After All These Years!: Lee Sattelmeyer’s Blog

Dear Folks,

Our beginning of the year assessments window has closed. Our district requires a battery of assessments at the beginning of the year for all students in a classroom. On my grade level, second, that works out to be six different tests: three in language arts and three in mathematics. That’s a lot of tests. The Dibels Benchmark test and the sight word recognition test require me to do each child individually. Even though the others can be given in a group testing situation, that still calls for a great deal of time to grade them and then record all the scores electronically by hand.

Our district requires that all students be enrolled in Pearson’s SuccessMaker suite of computer guided instruction. Every child has to be enrolled in Math Concepts and Skills 2.  It is left to teacher discretion to enroll students needing reading support in the reading components of SuccessMaker. That’s a lot of computer time on a weekly basis.

Two weeks ago, our annual Parents’ Curriculum Night took place.

Wow! All this had to take place in the first four weeks of school.

It is no wonder teachers in my building don’t take advantage of the professional development programs in technology use and integration that I put in place. It is no wonder that they don’t take advantage of the various professional development opportunities that are available at the various on-line subscription services we have, like Discovery Education. It is no wonder I find it hard to think up creative professional development opportunities that draw the teachers in my building like sweet things draw the hornet population around our school.

I find my “planning” time for technology fractured into very small time periods. Waiting in my doctor’s office, yesterday, I managed to get about 15 minutes of planning done. I got up early this morning to input some of my assessment data on-line. I was efficient in doing that, so now I have a few moments before leaving for work to think and plan again.

The one theme I keep coming back to is that technology should not make my job more difficult. I can’t “sell” that to my teachers who are struggling just as much as I am to complete assessments and to get the data put on line and into a couple of different spreadsheets that administration requires. These requirements are time consuming, tedious, and distracting.

All three of those conditions will kill any initiative, especially learning to integrate technology into everyday instruction. The required assessments and recording of data leaves a “bad taste in the mouth”. The experience generalizes over into teacher attitudes toward technology in general, “Technology means more work for me.”

It is no wonder that I feel like I’m swimming upstream every time I want to provide technology support through professional development opportunities!

I’ve decided that this year, that I’d try to focus more on integrating. We now have projected learning technology, sound systems, document cameras, and projectors, in every classroom. Some classrooms have SMARTboards, also. Instead of opportunities to learn SMART Notebook software or how to search for subject matter on Discovery Education, I want to incorporate all of these tools together so that teachers get a feel for the richness of educational opportunities that they can offer in their own classrooms.

I’ve got my job cut out for me. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to do it or where is an appropriate place to begin. I still have to juggle my own second grade classroom, and our K-4 building has a mind boggling array of variables in the needs of the classrooms, grade levels, and technology proficiency levels of the teachers.

What I do have this year is a different focus, “integration”. There won’t be anymore professional development on specific use of whatever. It will all have to be designed towards making technology use simple, enriching, and rewarding. If it makes teaching hard by creating more work or things to have to think about, It won’t be useful.

Technology should and can make our jobs of preparing young minds easier, more successful, and require about as much effort as we put into everyday things, like choosing whether to use your fork or spoon.

Yours,

Lee

I love Delicious! I don’t know how I ever got along without it. It simplifies my work by being only a URL away from my bookmarks. No longer do I worry about what I saved and on which computer it got saved on. Sure, Yahoo! will keep my bookmarks for me, but I can’t log into my Yahoo! account at work. So, Delicious really works for me.

What I can’t figure out is why I can’t seem to excite others about the site. I know in professional development sessions that others have been impressed that I can quickly and easily pull up a Web site to reinforce some concept. But the amazement stops there. In about six months of proselytizing, I’ve only inspired one convert!

Does this say something about me? Am I singing along with John Hancock in 1776 “if I’m the one to do it, they’ll run their pen quill through it…”?

Or does this speak to nature of human beings that we have a comfort zone and tend to stick to it? Or that you can “lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink”? Or that we all have too much on our plate?

I don’t know the answer to this, but know that it isn’t isolated to just my building in the district. We tried to put together a mini-tech conference in August showcasing the existing technologies and resources we have in the district. We got just six responses back from the whole district indicating that the person was interested in attending the one-day conference.

Meanwhile, I keep adding to my Delicious account. Ask me to come up with resources for our IB Planners. Within a few keystrokes, I have a number of them ready to share. I don’t know how I ever lived without it.

