After All These Years!: Lee Sattelmeyer’s Blog

Dear Folks 

One of the intriguing memories I left the conference with was Matt Monjan’s “Bend it, Break it,…” session. I have to admit I hadn’t thought of using ”moving pictures” (Yes, I’m that old to call it that.) to teach reading skills. I bit on the bait and was “hooked”

I can report now that I’ve conquered how to set up the closed captioning and to make the whole thing work on my SMARTboard. Downloading and saving the movie and CC files was easy. It was Microsoft that almost did me in.

I followed Matt’s directions and couldn’t do it. I did a search on line and still couldn’t do it after looking at a number of on-line resources. Finally, I remembered my experiences with learning Microsoft Office 2007 without a manual.

That was an experience! For six weeks, I kept trying to find where the SAVE and PRINT functions were hidden on the ribbon. One day, being very tired my finger accidentally depressed the button on the mouse as I ran the cursor across the page. Why Microsoft chose a “cute”, little icon to hide all that stuff behind when million of users were trained to look for the FILE menu, I’ll never know. Since nothing else launches from a graphical icon, I never thought to look there!

I’m running Microsoft’s Windows Media Player 11 on my computers at home. I haven’t been too successful finding things I normally use since I upgraded. I’m usually left to a “hunt & peck” strategy since I upgraded (I admit to defaulting to RealPlayer since I don’t always have the patience with WMP.). This was part of my problem with following Matt’s direction. DEN has info on v.9 & 10. I couldn’t find all the things I needed to follow the steps in the directions for setting up WMP for closed captioning.

 I’d like to think it was a moment of brillance rather than one of desperation when I connected the idea of the Window’s Flag icon which in now on the right-hand side of the window in v. 11 with the cute little round button on Office 2007. In a flash I right clicked on the Flag icon and had the familiar classic menus up and running.

From that point on it was really easy to set up WMP. It is basically two steps. Set up the player to show CC by going to play in the menu, scroll over to “lyrics, caption…” and click on “On if available”. Then go back to the menu, select “Tools”, and then “Options”. Click on the security tab. Click in the boxes the say “Run script commands…” and “Show local captions…”. I’m tend to believe in the “random decay of atoms in the universe” as a reason for why chaos tends to reigh in the area of technology. So, I always click on APPLY before OK. “Apply” tends to be my ritual in an OCD kind of way.

WMP worked like a charm after that!

Now here is the fun part! I actually used this with my students, and it works!

I found an under 2 minute movie clip on Discovery Ed about why we celebrate Presidents’ Day. Changed the CC text to 30 pts. and Yellow as per Matt’s instruction. Played it first to my second graders without sound. I then opened up a SMART Notebook file and asked my kids what Presidents’ Day was all about. I was amazed at how even my disadvantaged children had gotten the general idea of the video clip. We filled up a whole Notebook page with the main points of the video.

I look forward to doing more of this. In fact, I have a short video clip about “artifacts” from the Magic School Bus that is cued up for an IB lesson today. This simple little trick that Matt shared at the eTech Ohio conference shows a lot of promise in my classroom.

Yours,

Lee