Trinity Lutheran College is located in Queensland, Australia, and has been offering multiple progressive curricula for over 30 years. Throughout this period, the school has tried their hands at multiple technology platforms before moving to Toddle.
The school’s Head of E-Learning, Danny MacKenzie reflects, “We had been using multiple teaching and learning platforms for over six years and they seemed to work well for us. We were able to design learning tasks and assessments and provide continuous reporting effectively. However, it was only when we came across Toddle that we realised how much more just one LMS could offer!”
“We were amazed by how Toddle helped teachers collaborate, plan, deliver, share, and assess lessons – all in one place”
Before Toddle, the teaching team at Trinity Lutheran College had to juggle multiple platforms to create and collaborate on unit plans. Their PYP coordinator, Melissa O’Shea explains, “Our teachers loved creating daily lessons on the platform we were using, but we had to manage several documents outside of it to plan the curriculum, and this caused a lot of hassle.”
“For instance, the core components of a unit plan – the central idea, ATLs (Approaches to Learning), and learning standards – were all housed one platform. And when a teacher designed a Learning Experience (LE) on another, they had no visibility on the larger goals of the unit. They would have to go back and forth between the two platforms to ensure they were covering relevant learning objectives. This made it much more challenging to establish a connection between the planned and taught curriculum.”
“With Toddle’s planners, our teachers could plan units, break them down into learning experiences, and even share them with students – all in one place! Whenever we planned a learning experience, we could quickly refer to the unit plan side by side, and even tag relevant learning goals for it. This helped ensure our day-to-day teaching and learning was closely tied with the curriculum, and also provided better structure and direction for our teachers.”
Melissa adds, “We were also thoroughly impressed by how customisable the unit planner was. As an Australian school with our own unique curriculum requirements, we were delighted to find out that our curriculum was already built into the planner. We also had the freedom to make our own customisations like adding extra fields to the front page of the planner and restructuring our learning experiences. This level of customisation and how well it could be tailored to our curriculum made Toddle a no-brainer for us!”
“Our assessments and reporting became a lot more consistent after switching to Toddle”
While the students at Trinity Lutheran College could adapt to Toddle with ease, the teachers observed that they also saved significantly more time when building assessments on Toddle. Danny explains, “Even our youngest students had absolutely no trouble adapting to Toddle because the Toddle Workbook covered everything that our previous platform offered, and the experience was just as seamless. The most significant difference we observed, though, was how Toddle greatly simplified the assessment process for our teachers.
On our previous platform, our teachers had to create their own rubrics which involved manually building complex tables for each assessment, and this caused inconsistency in the way we designed assessments.
With Toddle, we could access a wide range of pre-built rubrics and checklists tailored to our curriculum! We also had the flexibility to create our own rubrics and seamlessly embed them within the tasks assigned to students. This not only ensured better consistency but also saved teachers a great deal of time, while giving students better visibility on how they were being assessed.”
“We experienced no change fatigue moving to Toddle”
Once Melissa and Danny made the decision to switch from their previous platform, their primary concern was how their teachers would adapt to the transition. Reflecting on how Toddle helped with the process, Mel said, “We were delighted by the support that the Toddle team offered throughout the onboarding process. They worked with us to develop a product that was exactly what we needed and provided professional development for staff, ensuring we didn’t experience any change fatigue whatsoever!
It’s been a year since Trinity Lutheran College has switched to Toddle, and they’ve not looked back since. Melissa sums up, “We were skeptical about moving our entire school to a new platform, but now we’re left thoroughly impressed by Toddle. It’s truly become our one-stop shop, and there’s no looking back for us!”
Get free access to the detailed
Trinity Lutheran College Case Study
