K12 Online

Now, I haven’t the faintest what’s going on here – but I do know that as an educatee (if that’s a word) I have having a lot of fun speaking to educators all over the world waiting for the keynote of K12 online to load. Some people in the live chat are already posting comments and quotes from David Warlick’s speech. Excuse this for being a very short post, but I’m going to go chat with educators all over the world, from Bangkok to Starbucks in New York – about how they can make my school career better for me and my teachers – before I watch this video (download already!).

And P.S. – Remember when I mentioned that Arthus had given me r.ompo.us? I’ll be switching over there very soon – no matter what it looks like. Just don’t go there now, it’s got posts that are starting to reek they’re so old (they still taste good though!).

Tip II

With no further ado (you’ve waited too long already):

Tip II:

Don’t get behind.

Now, this may just be the most important of all the tips. It’s hard to do, what with remembering everything, from homework to friends to relationships to even blogging, but if you can stay on top of the slowly accumulating mountain of things to remember you will be pretty well off. Even if you don’t get that project done on time at least you remembered it, which brings me to an apology. I have not been blogging. It’s a fact. Also a fact, however, is that I have a lot of stuff to remember and sometimes “superfluous” things like blogging get pushed to the bottom, therefor while trying to keep up with schoolwork lately I have been putting off blogging a lot, sorry.

Back to the point, when you get “under the mountain” (to use a betaphor), it takes a lot to get back on top. This strategy works for pretty much everything in life, when you have a lot to do. All you have to do to succeed is stay organized and things just fall into place.

Other than that, how about a nice surprise? I now have my own domain! Visit r.ompo.us (no, I don’t believe rompous is a word (Firefox spellcheck just confirmed that…) but it’s only a test) for my new testing domain. This is (hopefully) only a step between Betaphor at wordpress and Betaphor at “be.jeez.us”, a domain I have recently developed a longing for. Just betaphor.com would be pretty boring, don’t you think? And besides, I like domain hacks. Any other suggestions? Just comment.

Learning for the Future

In preparing students for the twenty-first century we need to educate them in certain ways. Skills in certain areas will be necessary because of recent advances in technology, for example, the human race will need to accept that computers and robots may do our jobs better than we do. In other words we must learn humility. Other skills will become the norm as well, for example it will be necessary in day-to-day life to have basic programming skills in all the major languages, we will also need to be able to service the hardware side of things too.

I believe this video is the newest version, correct me if I’m wrong. It was originally made by Karl Fisch (see his blog at The Fischbowl) for a presentation on how his high school should be teaching kids. It has been remade so many times it’s not even worth mentioning who else helped.

I’ve always loved this kind of video – words that shock you along with some quiet music. This goes along with someone talking made into animations, such as Alan Watt’s videos. This was actually assigned to be watched, which is progress in our school system, however it was also assigned that we fill out a sheet and analyze the video, which totally ruined all the progress. The writing in the top paragraph is actually one answer of what I’m handing in! Even this is a connection to the video. If the right steps are made soon all classes will be on computers, and, even further along, blogs, which is why I like including my homework into something I consider fun.

This video makes me think. If a laptop available in 2049 will surpass the combined technological power of the human race put together, than what are we left to do? As much as anybody I wouldn’t like an “I, Robot” situation however this may be for the better. I choose to see these advances as an opportunity; with all the “menial” (think open heart surgery) jobs out of the way our kind will have all the time we need to express ourselves in ways we can’t program computers to; such as the arts. Think about it.

Tip II coming soon.

Tip I

Alright, I was a bit tired when I wrote my last post, so I failed to reveal that I was to include tips about school life. And thus, tired again, I will do my best to write the first.

Tip I:

Don’t be too prepared.

Having recently spent a day at Walmart (among other places, thank god), I should know that preparing is hard. It can be a bit fun, fighting the crowds, sifting through the piles of stuff, squeezing into tight places to let that obnoxious person past to the checkout lane… But enough is too much. Get in, get out, and try to do it early. Later they may give you back to school prices, but they will wear you and your patience out very quickly.

After the ride home look at your items. Consider how much stuff you have. You’re not going to want more than one binder per class, so if you have too many discard or save them. Notebooks are essential for some classes but not others, find out from your teacher or maybe a friend. Pencils and maybe pens are obviously a must, but erasers are usually not necessary, the pencil ones will suffice. Your teacher may have recommended a calculator, even if this is not a requirement it is a very good idea for math classes. I suggest the TI-84, be it plus, silver, plus silver edition, or something else I have not yet heard of, it works very well for anything up to and even past college and the investment might as well be made now. Other than that accessories such as post-its and pencil sharpeners are surplus and not recommended by me, because they become clutter.

These are my main recommendations for materials for the beginning of the school year. I will take no responsibility if anyone gets in trouble their first day because of these, I am not forcing you to use these guidelines, merely suggesting. It’s rather ironic that as I type I am in my first day of high school, right before lunch, but this underlines my point that I do have experience and so am not a total dimwit when it comes to school preparation. It’s debateable as to whether this applies to blogging, but anyway… Try to enjoy or at least get through without mishap your first day at school.

School Special

After a very relaxing vacation, in which I went to many beaches and gamed a lot, I have come back with this post. Please get extremely irate at my sister who DELETED ALL THE PICTURES. What an idiot. Ah well, on to the meat of the post.

