Discovery Education has another great on-line resource for teachers. Discovery Education has a home on YouTube! The Discovery Education Channel has a variety of video resources to support teachers. The resources range from relatively short ‘How To’ videos to the longer professional development Webinars.

I’ve attended a number of the Webinars both in person when streamed and as archived resources. I’m impressed with the quality of the content that explores various topics from effective use of the DE Web Home to the ever evolving Web 2.0 on the Internet.

Exploring Discovery Education’s channel, I found out about Daniel Pink. Never heard of him before but let me tell you his ideas about today’s world requiring right and left brain thinking intrigued me. The four-minute video titled “Daniel Pink: Education and the Changing World of Work” led me on a personal research quest to find out more about him and how his thoughts apply to education. The end result? I ended up deciding to purchase his book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, in the Kindle format to read on my laptop.

A really fascinating YouTube video on Daniel Pink’s first book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, By RSA Animate can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc .

Summertime is a time to relax. I find it the perfect time for me to explore new things that will make instruction more effective in my classroom. I probably never would have discovered the highly motivational Daniel Pink without giving this DE resource a ‘spin’. Why don’t you give the Discovery Education Channel a try.

Yours,
Lee M. Sattelmeyer

I grew up in an era of the great Broadway musicals: Oklahoma, Kismet, The King and I, Flower Drum Song, The Sound of Music, and of course, South Pacific.

This great era of musical creativity became very much a part of the popular culture of the time. Perhaps, these musicals were popular because of the singable songs with memorable lyrics or because the musical’s book told believable stories about the human condition.

Whatever the reasons for such cultural impact on American society, the music from these Broadway productions became part of my life. I played the LPs of the Broadway casts over and over. There were certain favorite songs of mine that gave voice to a very complicated adolescent growing up.

It is no wonder that even now conversations with others sometime trigger musical memories that apply to the content of our conversation.

One such piece of music is ‘You Have to Be Carefully Taught’ from Oscar and Hammerstein’s musical South Pacific.

You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught
From year to year,
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

In this song, Lt. Cable sings that our prejudices are passed down from our family, peers, and social groups. It doesn’t matter if you want to weigh in on whether prejudice is a learned behavior or an acquired genetic survival trait. If you look at the song closely, I think it is also saying that we need to teach more appropriate behavior to our children.

That today’s children lack a bit of social grace in dealing with others is evident. I was taught to let the adult through first as a sign of courtesy and respect. My wife still enjoys that I’ll open the car door for her or hold the door to let her pass through first. No respectful adult male every entered a home or building without first taking his hat/cap off. We were certainly not perfect as the later decades began to show the weaknesses behind the facade. But these social graces, helped us get along.

For whatever reason, today’s children need a lot more support from their teachers and schools in learning how to get along with others and deal with the frustrations of interacting with the rest of us who are less than perfect.

Unfortunately, our current cultural models, such as TV, interactive video games, and movies ‘don’t cut the mustard’.

Well, Discovery Education has some really wonderful videos for elementary age children that teach how to get along with others more effectively.

To find available resources, you only have to type “citizenship”, “getting along”, or other behavioral terms in the keyword search box at the top of your home page.

Two of my favorite series that I like to use with my students are the ‘Getting Along’ series by the Center for Educational Resources and ‘A Kid’s Guide’ by Learning Tree.

The ‘Getting Along’ series includes six different titles from my favorite “Don’t Make Me Stop This Car!” to “No Fair!” All of the videos begin with a scenario where a child or group of children are not getting along. There is an adult role model, Scott, that talks with the children about feelings and how someone might behave positively to resolve a conflict. There is a literature piece where a character named, Banya, reads a book that is appropriate for the videos topic (My students’ favorite saying comes from Banya who says, “Are ya not listening? She bugs me.”). After getting advice, students watching the video get a chance to see the child/children put the advice into practice.

Another good series for helping children learn to get along is ‘A Kid’s Guide’ by Learning Tree. There are almost 30 different topics in the series from learning to be a ‘good kid’ to ‘telling the truth’.

Both series do a good job in helping children move from an egocentric point of view to one that is more socially centric. These series in Discovery Education are developmentally appropriate for children in the elementary grades, especially the primary grades. Behaviors and feelings are identified not scolded, specific advice is given to help children work through their feelings, and the advice in practice is demonstrated.

There are many more titles in DE’s catalog that are useful for teaching citizenship and social behaviors. All of them have have been split into segments so that you can show the whole video or just the part you need. The great thing is that DE has taken all the work out of finding and using them.

Try some of them out with your class this Fall. Who knows? You just might find yourself singing along with Anna Leonowens…

Lyrics | – Getting to Know You lyrics

Yours,
Lee

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.

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

Instead, this was a “BIG” ideas book, a philosophical book looking into the benefits of technology to the next generation and examining the change process involved in giving technology to our children.

