ISM Spotlight – Using Skitch to Enhance Student Presentation

This year I am the luckiest teacher in the world. I get to teach at the best school ever – International School of Morocco, with some of the best, most creative, teachers ever. Each time I walk into someone else’s classroom, I get inspired and we just seem to spiral great teaching ideas off of each other. It’s a wonderful place to teach, and since we are all collaborating, it’s a wonderful place for our kids to learn – a teacher’s dream, right? I have tried and tried to convince the other teachers to create blogs of their own to spotlight and share some of their amazing ideas, but everyone is super busy. Instead, they have each agreed to let me spotlight some of their ideas right here on Raki’s Rad Resources. So, each Friday night, I will be posting an ISM Spotlight.

This year, there are three new teachers at ISM.  I’m going to take the next three weeks to introduce you to them.  This week, we will meet Courtney Nassar, our Year 1/ Year 2 teacher (K5 and 1st grade).  Courtney has so many amazing ideas that she needs a blog of her own!  (I’m trying to convince her to start one.)  Not only does she balance the many levels of her class with amazing ease, but she integrate technology in ways that stretch her students’ thinking.

For today’s post, she shared an amazing activity she did as part of her Our City of Casablanca unit.  Over the weekend, Ms. Nassar asked her students to take a picture of someone in their neighborhood.  Ms. Nassar took the pictures and placed them into Evernote.  (If you have never explored Evernote – there is a computer based and an iPad based version, which sync.  There are also additional programs like Skitch that can be added into Evernote.) 

The next day in class, Ms. Nassar had the students “present” their person to the class.  While they were showing the picture, the students told something their person and drew on it with Skitch.  Skitch is a program that can be added to Evernote.  In Skitch, you can draw and “annotate” on top of any picture.  Ms. Nassar’s students annotated their pictures with what they felt was important to remember about their person. 

Here is an example picture from Ms. Nassar’s class.  This student took a picture of the security guard who lets her into her residence each day.  The most important thing the student wanted everyone to know was that the guard smiled at her every day.

Come back next week for more of the awesome stuff that is happening at the International School of Morocco.