A basketball clip

Here is the clip of a basketball game from my new school.

test table

Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? Quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet? quem ad finem sese effrenata iactabit audacia?

How long, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end of that unbridled audacity of yours?

Audio Test- video test

This is a great place to test an audio link....

Audio Test



video link


Audio 2

A Cross Post from EdTechJournal

This post appeared in another blog and rather than just link to it, I republished the whole thing.
It is from EdTechJournal at http://preilly.wordpress.com/.

The Wolves of Learning

At birth we are blessed with a natural curiosity. There is a great wildness in it. A shaft of sunlight illuminates a world of dust and delicate objects floating in air, as if by magic. A child who catches a glimpse of this will stop whatever it’s doing and begin to explore what it sees. We are called to learn.

Our natural curiosity is like a wild animal; it hunts where it needs to in order to satisfy its deep hunger. As children, we awaken each day with an insatiable appetite to learn. It is in our early years that we are “wolves of learning”. There is a deep, DNA-based, natural connection between learning and survival; call it the burning relevance of the empty stomach.Over the centuries, as we have institutionalized learning, we have taken something precious from our children, our young “wolves of learning”; and from ourselves. The wildness of our natural curiosity has been tamed, domesticated, and subdued.

We have done this by giving our children virtually no control over their education, little responsibility for their learning and whatever natural curiosity they have has been replaced with a structured curriculum. We reward them for following directions and doing what they are told and reprimand them if they wander too far from our agenda. Since it is our agenda and not theirs, they put minimum effort, if any effort at all, into what we ask them to do. They are in compliance mode. Compliance produces the lowest level of effort. Fear of retribution becomes the prime motivator rather than the excitement of learning.

We have trained them to expect to be fed without going on the hunt. Like domesticated pets, we offer them bland processed learning laid out in prescribed amounts at certain times of the day. We decide what they are fed, how much, and when. They rarely experience learning by their own wits, their natural curiosity, or even serendipity. They will not gorge on learning and fight over the scraps until their bellies are full.

We have so successfully domesticated our students that they are likely to rebel when they are asked to use the natural gifts for learning with which they were born. It’s as if we were trying to release a pet house dog into the wilderness, the odds of survival would be small. Within hours the dog would be back in front of the door, begging to have its master serve its dinner to it in a dish.

Let us find ways to give our children back their birthright, their natural curiosity and facility to learn. There have to be ways that we can organize our learning institutions to accommodate individual curiosity and the standardized curriculum. I believe that thoughtful educators can create environments that are less restrictive and provide much more natural habitat for learning. Let us find ways to foster the wildness and thrill of learning again. Let us answer the “Call of the Wild”.
pete

Father Andy Demonstration

This post is to demonstrate to a student how to place an mp3 file on a web site.
Andy Test

Norman

De-Schooling

As learning moves into the 21st century , if we wish to create life long learners, we have to create learning structures that speak to learning styles and needs of what Marc Prensky calls the “digital natives” (Prensky, 2006). James Paul Gee speaks of them as the “the gaming generation.” (Gee, 2006). Teaching and learning need to become one, in an anarchy of creativity. The interesting question is will there still be a formal learning system that sits on top of the informal learning system we all use in our lives? Human beings need to develop the habits of independent thought and life long learning that will help them to become productive questioning citizens of the new flat world that we now inhabit.

Just as the printing press ushered in the new societies of the renaissance so too has the Internet now ushered in a new renaissance of learning and exploration that is changing everything human beings are learning and doing. We are now longer in a world of scarcity of information. We are in a virtual world of overabundance which we need to learn how to navigate.

Our schools are not designed to successfully engage our young people in the world of independent and constant learning and interpretation. Our schools are designed to deliver common content to a captive audience. This paradigm simply does not interest our "digital natives" any longer.

Distance education has always tried to emulate classroom education since the early 19th century. As the Internet has developed it has made the whole idea of controlled curricular education, whether distance or face to face, obsolete. Students entering our Universities this fall are learning content that will be obsolete by the start of their junior year. We are in a new world. To explore that new world we must be committed to encouraging our students to use their digital tools in the evolving fffcccccvirtual world of the Internet.

The Digital Teacher

This essay origninally began as a reflective statement of my time in the Distance Education Master's program at University Maryland University College. I have spent a very long time in that program by most standards, taking seven years to reach the Capstone course where I now am. In that time I have moved from thinking that distance education was a form of education that would increase the effectiveness of education in general by making it available to anyone who desired to learn to the realization that education as we know it was not about learning to one that realizes that the problem is the institution of education.

I am back to blogging and this is the place where it all started. When I think of what happened to my thinking over the past few years I must consider this blog and how I became such an unrepentent advocate of one to one laptop schools. My thinking has reached the point where I have realized that school as is presently constituted has ceased to be a meaningful experience for students, particularly in the K-12, learning enviorment. School, as presently constructed, is an orgainized content based experience with a fixed curriculum. Students are viewed as a product to manufactured. School is a selection process rather than a learning process. Position and access to wealth in society is based on that selection. School is a conservative freedom restricting activity preserving the status quo.

More to come.......