Karie Huttner’s Blog

I wanted to share a page that I have been using with my 3rd graders to help them develop research skills. We start with
1. what they know
2. what question they might have that works off of what they know
3. where they think they might find the information
4. what the answer is to their question
5. where they found the answer

Awhile ago, I downloaded for our classroom iPad the app FaceJack. This week students designed a turkey using a paint program and then used FaceJack to create a talking turkey.

Check out the article about our participation in ROW.
http://veronapress.com/ftp/VPfront.pdf

I forgot to share our track that we did with Rock Our World. Enjoy!

So I’ve been taking Wilkes courses for the past two years and have had the opportunity to work with some of the most influential and digitally creative people in the instructional field like Steve Dembo, Joe Brennan, Kathy Schrock, and Lance Rougeux. Online classes allow me to have instructors that I would never otherwise have the opportunity to have.

So right now I am doing Digital Storytelling with Joe Brennan. For the last three nights I have been planning my door scene for our class assignment in my head. Of course, I can’t follow directions to closely so I created my own version.

I find that my courses cause me to push myself to try different things but I realize that I am fortunate to have instructors who embrace the creative part of technology and creation. What other class would accept a ePub as a final paper… yet by allowing me to try something different, I am learning more and realizing that as an educator, I need to do this with my students.

This summer at the DEN institute Rita Mortenson pulled me in to a conversation with several other STAR DEN members. Carol Anne McGuire was sharing about the amazing project that she designs and organizes called Rock Our World. Rita and I decided that it would be really powerful for our elementary and high school students to collaborate and participate in this experience. It has been one of the most positive parts of my teaching experience to date.

Each week my students laid down a new track on Garageband and I uploaded it to the ROW idisk for the next class. We had classes from all over the world in our group. Besides creating a song, we contributed to the following video.

But the best of all were the skype conversations that we had with classrooms in Massachusetts, Michigan, and Mexico (2 times). We are still hoping to connect with Peru and tap into these new connections.

Carol Anne McGuire is amazing and I am so thankful that our class was able to be part of this experience.

So we are a very fortunate school that has been able to purchase some iPads. 12 to be exact. So projects are VERY collaborative which isn’t bad unless 2 of the iPads don’t have the program you are using for the project. But, it is the process that makes the end product so much more amazing. Remember – kids need to have adults who model how to respond when something doesn’t work as expected. I’m becoming a poster model for this in the last few months with the iPads.

Now back to the drawing board to reinforce deeper understandings. Grow Teacher Grow!

Two summers ago at the DEN institute in Boston, I was able to experience the “Lodge McCammon”. We learned about his music and transforming them into videos. Today as an introduction to the rainforest, we created this video. It was a very fun way to show our learning about the rainforest. I used a green screen and then pulled a video about the rainforest from DE to play behind our video.