Just wondering about ISTE Standards and the IB.

Recently, I have attended my first series of workshops for our school administrators and those workshops are about ISTE (International Society for Technology Educations) standards. The main objective of those workshops is to emphasize the fact that understanding and using ISTE standards will enhance teaching and learning in our school.

First of all, I think it is important to consider that schools, as we all know it, are busy places and curriculum development is a critical piece of what we do. This makes sense since as we are constantly working on improving our “guaranteed and viable curriculum”, as Dr. Marzano puts it. However, when we are talking about adding some new standards, we have to look carefully at what we are already doing, where we want to go with those and we need to set up a plan for how we want to go there. This is why our workshops on ISTE standards are useful. Since I am also discovering those standards and since my expertise is around the IB, I wanted to compare ISTE standards with what we actually do through the IB Diploma Courses and the Core components that we teach. I started cross-referencing ISTE standards 3 and 4 with the IB Diploma Core, the IB learner profiles attributes and the IB Middle Years Programme (MYP) Design Cycle that we are using in different sections of our schools.

STANDARD 3: Knowledge Constructor

The first time I read the name of this standard, the Ways of Knowing, from the Theory of Knowledge (ToK) course, came right to my mind. And by looking at other IB Core assessment criteria and learning outcomes, this is what I came up with: ​

It is worth noting that IB Diploma candidates, by pursuing Creativity, Activity and Service, writing an Extended Essay (EE) and studying ToK, actually meet many of the indicators of standard 3. In fact, it is interesting to note that some of the language is actually pretty similar.

Let us look at criteria 3a:

Students plan and employ effective research strategies to locate information and other resources for their intellectual or creative pursuits.

This reminds me of the work that I have done with school librarians over the last eight years during EE workshops targeted at 11th graders. No, Google is not the answer to everything and it is sometimes hard to convince students. When the name of a company becomes a transitive verb used in daily conversations, we can appreciate the dimension of the challenge. While many students (not sure if this is limited to students…) can search with Google, not many can search well with Google. And this search engine sometimes represents the main tool to find sources for academic work.

STANDARD 4: Innovative Designer

If we look at standard 4 and its indicators, the connections between ISTE and the IB world are even more telling: the links below, while certainly not exhaustive (and a bit messy), between the IB Learner Profile attributes and the IB MYP Design Cycle are quite amazing:

So, it is quite comforting to see that, at least for those two ISTE standards, we are not adding something extra. We are already doing a lot and we can use ISTE standards as another lens to corroborate and improve our curricula.

For what it’s worth…