Yours,

Lee

I recently sent an e-mail to Porter Palmer on the DE Learning Council introducing myself. I frequently stop and assess myself as to who I am and what my belief system is. I know, to some of you (if I even have a reader) that may sound kind of silly. But I find I need to reaffirm why I do the things I do, where I came from and where I’m headed, and who am I doing it for. As long as this self-check keeps coming up with “for my students and the students of Lomond Elementary School”, I know that I’m on the right track and really not ready to retire yet.

Since it is highly unlikely that you and I have ever met, I thought it might be appropriate to copy part of what I sent Porter. So, if you’d like to know who this “knucklehead” is, read on.

“I’m the building tech coordinator for Lomond Elementary School in Shaker Heights (OH), as well as a regular education teacher for second grade. I’m now the oldest surviving member of the original district tech team, having watched all the other founding members retire or look for less headaches.

I go way back to the Radio Shack TSR-80s and still remember when the first Apple II entered the doorway of each school building. It was then that I decided that this “new” technology was going to have an impact on my teaching and student learning.

I made behind the door “deals” with the other building coordinators to get each of our K-4 buildings three Macintosh LC575s, and then had to bid my time for several years while I supported the middle and high school tech coordinators in getting technology for their buildings. That was back in the days when there was no line item in the district budget for technology.

I’ve pushed for the creation of the first K-4 computer lab when the emphasis in the district was on technology for secondary students as there wasn’t a vision of technology being useful to the younger student. That original lab went from a 12-computer lab in a borrowed library space to a 25-computer lab in its own air conditioned space. This year we are moving the lab to new and much larger location in the building so that the lab will coincide with our professional development space.

I’ve had a part in bringing computers into the regular classrooms. We’ve gone from only a couple of rooms having a computer to every classroom having at least three. We have brought SMARTboards and projected learning into the classrooms in the last several years.

So, I’ve been around. The hair is thinner. The body much rounder. The eyes need additional support. And, my patience has probably gotten a little thinner.

As I am about four years away for retirement, I’ve been nurturing a young man to eventually replace me. That in itself is kind of an exciting task to take on.

What hasn’t changed is my commitment to technology helping K-4 students become active learners and in helping teachers step into the 21st Century by finding ways for technology to enhance what they are already doing.

A truly seminal event in my younger years was finding and reading Seymour Papert’s The Children’s Machine. His description of an immunological response to change in an organization made sense to me and still does. From the individual classroom teacher to central administrator, the challenge is to always nudge them a little bit farther along and avoid complacency. It is way too easy with technology for many teachers to get into a comfort zone and not explore what else can be done to enhance student learning.

I don’t worry so much about the children as they seem to see the whole picture without being encumbered with a lot of doubts about technology. They are always eager to try new things and to push the boundaries of what they can do with technology. They embrace where, many of us sit back and ponder before making a move.

This year for the first time, I’ve consistently made the use of technology a part of any lesson plan when I’m out of the classroom. I’ve had a group of second grade students who eagerly support this and provide assistance to the substitutes in getting lessons up and running on the SMARTboard. Several of the subs that go way back historically with me have indicated their appreciation to being exposed to new ways of doing things. The children’s enthusiasm and innocence about technology making the difference for the substitutes.

That gets back to “technology” truly being the children’s machine. It is the children, I believe, that will eventually support those of us who are older, who didn’t grow up with technology, to make that leap of faith and change or adjust our teaching habits and methods.

It is the children I always come back to when I’m overwhelmed with my responsibilities or grumpy when some insensitive staff member forgets his/her manners. It is their “Ah, ha!”, their fearlessness to tackle big ideas, to embrace change.They are the ones that make what I do worthwhile.”

Yours,

Lee

Dear Folks,

I'm constantly on the lookout for useful educational content and technology tools on the Web. My major criteria is that the Web site has to be effective, interesting, and makes what I do simpler and easier. I often find sites that are promising but make doing things harder. I don't really care how stunningly beautiful a site might appear. If life becomes a little more difficult, requiring me to jump through more hoops, then I pass on the site.

I obviously run into more Web sites than I can possible process in the small amount of time I have available. Sites that I don't want to forget, have access to outside of my home computer, or that I want to take a second look at go into my http://www.delicious.com account.I've grown to love Delicious.

Recently, while in San Juan, Puerto Rico for my son's wedding, I was able to access Delicious on my laptop. I was able to quickly revisit sites to continue working with the information on them and to add new bookmarks that I found while researching. I was able to do this from whatever location I was in that had WiFi.

What a time saver to not have to Google a specific topic and wade through unnecessary returned hits or to prod my preoccupied brain into trying to remember the URL.

If you haven't discovered the benefits of Delicious yet, I suggest that you open an account. It free, and it is simple. You'll be happy to add this Web 2.0 tool to your arsenal of tech tools.

