Viking International School follows the International Primary Curriculum by ICA (formerly known as Fieldworks), and aims to foster a supportive environment not only for students but also for their families.
The school’s technology coordinator, Melisa Gigena, elaborates, “As an IPC (International Primary Curriculum) school, we saw families as a key component of our students’ growth, and were keen on enabling students to extend their thematic learning at home. However, achieving this required ongoing, effective communication between teachers and families, which turned out to be a significant challenge for us.”
“With our previous platforms, our teachers found themselves spending hours crafting emails and announcements, only to see minimal impact. Families would end up receiving several disjointed emails, most of which were left unopened in their inboxes.
“We were on the lookout for a platform that would assist teachers in spending less time on communication while ensuring families could stay informed and actively participate in their children’s learning journeys. And Toddle proved to be the solution we were looking for!”
“We could share daily classroom experiences with families with just a click!”
Before Toddle, sharing student work with families was often a time-intensive process for teachers at Viking International School.
Melisa explains, “Our previous platform didn’t allow us to share photos or videos with families. As a result, our teachers had to manage several G-Drive folders outside of the platform, manually copy and paste links of student work, and distribute them to families via emails. The process was so time-intensive that our teachers couldn’t afford to do it more than once or twice a month.”
“With Toddle’s portfolios, our teachers now send photos and videos of our students at work to families regularly with almost no manual effort! All we need to do is click snapshots throughout the school day and upload them onto Toddle. Families can then access their children’s portfolios anytime – even on their phones – and get an almost live view of how they are learning and growing in our classrooms.”
“Our teachers offered families a more holistic view of student progress through Toddle’s Gradebooks”
When the school used Microsoft Forms to report on student progress, they observed that it didn’t allow for collaboration between their subject teachers.
“Microsoft Forms was very complicated.” points out the tech coordinator. “A major drawback was that multiple teachers couldn’t collaborate on the same student’s grade book. Specialist teachers and class teachers had to coordinate when to access each report to avoid interrupting each others’ work which was chaotic and time-consuming”
“On Toddle, various teachers could input grades for each skill across subjects. For instance, a student might be assigned an A for critical thinking in Math, while also receiving a B for the same skill in Science. All these grades are then visible on the student’s gradebook, offering our families a more comprehensive view of their children’s progress.
“We were able to create more precise and descriptive progress reports for families in just a fraction of the time”
With Toddle, the teachers at Viking International School could significantly cut down the time they spent on writing progress reports.
Melisa explains, “The seamless connection between Toddle’s gradebooks and progress reports was one of the most powerful capabilities we had seen in a tech platform! It was almost magical to see how the grading histories from our students’ gradebooks would automatically appear in their progress reports as we wrote them! It meant our teachers could now easily assign grades by referring to these histories without digging through multiple folders of student work and assessment data.”
“To further simplify our work, the leadership team also created progress report templates with pre-filled learning objectives and a comment bank to go along with it. All we had to do was choose the proficiency level for each student based on the grading histories, and if needed, we also had a collection of built-in comments to get us started.”
On how she would sum up her experience with Toddle, Melisa Gigena reflects, “We have now established seamless, ongoing, and meaningful two-way communication between teachers and families, thanks to Toddle. Our teachers create portfolios, gradebooks, announcements, and event calendars all in one place, and share them with families with just a click. Families are instantly notified about all our updates through the Toddle Family App, and can stay involved in their children’s learning journeys, anytime and from anywhere. The system is so simple, elegant, and yet remarkably powerful!”
