a proposal together, which turned out to be about creating a blogging project for our Year 6 teachers and students.  It was quite successful, and as well as a complete written report, we also produced this 7 minute video to summarise what we learned.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I remember tweeting about the fact that we were applying for a grant to get our teachers blogging, and getting a reply back from my kiwi mate Allanah King asking why on earth you'd need a grant for that. Allanah, who is not just a fabulous blogger herself but a real pioneer in the ways she has used blogs and other social technologies with her students, found it difficult to understand why blogging had to be a complicated and beaurocratic process. She quite rightly pointed out that you don't need a government grant to blog, you just need to open one of the many free blogging tools available and start writing!  And she is correct. But what the AGQTP grant process bought us was the time to do that. By providing the funding to get our Year 6 teachers released from class, we could set aside the time to learn this new skill in a far more focused and somewhat systematic and committed way. While it would be nice to think that teachers would just go and learn new skills in their own time for their own motivations, sometimes that just isn't realistic, so getting some financial assistance to help build teacher capacity was seen as a very welcome thing.

As a follow up, I was also interviewed about this by Selena Woodward from CEGSA in Adelaide after she saw the video. Selena was intrigued by the deliberately open and public nature of our blogging project, a feature that I was insistent was critically important to the project. Blogging behind closed doors, without the potential for writing to an authentic audience, seems completely pointless to me. The South Australian DECS attitude to blogging is somewhat less open-minded. Some people refer to this reluctance as "the Upton effect" because of the shitstorm that DECS created a few years ago when they very publicly  showed their cyber-ignorance by closing down teacher Al Upton's very popular class blog, the MiniLegends. The regrettable fallout from what happened to Al seems to have caused many South Australian teachers to be overly gun-shy of any online use that might be vaguely interpreted as "social".  It's such a shame.

Back in 2008, I had the pleasure of giving the keynote address at the CEGSA conference, where my topic focused on how important it is to be a connected educator, to form PLNs, to get both ourselves and our students connected and functioning safely in this highly networked world we live in. I blogged my thoughts about that keynote at the time, and looking back at that post now, and hearing that so many educators  are still just as wary and frightened of the online world as they were in 2008, makes me sad and disappointed for the kids in their care. It is disappointing that in the last 3 years, during which I believe we are finally starting to see far more educators beginning to understand the really significant shifts in the way technology is affecting the process of education, that there are still such outdated attitudes to learning online.

Overall though, I'm happy with the progress we made with our own blogging this year. It was progress. It wasn't perfect, and there is lots that I'd change next year, but it's a good start.

No related posts.

This wonderful little video, 'The Christmas Story' as told by the children of St Paul's Church, Auckland, New Zealand is a beautiful expression of the pure joy we all deserve to feel at Christmas time. Thanks to those who made it.

To all the subscribers, readers and friends of Betchablog, thanks for being part of my world. It means a great deal to me. As you gather with your families and friends, have a safe and happy Christmas season, and I'll see you in 2012!

Love, Chris

Related posts:

1. Getting into the Christmas Spirit
2. Merry Christmas