ISL Qatar is a full IB continuum school, PYP through DP, with 80 nationalities of students and 13 languages taught. Three years ago, our technology didn’t reflect that. Middle school and high school were on ManageBac. Primary was on Seesaw. Early years was trialling a separate learning stories tool.
Our school community felt overloaded with systems. Parents found ManageBac difficult, especially when their children moved into Grade 6 and they had to learn a new platform on top of a new programme. And when teachers left, their curriculum went with them.
We ran a structured evaluation of platforms before making a decision. Two of our IB coordinators, Ika Vargas, our PYP coordinator, and Benjamin Smith, our MYP coordinator, had both used Toddle at previous schools. They ran internal demos that made the case more concretely than any vendor presentation could.
And so, we phased our Toddle rollout: primary, early years, and middle school first, with high school following a year later. We’d considered keeping Grade 12 on ManageBac, but the feedback was clear: teachers wanted to be on Toddle.
We can finally focus on alignment across the continuum, not across platforms
Is what we’re teaching in Grade 5 preparing students for Grade 7? Are the ATL skills we’re emphasising in PYP being built on in MYP and DP? Is there any coherent thread in maths from early years to Grade 12?
Our staff and subject leads couldn’t answer those questions properly in the past. The information lived across different systems and documents, and pulling it together took significant effort.
With all three IB programmes on Toddle, our team finally had the visibility they needed. Our maths team is the best example. We have a PYP maths coach, a middle school maths lead, and a high school maths lead. For the first time, they could go into each other’s programmes on Toddle and see what was being taught in each grade. They found gaps and repetitions – content missing from some years, duplicated in others. Our programmes this year are stronger because of that work, and the maths team will be the model for our other subject teams going forward.
Having the IB standards, ATL skills, and learner profile built into Toddle helps too. That language is consistent for our students as they move through the school. Seeing everything mapped in one place gives the continuum the coherence it’s supposed to have.
We’re finally building the reports we actually want
Our old approach to reporting is something that many school leaders will be familiar with.
Teachers were recording grades in ManageBac, or in an Excel file on their desktop, or in a physical notebook, sometimes in more than one of those simultaneously. Then at reporting time, they entered everything again into iSAMs. Double entry, every term, on top of everything else they were doing.
With Toddle, the gradebook feeds directly into reports. The more teachers record throughout the year, the less they need to do at reporting time, reports become a summary, not a sprint. In primary, portfolios play the same role: learning is tracked all year so that reports aren’t built from memory in June.
We’ve also been working on aligning our PYP assessment scale from three points to four, so that the transition to MYP’s 1-to-8 criteria feels less jarring for families. The DP has its own structure entirely. For teachers who work across two or even all three programmes, having those different reporting formats in one system matters.
ATL grading has changed in an important way too. Before, a teacher writing an ATL comment was thinking: what do I remember about this student’s self-management? Now, Toddle AI pulls from what the student actually submitted and was graded on across their assignments. And for a school with over 50 nationalities of staff, most writing in English as a second language, the AI proofreading and translation matter enormously.
Our annual parent survey shows communication satisfaction has risen since we moved to Toddle. For parents with a child in PYP and another in MYP, one app instead of two platforms is a real difference.
AI that already speaks IB
What our teachers love about Toddle AI is that it already understands the IB. When a teacher builds a unit plan, the AI guides them through an IB lens: conceptual, with statements of inquiry, links to ATLs, connections to the learner profile. You can get that kind of output from another AI tool, but you have to know exactly what to prompt for. With Toddle, you don’t have to think about that. For a teacher who’s new to the IB, that changes the quality of what they produce from day one.
One of our most experienced teachers, a long-time IB workshop leader, tested it for an intro-to-MYP course. Even she was impressed with how well the AI held the IB framework.
The area I’m watching most closely is our 13-language programme and maths. Both involve a mix of inquiry and practice – vocabulary drills, times tables, repetition work. As AI tutors develop within Toddle, there’s real potential for that practice layer to be handled intelligently, freeing teacher time for deeper work with students.
What made the implementation work
Two people carried the implementation: Ika Vargas, our PYP coordinator, and Benjamin Smith, our MYP coordinator, had used Toddle at previous schools. They did the heavy lifting of setting the platform up in primary and middle school, running small-group training with grade-level leaders and subject leads, and being the people teachers could go to when something wasn’t working.
My advice to any school starting this process: find your Ika and Benjamin before you commit to a timeline. We phased to primary and middle school first because that’s where we had advocates.
Lastly, lean on your Toddle onboarding support from the start. We used it more in year two than we did in year one, and the more we used it, the more we realised we’d left value on the table early on.
One school, moving in the same direction
Vertical alignment, item 1.1 of our strategic plan, is finally getting checked off.
When I came to ISL Qatar three years ago, our technology was fragmented, our curriculum was fragmented, and our teachers were spending significant time navigating systems rather than teaching. We’re in a different place now.
Teachers are asking which subscriptions they can drop, not which new ones they need. Subject leads sit down together and review each other’s programmes with ease. A new teacher can build a solid IB unit plan in a fraction of the time it used to take.
For a continuum school, everything Toddle does is in service of one goal: the school actually functioning as one school. That’s what we came here to do.