Yours,

Lee

I found this statement in an article I was reading on eSchool News about the effectiveness of 1-to-1 computing (http://www.eschoolnews.com/2010/02/16/11-programs-only-as-good-as-their-teachers/#comment-334).

 “Similarly, a study of laptop use in 21 high-need Texas middle schools noted that “teacher buy-in … is critically important, because students’ school experiences with [the] technology are largely dictated by their teachers.”

 I didn’t find this statement shocking or unrealistic. It pretty much sums up my experiences.

Seymour Papert, in The Children’s Machine, wrote that initiatives often experience an immunological response to change where the initiative is welcomed at first, swallowed up by rules, regulations, guidelines, etc., and eventually smoothered/killed so that the status quo pretty much remains the same.

Papert suggested that the reason change process initiatives tend to fail is that change is often driven Top-Down. I think that is true for us here in Shaker.

It is not difficult to identify the emphasis testing has had on technology innovation in our district. SuccessMaker, which is a really good tool, has become the emphasis for computing in the elementary grades. We get a list periodically from our building administration indicating which children in our rooms aren’t at a certain arbitrary point at a specific time of the year. We are expected to remediate that by increasing time on the software and intensifying support in the classroom. SuccessMaker, the instrument/tool for learning, in itself has become the evaluating test indicating Pass/Fail.

 The data from the software has slowly begun to drive instruction, teaching, and learning. Available class computer time and lab time become focused on only this one goal of providing enough time on the software. Innovation, constructivism, and preparing children for the 21^st Century have little room in the school day.

 No wonder, despite my best intent to engage teachers in learning new technology skills  and developing a vision for technology in their room, I get so little buy-in.

Yours,

Lee

Dear Folks,

Wordle… I’ve known about Wordle (http://www.wordle.net) for more than a year. I thought that the word clouds were pretty.

Yup, that’s the limit of thought I gave to this wonderful resource. It wasn’t until after I’d seen it used effectively at eTech Ohio by a number of presenters that I started thinking it might be a good teaching tool to use with my students.

Since we have been studying about being a “Communicator” as our school moves towards IB recognition, I thought Wordle might be a useful tool to help second graders learn about communication.

Over a period of days, I gathered transcripts of President Obama’s speech about race (given while running for president), his September speech to students, and Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. It was very easy to copy and past the text into Wordle and let the default settings produce a word cloud for me.

The word clouds were put into SMART Notebook presentations along with video of the speeches.

The result with the kids was more than I’d hoped for. We’d listen only to parts of the speeches (Normal 7 and 8 year olds are not fond of 37 minute speeches. They’re like the carnival arcade ”Whac-a-Mole’ game after the first few minutes.) Periodically, I’d stop the video and then switch to the word cloud. The kids quickly made connections between what they heard and what they saw in the word cloud. They eagerly went looking for words by size and understood that the big words were the “big ideas” of the speech. They asked questions about the words in the cloud that showed a sophistication of thought that I hadn’t seen very often. I have to admit that these were pretty cool moments in the classroom. I found that the kids were more interested in listening to more of these long speeches after looking at the clouds.

I spent a lot of time playing around with the settings and came up with some ideas on making more effective word clouds:

1. Change the number of words to suit your needs. Lowering the default setting of 150 words creates more focused word clouds where the “Big Ideas” stand out. For second graders 50-75 words in a long speech like Obama’s 37 minute speech on race seemed to be just about right. Too few words and you begin to lose the ideas the speaker was trying to communicate.
2. Play around with the color format. My favorite setting is the Red, Green, Blue/Black background style. Dynamite on a computer monitor. Not so great on an Interactive white board because LCD projectors have trouble with true black and because the ambient light in a classroom washes out the color. The vivid blue actually is hard to read from 10 feet away. The lighter background color styles actually look better in a big classroom. In my spare time, I think I’ll try creating my own style color palette.
3. Get a good screen capture tool and copy the Wordle word cloud from the screen. Going through the process of saving the word clouds, I never liked the resolution of the resulting jpeg. The letters were not crisp and were sometimes jagged. Snagit 9 is what I use for screen captures. It did a perfect job that turned out to be just the right size for putting into a SMART Notebook presentation.

eTech Ohio 2010 was a nice break for me. It exposed me to new ideas and new ways to do things. It allowed me to rethink some of the things I do 0r don’t do, and did a nice job thawing that mid-school year ice damn that seems to hit in February. I’ve only scraped the surface of the things I challenged myself to try out. With the successes I’ve had trying out just a few things, I’m lookng forward to more experimentation and excitement over the next several weeks.

Yours,

Lee

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