“Oh noes!” as some of my friends met online would cry. As the school year draws closer and closer we as kids have become more and more agitated, and I and my friends have even more reason to be so because we are incoming freshmen at Champlain Valley High School. I find it ironic that as soon as I begin to write this sentence the opening notes of the song “School’s Out” by Alice Cooper start to play. Despite my growing dread, I find the concept of high school fascinating. Though my freshman year will be packed; I have been taking and will take Band and Spanish; I cannot help but see the possibilities in taking classes such as “Design Tech” and other languages, maybe even Latin. Anyway, to act as a diary (so I can see how stupid, immature, and naïve I was), and also just to give any middle school readers a chill (not that there are any (*sigh*), but feel free to prove me wrong! ) , I will be writing a weekly series on how life in high school is. This will be loosely regimented and not at all posted every week exactly; for example I may post next Tuesday (the first day) then post on Monday the next week, or perhaps Friday. Hopefully this will not be too boring.

By the way, thanks to Arthus for the idea.

Son of Patchpelt, Part Three

Reminiscent of Raven

A glittering black
reminiscent of raven
as if a flash of wings
fluttering by, blacker than night
blacker than blackest, it takes away your fear
your hunger
your desire
curiosity wells: in the tranquil gardens of your mind
a sprinkling of dew wets the green green grass
inexplicably falling to unmapped distances

Potion

Deathly cauldron
simmering whilst the witch chants
over her potion
it will not cure warts
nor a broken heart
and it doesn’t particularly seem to do anything
so the witch is disappointed
but she trudges on
through the fields of knowledge
picking a flower, once in a while
for the love of life she tries and tries again
until her ingredients, and soul, are spent.

Raindrop

The illusion of mist
a shimmering blue
walking along
staying true
to the laws of nature
that govern all
yet impossibly
the rain does not fall
touch a drop
it will implode
it’s life spent
death to you owed

Patchpelt cont.

Still gathering words and phrases…

Please comment with some of your favorite ones.

A short snippet I noticed:

The Estonian man who was caught driving a car even though he is blind has been at it again, police said on Monday, and this time he faces jail.

Remember? Oddly Enough?

Patchpelt Poetry

Have you ever looked at random words and put them together in a sentence? Have you ever rearranged those sets of fridge magnets to make funny sentences? Well, recently at CVU Summer Camp, I saw the last bit of a poetry class happening and was very interested. Each of the students in the class, Arthus included, had written at least 5 random poetic phrases and drawn them on the white board.

Now, this reminded me of how I write. I am an okay writer but this is only because I memorize phrases I find interesting; for example, in the book I was reading recently, Spare Change, I found a phrase I liked: “…so recently out of law school they smelled like diploma ink.” This phrase is one of many I find interesting, along with many words, such as quagmire (from Eragon), blunderbuss, and Nebakanezer.

The whole point of this: I will be doing some poetry created from random words and phrases I see wherever I go. How this will turn out, I don’t know, but hopefully it will go well.

If you feel like it, comment with some of your favorite words and or phrases.

To be continued…

나는 한국어를 말하지 않는다

Meaning, of course, “I don’t speak Korean.” How could you not know that? Because you don’t have Babelizer!

The reasons for this post:

1. Arthus has recently gone through a phase of “Mind Map Madness” in which he tested some mind-mapping programs (think Inspiration).
2. I have been learning (at HCS, wow!) Spanish for at least 3 years now, and have become very interested in other languages. Of course before you learn any language you want to know how to say one thing: “I do not speak [insert language]” in that language. Recently, I have been trying to learn it in french, and not succeeding.

Thus, I have also narrowed my search down to two candidates, iParrot, and Babelizer. First, some background info.

Babelizer is a small (944 KB), neat (less than 400×900 pixels), and smart (translation in under 2 seconds) application. The simplicity of the program itself is the key, there are only two menu items and only two drop-down menus in the actual application. You choose to and from languages from the menus, type your text in the top field, and watch it come out below. Simple, fast, and efficient. What more could the nerd want?

iParrot, however, is unfortunately, one, not free, not accessible. Even the demo version required the very latest version of iTunes, 8 GB of space on your hard drive, and while this may not be so bad for just an installer, it also requires 60 GB of space on your iPod, and, of course, an iPod.

There are always web apps to do this, but which one has features like Babelizer? Needless to say, especially since I only have about one GB on my iPod at the moment, and tops 4 GB, I chose Babelizer.

Tan si usted desea entender esto, obtiene Babelizer.

Bind Your Ideas

I while ago I had a Spanish project to do, the goal being making a “fotonovela,” a picturebook. I was getting frustrated having to use Appleworks, Word, Google Documents, et cetera… So I found Booksmart. Booksmart is a wonderful little application, for Macs and Windows, which tastefully walks anyone, from the smallest toddler to the oldest grandparent through the process of creating a book. You can make books on anything you could possibly imagine, and then some. There’s a feature in Booksmart that allows you to “slurp” your blog into a book (supports: Blogger, LiveJournal.com, TypePad, and WordPress.com blogs). And on top of it all is a delicious interface. Unfortunately, I found that Booksmart was not right for me, the problem and the one downside of the program being that the project was due in a couple days and the books take time and money to publish, but Booksmart can still help you.