After All These Years!: Lee Sattelmeyer’s Blog

I’ve acquired  quite a bit of new knowledge lately about using technology. The problem is that it is pretty much “pieces”. I picked up new information at a conference that led to learning new skills. Searching for IB resources for our grade level Plans of Inquiry led to some more. Our son and new daughter-in-law gave us a gift of a really nice web cam, and another skill was added to my repertoire. One of my least tech savvy teachers introduced me to Tokbox, and I taught my kids how to do video conference calls that we couldn’t do on Skype. My oldest convinces me I need a Facebook account, and I find me posting comments about the things I’ve read, family history, and generally poking fun at myself.

I’ve become a Renaissance Man of Technology of late, a regular “Esperto di tutto, maestro in niente” (Italian for “Expert of everything, master of none”).

That has begun to concern me a little. Sure I know a lot more about utilizing technology than most teachers in the district, and am smart enough to realize I don’t know enough. What has begun to be apparent is that while I know a lot of “things” I’ve not had the time to develop a gestalt integrating all that I know and can now do into my vision for technology in education.

A dear boss, instructional leader, and friend used to annoy me at times with his incessant admonitions to stop thinking of all the minutia that everyone tells us we have to teach, and think about the “Big Ideas”. Anyone who thinks there isn’t a lot of minutia that teachers have to teach hasn’t looked at the state standards recently. I can’t quite remember what I read I’m supposed to be doing/teaching from one page to the next. It’s the “Big Ideas” Larry used to say that captivate the learner and keep them moving forward.

So somehow, somewhere I’ve got to find the time to tinker with these new skills, experiment with them with my students, and allow their responses, enthusiasm, and ideas help me formulate how technology can transform education. It isn’t enough to just teach 2nd graders how to do something with technology. That’s the old paradigm. I’ve got to capture the essence of the “Big Ideas” here and pass it on to my students so they don’t see these fabulous resources as discrete skills to learn how to use. Instead, I’d be happy to know that I’ve communicated they are all just tools in their toolbox to facilitate their becoming “master of all”.

Yours,

Lee

P.S. There is a similar phrase in Cantonese, 周身刀,無張利 (“Surrounded by knives, none is sharp”). My own children could have written this about their Dad during the Dark Ages of their Adolescence. Wait, I think they did!

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

Dear Folks,

It has been a week since I left to attend the eTech Ohio 2010 conference which took place in Columbus. My friend Adam and I looked forward to a few days off from our students and being able to focus in on technology use in the elementary classroom. I had some modest goals of looking for ideas, information, and support in utilizing the technology that exists in our district. The economy being what it is, the “million dollar” latest, greatest technology was only going to be an unsatisfactory tease.

That said, each night I carefully planned out my first through sixth choice for each scheduled session on the following day. There were a whole lot of sessions I didn’t consider as possibilities at all and mentally crossed them off my list.

I was glad I’d done my homework each day as  I found myself getting closed out of session after session due to the room capacity being over filled and presenters not showing up. On a number of occasions I went through my entire list for that particular time without being able to even sneak into the room. It got kind of discouraging thinking I was missing out on sessions I really wanted to attend.

For some reason, I was reminded of my graduate school days when some friends of mine bitterly complained that a class instructor was “terrible”.  I never quite understood their position because I felt the responsibility to learn was always mine. I’d actively search each class session for some “jewel” that intrigued me. Because I took ownership of the learning, even the most boring lecture became captivating. With this mindset, I found myself developing a real love of learning that I don’t think I’d ever experienced before.

Remembering this, I realized that missing a session I really wanted to attend wasn’t a waste of my time. There were still plenty of opportunities to find thought provoking ideas at the conference from a lot of really interesting people. I just had to take responsibility for learning from them.

I probably missed attending more than half of my first choices for sessions. And, I know there were a number of times I went through my entire list and was left scrambling for any available session I could attend that was near by. Afterward, I would leave occupied with some fascinating idea that tantalized my thinking on how implementation might enhance my teaching.

I’m really glad I hung in there. I’ve come home with my head spinning with possibilities and potentials. Staff members have commented that the e-mails I send out about the conference testify to what a valuable opportunity it was for me. I’m excited to try out new things in my classroom (Tomorrow’s “new thing” is using closed captioning with Discovery Education!) and pass the things I’ve learned on to others.

Yours,

Lee

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