What has stuck with me over the years has been Papert’s analysis of the change process. Why do so many “good” ideas seem to flourish for a little while only to whither and die? Why do so many teachers cynically say if you teach long enough you’ll see it all come back into vogue again.

In my own district, I’ve watched numerous incentives become the hot topic of the day, lived through a lot of staff development, only to see us move on to something else. Years ago a lot of us were extensively trained in TESA (Teacher Expectations & Student Achievement – here’s a link to a summary of what TESA is http://www.hotchalk.com/mydesk/index.php/math-matters/537-teacher-expectations-student-achievement-). After the push to train us, time, energy, expectations, and resources gradually dwindled away.

The younger teachers in our building have never heard of or know what TESA is. But the new hot topic is a peer observational program called a Walk-Through which bears a remarkable similarity to TESA.

Papert inferred that this kind of change process where “new” ideas are embraced, encouraged, and gradually left to whither and die was like an immunological response to the change process.

Nowhere have I seen this pattern repeated more often than in bringing technology innovation to our children.  Why is this?

I suggest that it is a lack of vision that is the culprit.  People have trouble articulating a cohesive vision as to how technology is more than an add-on to an existing curriculum. It is not visualized as a critical tool for thinking, creating, and learning. It is more like the frosting on a cake in most classrooms.

Some might like to suggest that this is the fault of the Trail-Blazing, Pioneer folk in the building. They aren’t vocal enough to encourage the rest of us to leave our safe, comfy havens that we’ve acquired through years of teaching.

I listened to a number of really intelligent presenters at eTech Ohio talk about publicizing what you do with technology. It is not enough to just “tell” your building administrator. I think you have to push them out of their comfort zone.

If you’ve been around as long as I have, you know that administrators are the real “gate keepers” in a school district. Funding for equipment, software, and supplies is non-existent unless your request somehow fits into the administrator’s idea of where the building should be headed. Sometimes, even small grants from your local PTA or school foundation must be vetted first by the building administrator.

Administrators are also the people who will make or break technology professional development in a building. If technology professional development is not an integral component of whatever the PD plan is for your building or district, it just doesn’t happen expediently in your school.

Administrators are not the only obstacle to technology PD in a building. Let’s face it, teachers own part of this problem. Teachers tend to not attend PD if they are not required to do that. We’re all busy, have too much to do, and keep getting more paperwork required by the state or national government. A teacher’s time is finite, and most of us are not looking for anything else to do.

However, the building and district administrators are responsible for encouraging technology use and for facilitating the professional development that will stimulate integration of existing technology resources into teaching and instruction.

So, how do you effect change in a system that tends to surround technology development with a great deal of “antibodies” waiting to engulf and divert the change process?

Well, I believe it has to begin with the one with a vision, whether that is the local tech guru, a group of teachers who find inspiration working together, or the teacher that just happens to attend some conference and was exposed to an idea that might transform her teaching through the use of the technology currently found in her room. Whoever that is, he or she has to get the word out to the rest of us.

I appreciate DE revising and broadening the idea of what an “event” is that qualifies for Star Educator certification. The changes addressed what is the real secret and power behind the change process, the power of informal communication among the educational staff. The sharing of ideas for technology use over lunch or within the framework of the teachers’ common planning time is a powerful tool in the change process.

It would be an wonderful world where every administrator embraced new ideas and understood how valuable integration of technology is in instruction. I would, indeed, believe I’d died and gone to heaven if technology integration was a permanent part of each professional development session I attended. Real world concerns, however, sometimes makes that impossible. In the pursuit of meeting state and federal mandates, administrators sometimes have to balance between what might be helpful with that which must be done.

 That is what I believe is the real “antibody” that continues to surround the idea of technology becoming an integral part of instruction. My job is to not give up hope but  to continue waging guerrilla warfare on those pressures by finding ways to encourage teachers to confront their comfort zone by providing resources and timely support.

The day of  having a mandatory PD session solely devoted to using technology with students is gone. Instead, new ways to change teaching practices must be explored. Thanks go to DE for recognizing this and allowing its STARS to find their way in their buildings with their administrators.

Sometimes, the change process starts with one individual.

 We’ve been back a couple of weeks. Despite the summer coming to an end, I’ve been lazy, as if there would be no end to this season of low stress and no deadlines. You could say I’ve been like the lotus eater. I didn’t work on all those things I’d promised myself I’d do when I had the time. Lessons weren’t created. Information and resources weren’t researched. Staff development plans never got past the initial dream stage.

 Like Odysseus, I now must gather my focus and lash my attention to the spar lest I conspire to remain in the land of the lotus eaters.

The farther I distance myself from the joys of the summer, and the nearer I get to the shoreline of the new school year, the more I feel the pull of excitement of discovering new things and rethinking what I want to do over the next year. I’m clear that I don’t want to continue with the same lessons that I can practically do in my sleep. I want to challenge my thinking and explore new directions with my students. I want my students to find the same joy and excitement in learning that I do.

