EdTech as a Tool for the IB Classroom of the Future

This post is part of a 4-part series highlighting how teachers can put the IB Learner Profile into practice and expand their students’ consciousness.

As an IB teacher, you already know the unique challenges of teaching the pillars of the International Baccalaureate Learner Profile in your students. Educating a new generation of citizens of the world means rethinking the process of value, attitude, and behavioral acquisition (Wells, 2011), and this is no small feat. With this in mind, how can you “develop internationally minded people who, recognizing their common humanity and shared guardianship of the planet, help to create a better and more peaceful world?” In other words, how can you, as a teacher, cultivate more conscious students?

In the final installment of our series, we will discuss how the right educational technology tool can help you, as a teacher, achieve the ultimate goal of student consciousness.

Our Perspective on Educational Technology

Educational Technology is something my whole team is passionate about. We’ve covered it from a number of angles in the past, including: what it is and its impact on education, benefits of using it in the classroom, how to find the right tool for your classroom, and how our latest product features are taking mentorship byte-sized. But, educational technology is more than just a tool – it can help a classroom move from the past into the present.

Just as lab equipment in a Physics class changes as science advances, so should all classrooms shift with new developments. Educational technology is not a tool that changes why we learn or work to expand students’ curiosity, but rather how we do so.

Technology within the IB Curriculum

Experts on the IB curriculum have identified some key insights on the Integration of Technology in the IB Diploma Program’s Final Report, and inquiry learning, as we’ve previously covered, is highlighted as one of the areas in which the most innovative developments can be possible. This study revealed some key pedagogical goals that can be achieved through learning with technology, chief among them: learning through inquiry, learning from experts, and learning with others. Technology use in facilitating inquiry-driven learning can offer an opportunity to try new tools that directly support your needs as a teacher in cultivating the IB Learner Profile in your students.

Choosing an Educational Technology Tool for your IB Classroom

Your learners are digital natives who are coming of age in a time of unprecedented technological intervention. As a teacher, your task is to speak their language and close the gap between education and the real world by enhancing 21st century skills. With a world’s worth of educational technology tools to choose from, which will superpower our access to “human expertise” and put the needs of the learner first?

Let’s ask, which educational technology tools will support the needs of the IB learner?

Complex Educational Aspirations Require Simple Tech Solutions

Building a digital curriculum centered on inquiry, expertise, and learning from others is a hefty task, but one that can be achieved seamlessly with the right tool. Empower your IB learners to be proactive participants in their learning journeys by selecting simple tools that will give them the responsibility, power, and opportunity to set the right kinds of questions.

Limited Class Time?

The IB curriculum is packed with curricular thresholds, like how much you must focus on inquiry, which you’re already pressed to meet. The right edtech tool should be streamlining your goals, not making it more difficult to meet them with additional effort invested. Consider a tool that doesn’t require heavy classroom training or usage – something that can be explored in small, incremental tracks. Or, a tool that can be adopted by students as a homework assignment, too.

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Picking a Tool You’ll Actually Use

DO: First design your curriculum plan and then find the best-fit edtech tools that align to your core class goals.

DON’T: First pick the edtech tools you like and then design your plan on your picks.

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Usually, the selection of edtech tools does not sync with core goal setting, which results in low activation & usage rates.

Source: EdWeek

Then and Now

Taking a cue from an evaluation of technology output from Dobbs Ferry High School, we modeled the then and now of learning through the central pillars of learning through inquiry, expertise, and others.

How can you bring the future of learning through inquiry, expertise, and others to your classroom? Choose 100mentors to be the educational technology tool for your IB students, and connect them with 4,000+ mentors at 500+ companies and 300+ universities.

Today more than 22,000 students in 120 international & private/state schools across 17 countries use 100mentors to engage their students into designing their own learning journeys in and out of the classroom through our live, interactive platform and mobile application

Our world is: A physics class in South Korea with a NASA engineer; an environmental assignment group in Brazil with a Harvard/MIT, Marie Curie fellow in marine biology, about the Amazon’s natural “gifts;” literature experts like Barry Cotton and Michael Dobson leading classes on “The Great Gatsby” and the “Twelfth Night,” to 11th graders in Vietnam and Moscow, respectively. Your students, asking the questions that inspire them, and getting answers from mentors across the world.

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