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!).

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 It was originally made by Karl Fisch (see his blog at The Fischbowl) for a presentation on how his high school should be teaching kids.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.

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.

Have you been dancing?

It’s not very surprising that I haven’t blogged recently, most of the time I blog when I have other things to do that I actually want to, and summer is full of things I want to do. However, I seem to have pulled myself together a bit to post a movie I recently saw:

I find it reflects a lot on my view of life; I find it very annoying when I know (to use that metaphor) that I can dance, but am unable to due to everybody around me, for example, my previous school system (HCS) was horrible and failed to meet my needs (a “larger dance floor”).

Keep dancing!

Alan Watts’ videos (yes there are more and they rock!)

Quizlet

What do you do when it’s 1:37 A.M. the morning of that big Spanish test and you don’t know any of the vocabulary?

You go to Quizlet of course!

Quizlet is the online version of flash cards created by Andrew Sutherland who…

started Quizlet in October 2005. I had just received a list of 111 French Animals to memorize from my magnanimous French teacher. I was puttering along with my dad with some call-and-response type quizzing. “Man, I love doing this” was NOT what I was thinking. So I put my thinking cap on, and the first line of code for Quizlet was written that night.

There you have it. I’ve tried it; it’s pretty fun for a homework help site.

From past experiences, I know that I shouldn’t try to go too in-depth on any subject; it hurts my brain and bores the hell out of most people. But try it for yourself and you’ll see what I mean when I say that Quizlet is the future in vocab memorization.

Some links:

• Brainflare, the company Andrew started to support Quizlet.
• A press release for Quizlet/Brainflare.
• Quizlet (…)

You are entitled to 1 (one) prime number

I don’t know about everyone else, but this topic has been an ongoing discussion between me, my math class, and, I guess, the world:

Is 1 (one) a prime number?

And so, I offer to you a challenge: Present me a reason, not any of that “Oh, one’s prime because it says any number above one can be prime” crap, I want true mathematical fact. An equation or something. Please, it’s killing me how people don’t know when I ask them. I even resorted to googling it, but I got the crap described above, so please help.

That is all.

I wonder what the normal people are doing?