After All These Years!: Lee Sattelmeyer’s Blog

My kids are grown and starting families of their own.

When I was a kid, families often lived near one another. Early on in life, I grew accustomed to being able to visit my grandparents frequently and almost any time I wanted to do so. I could celebrate with them the things I was learning, play games with them, and enjoy hearing them read to me. But that was back in the 50s before there were Interstates.

Now it is a grueling 12-13 hour trip to visit my two oldest and their children. This means that sometimes it is a half of a year or more between hugs. Those casual, meaningful moments are few and far between.

Technology has become an increasingly important tool for me as a Grandpa. E-mail and text messaging plus an occasional quick visit to his Facebook page fills in some of the gaps in keeping up with my teenage grandson. But the other four grandchildren are either toddlers or babies. Facebook, e-mail, and text messaging won’t do. Neither does the occasional phone call keep the relationshihp alive at that age.

Thank goodness for technology minded adult children and SKYPE. I can see the newborn sister and hear her older brother call me “paw-paw”. It registers that the older one really can distinguish between me and his other grandfather, “Ho-Ho”, even though he is only two. “Ho-Ho” grew a beard this past year and is challenging me as Santa’s look alike. But Avery knows who is “Paw-Paw” and who is “Ho-Ho”.

My oldest grand-daughter is four. She has to work harder at communication skills than most other four-year olds. A couple of weeks back, I was playing with her on SKYPE. I have a bunch of small animal toys that parade in front of the webcam. For about 20 minutes, I cracked her up with me quacking like a duck. Her mom said it was so nice to see her laugh, giggle, and just have fun with “Grampy”.

But there was still more to delight the heart. Athena suddenly left the area. I sighed for a moment thinking play time for “Grampy” was over. Suddenly, Athena was back in the monitor screen. She’d gone to get the vocabulary cards she’d been working on. To my delight, she put the picture side down and began reading the names off the back of each card without peeking at the picture. As she read the name of the animal off the front, she held the back side with the picture up to the webcam for me to see. We were back in the business of celebrating one of life’s little moments.

Being able to SKYPE allowed me to celebrate a few moments where my grandchildren were able to demonstrate the things they were learning. How precious those moments have become to me.

As I ponder the importance of these moments, I wonder what educational doors these technologies might open for my students. Dare I take time from doing “school” to do something more authentic? Could sharing with another class in another city or one of my student’s faraway relatives become as transforming for them as it was for me and my grandchildren?

This is a question I intend to ponder over the summer while I’m enjoying getting to really hug my grandchildren in person.

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