La Scuola International School is a PreK-8 school in San Francisco inspired by Reggio Emilia. The school believes that every child is capable of being a partner in their learning, and is committed to inspiring brave learners to shape the future.
Their technology coordinator, Chiara Fornetti shares, “We’ve always thought of our educators as facilitators and co-learners, working with our students to think deeply about the world and express ideas through a multitude of learning languages. And Toddle’s portfolios and progress reports were just the right space to bring our vision to life for our primary and middle school programs!”
“Our students became the protagonists in their learning journeys”
With Toddle’s Student Journal, La Scuola was able to empower its students to choose how they wanted to demonstrate and share their learning journeys. Chiara explains, “Before Toddle, we used to manually capture each student’s work into paper portfolios. As personal and engaging as it was, we couldn’t continue with this approach as our school scaled up. We started to lose a lot of time that we could have otherwise spent on creating unique lesson plans for our students.”
“With Toddle, we were able to achieve the same level of personalisation through digital portfolios, while also making our teachers’ lives a lot easier. For every lesson, our students could choose to demonstrate their work as notes, sketches, images, audio-notes, videos, or even mix them all up – Toddle would then automatically collate and organise these pieces of work into their portfolios! Over time, each student owned a more visual, diverse, digital portfolio that gave them a much better picture of their learning journey.”
“What’s best was that we could also make these portfolios visible to our students’ peers, families, and the rest of the school community. This helped students support each other’s journeys, teachers reflect on our teaching practices, and families get a closer look at their children’s learning moments.”
The sheer joy of being able to choose their own learning tools, and seeing their work being showcased to the entire school community has given our students the confidence to take the lead on their learning and even support each other’s journeys! And that’s Reggio Emilia in a nutshell, isn’t it?”
“We were able to create personalised progress reports, that too at scale”
The progress report templates on Toddle helped teachers at La Scuola create more personalised progress reports, at a much faster pace. Chiara recalls, “Before Toddle, we had to manually review past assessments of each student, and then create progress reports from scratch. This was not only an ineffective use of our teachers’ time, but also error-prone”
“To our delight, Toddle automatically collated this information for us! We had ready access to each student’s past grades and assessments right within the report, that too in the form of meaningful graphs. With just one quick glance, we could view the progress a student had made over the term or year, and award more accurate grades and comments accordingly.”
“The game changer though has been the ability to add visual evidence to support our grades. When we gave a student the highest grade, we were able to attach a snapshot of their beautiful work right next to it, and this has not only helped justify our comments and grades, but also made families a lot happier!”
“Families ended their day on a happy note, thanks to the Toddle Family App!”
With the Toddle Family App, the families of the La Scuola community could get a closer window into their children’s school lives. Chiara elaborates, “Unlike before, they didn’t need to wait until the end of a term or academic year to learn about their children’s progress. With the Toddle Family App, families could view their children’s day-to-day learning moments, tasks, portfolios, progress reports, and even have one-on-one conversations with our teachers, anytime and engage more actively in their children’s learning journeys.”
“Parents would get excited just to see pings from the Toddle Family App, because it meant that they were going to watch their children busy learning, laughing, and growing at school via the Toddle Journal! And when their children got back home, they could go through the Journal together, have more creative conversations about school, and simply end their day on a happier note! :)”
Chiara adds, “Even from an academic standpoint, the fact that families were able to access all their children’s previous progress reports and portfolios in one place has made it easier to apply for higher education and take the best steps towards their children’s future.”
About Toddle
Toddle is an all-in-one teaching-learning platform. Loved by 40,000+ educators around the world, Toddle empowers teachers to work together and better for curriculum planning, student portfolios, assessments, reports, and family communication – all from one intuitive interface.
