Search: Chris Betcher

The thing I love most about hearing Chris Betcher speak is they way he constantly teaches me more about things I thought I already knew.  Chris has already posted some incredibly helpful links on the ISB Wiki so I’m just sharing the link to the wiki rather than reposting all his links.  You’ll find the links here: (Just scroll down past Chris’s mugshot)

In just few short minutes Chris has just taught the entire room some very useful tips for searching “smarter” with Google, how to use basic search syntax and Google Advance Search.

Chris’s session was extremely interactive – he had us all searching and learning in a fun way.  The Google quiz was great – I like the fact that you needed to apply your search techniques – great for doing with our students – and the last question was excellent because it required a deeper level of thinking/synthesizing – kinda like Blooms Taxonomy thinking.

I especially enjoyed the Spaghetti growing on Trees Video and the link to the Tree Octopus website bought back memories of my entire Year 7 class a couple of years ago being completely fooled by this site when we were learning about the validity of websites and information on the internet and how do you know.

Even more informative was the discussion we had about Wikipedia.  In just a few minutes (again) Chris was able to explain the ins and outs of Wikipedia’s questionable validity and truthfulness in such a way that the majority of us could go back and explain the exact same thing to our students.

This session was fabulous practical session and I am so grateful to have been reminded about the Google for Educators website (bookmarked in my delicious account but certainly not looked at closely).  Even better are the resources we now have on our ISB Cert. Ed. Tech. & Informational Literacy wiki, (COETAIL.Asia) available at our fingertips (and we’ve experienced them) to help us teach ourselves and our students what’s real and how do you know and how can you find out and can you tell the difference?

Thanks Chris – great way to spend the afternoon and thanks so much for sharing your expertise with us.  Hope Kim and Jeff ask you back for another session!