5 reasons why IB candidate schools love Toddle
Ever bumped into an old friend while in a new country? You catch up over coffee, they tell you about their experience moving in, even introduce you to new friends and cuisines, and suddenly, the place that seemed so “new” and “overwhelming”, starts to feel like home.
That’s the kind of joy, comfort, and hope we want Toddle to bring to you as you step into the world of IB. 😊
Designed by experienced IB educators, Toddle understands and caters to the specific needs of teachers and school leaders who are new to the curriculum, and has helped over 150 candidate schools successfully complete their authorisation visits so far.
In this article, we deep dive into the 5 key structures of Toddle that such candidate schools benefited the most from (along with snippets from their success stories!)
1. All aspects of teaching and learning connected in one place
Implementing a curriculum as rigorous and holistic as the IB entails several interconnected processes. You need to constantly draw meaningful connections between the planned and taught curriculum, unit plans, student work, assessments, progress reports and more. Using multiple platforms to manage these processes means that you need to draw such connections manually, and this can get overwhelming very quickly.
With Toddle, you can connect planning, portfolios, assessments, reports, and family communication – all on one intuitive interface:
2. A guided interface for curriculum planning
Planning for inquiry-based learning is one of the top priorities in the IB, but is uncharted waters for most candidate teams. With their IB documents, state/national curriculum overviews, anecdotes from previous units, evidence of learning, and unit planners, all scattered across different platforms, we’ve seen that new educators often find it challenging to :
- Identify which curricular elements to pick for a unit
- Establish connections between the different elements they pick
Built especially with IB educators in mind, Toddle’s planners bring all the information you need in one place, providing a more visual and guided planning experience:
What’s more, your Toddle Buddy (your go to person for all things Toddle – also an experienced IB educator) will work closely with you to help you finalise scopes and sequences, subject strands, and also support you with timely PD resources throughout your journey with Toddle.
3. On-the-go professional development for your team
Even while the internet is filled with professional development courses for new educators, experience tells us that candidate schools often need to hit the ground running. You could have saved up hundreds of PD articles and guides to “eventually get to”, but somehow they rarely seem to make it to the top of your to-do-list, and when they do- you don’t know where to begin!
This is why candidate schools love that Toddle supports PD-on-the-go!
With PD resources embedded in every module of Toddle, you can now develop a deeper understanding of the IB as you go about your everyday teaching and learning. Learn tips for drafting the central idea as and when you plan a unit, access prebuilt comment banks and sentence starters as you draft progress reports, and if you ever need inspiration for your units, head to Toddle Community : a library of high quality IB units and learning experiences built by experienced educators from around the world!
How Toddle supports ongoing professional development
Here’s how Toddle helped a candidate PYP team develop a hands-on understanding of the curriculum.
4. Insights on horizontal and vertical balance of curriculum
One of the key requirements for IB schools is to maintain horizontal and vertical balance in their curriculum (that is, to ensure an equal distribution of skills and concepts across themes (horizontal) and grade levels (vertical)).
For schools using makeshift tech platforms like the G-Suite, this often means sifting through complex spreadsheets to manually calculate which curriculum elements have been covered and how many times. Imagine doing this while you’re still warming up to what a ‘balanced curriculum’ should look like!
With Toddle, you can access realtime curricular analytics across grade levels, at the tap of a button. Every time you create a unit plan, Toddle will automatically scan through all your units, identify the curricular elements you’ve touched upon, and update the analytics accordingly. And so, with one quick look at Toddle’s planning insights, you’ll see which objectives, concepts, ATLs, and learner profile attributes you have covered and which ones you’re short on, and plan a more balanced curriculum.
Hear as PYP coordinator, Mark Krabousanos, talks about how he had to turn a data manager to get curricular insights on Google. With Toddle, he now spends his time reflecting on planners, rather than updating them.
5. A dashboard to manage evidence collection for your authorisation visit
The single most important goal for a candidate school is IB’s authorisation. In our experience, we’ve seen schools spend up to 6 months (creating 8,000+ documents!) preparing for their IB visits. With Toddle’s built-in authorisation module, all you will need is 2-3 weeks!
The dashboard helps you track all your requirements in one place. You can view the list of standards and practices, easily tag suitable evidence for each one, collaborate with your team to review these evidences, and finally give the visiting team one-click access to all your documentation.
In a nutshell, candidate schools like yours love Toddle simply because we’re like the familiar, reliable friend in your new territory. The friend who has experienced the IB first hand, wants to help you along as they explore new ways of teaching and learning, simplify you work, bring you the right resources at the right time, and make you feel right at home with the IB!
Want to find out more about how Toddle can help your school during candidacy? How about you write to us at misbah@toddleapp.com so we can chat over a cup of coffee? 😇