 I’ve been exposed to a number of new concepts in the last couple of days that have challenged my thinking. I’m still trying to fit them into some kind of framework that affect my teaching.

First, my 32-year old son criticized my e-mail. We’ll he didn’t exactly criticize. It was more of a casual statement that I’d stayed in my comfort zone and hadn’t moved ahead with technology. To understand his comment, you need the background on his statement. I tend to send long e-mails. Not just long, lengthy. More like tomes, except sometimes I really can’t claim the “learned” part of the definition. My youngest son calls my e-mails “SPAM” and has threatened to list me as a spammer in his e-mail software. My middle child sometimes responds with the comment that I should “get a life”.

My e-mails are carefully constructed, being read, reread and revised until I’m positive that I’m communicating my ideas. I spend a lot of time crafting my message.

According to my kids, that is so last century. Their e-mails are so brief that sometimes I’m not sure that they understood what I sent. They are into text messaging. If I want to communicate quickly, I have to text them. Days might go by before e-mail is checked. Yet texting continues as part of the fabric of their daily life. Without skipping a beat or missing a syllable of anything while I’m talking with them, a quick glance at their phone tells them who just communicated with them through texting and what that person wanted. A deft flick of the wrist, casting eyes downward, and the message is received. A few swift pecks on a keyboard not much bigger than my index finger, and the response has been sent without missing a beat of our conversation.

I have to admit being a bit defensive when son #1 told me people don’t want to use e-mail as much anymore. Quick queries and immediate responses is what today’s generation wants. It also explains why days may go by before I hear back from my 16-year old grandson. Text messaging is beginning to replace e-mail, just as e-mail began to take over snail mail.

A week after our conversation about my e-mails, AKA SPAM, I happened to find an article on an educational blog discussing this same growing dichotomy in communication strategies. Interesting enough, age appears to be the predominate determining factor for preferences in communication medium. 

So what does this have to do with education? I’m not exactly sure. My best guess hypothesis is that younger brains than mine hunger for information in faster, shorter morsels. While I love to lavish time upon each piece of information, savoring the meaning and connections, today’s learner wants to acquire and utilize information in a shorter time frame.

 Discovery Education videos have already anticipated that change in paradigm. Many of the full-length videos have been divided into video segments or clips, creating a “video byte” around a specific concept. I have to admit I tend to think in terms of complete movies rather than “clips”. This year, in light of my rethinking how younger people communicate, I want to do more with the video clips in instruction. I want to see if it really makes a significant difference in  my students acquiring concepts. I think it may.

As I’ve been thinking what could or should be done for the next year, the opening scene of Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man echoes through my head. The music salesmen are singing about an interloper, Professor Harold Hill, who has managed to make their job difficult by selling uniforms and instruments and then skipping town before following through on his promise to create a town band. There is one character whose line is to say, “But he doesn’t know the territory…”

I had to think awhile before I could figure out what my brain was trying to tell me. I really can’t plan anything without knowing what my staff wants to know. I’d be like Professor Hill promising a “band” when I didn’t know anything about music.

My problem is I really don’t know what my staff wants to know. I’ve asked. I’ve put out e-mails. I tried to entice. And I’ve tried to bribe, to no avail. I’ve been left with the odd sense that my staff either is smarter than me, don’t want to know about any new things, or they don’t know what they want to know.

Since I manage a number of district technology resources in my building, I know how little use is being made of resources being made available by our district and paid for out of my community’s taxes. So, “smarter” can’t be it, otherwise the resources would be utilized more successfully.

I could certainly make a case for the “don’t want to”. I know how often people in the building look at my name on an e-mail and defer opening the e-mail until later, sometimes really too much later. My last building walk-through for the summer, showed me that most of the staff in the building didn’t follow through completely on the summer tech shut down procedure e-mail. Only three people in the whole building had everything shut down, document cameras covered, amplifiers turned off, and microphones and remotes stowed away safely.

However, I’m a “born in the wool”, honest-to-goodness liberal, optimist. So, I chose to believe that my staff really doesn’t know what they want to know or learn when it comes to technology integration in the classroom. I got absolutely no response from anyone in the building about their interest in some one hour professional development sessions in our building prior to the beginning of school, not even a “no thanks, I’m busy that week.”

This coincides with an almost total lack of interest in our district for a 1-2 technology mini-conference in our district. I was getting really excited about the topics. The goal was going to be to show staff what they could do with our existing technology not present some ivory tower version of what education could be if we had the money, if we invested in new technology, or if we subscribed to some additional services. Practical and doable now were to be the theme. We got six inquiries from the whole district.

I keep hearing the music waft through my head. Before I go deep into planning technology professional development this summer, I need to find a way to stop thinking like the music salesmen on the train. I need to be more like Professor Harold Hill and help our staff dream that now that they have the instruments, they can become a “band”.

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

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