After All These Years!: Lee Sattelmeyer’s Blog

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