130 people filled in the survey about IB Educator Chats. You can see the responses above.
Summary: People are pretty flexible! There is a preference for workshops and webinars, over discussions. People want sessions to run around 45 minutes, and have a preference for Zoom. Most people want sessions in the evenings and over the weekend (including Fridays). Most of the people who filled in the form are in Asia or North America! There's a preference for MYP sessions, but also an interest in other sessions. Basically, you are all wonderfull and flexible and willing to try lots of things!

Based on the feedback - we will have our first IB Educator Chat session running from Friday 7th of May to Sunday 9th of May! As people are all over the world (in different time zones) I've added the option for people to run a session twice.  Most of the participants are in North America of Asia, but I am in Europe, so I am inbetween the two time zones - this makes it easy for me to run sessions that suit both groups, but I know it is is not easy for others, so there is no pressure for those signing up to run a session!

I've changed the Google Form, where people express an interest in running a session, so that I can just share the form responses! This will make it much easier for me and also means that when someone chooses to run a session, it will be added to the list instantly!

If you are interested in running a session - please fill in this form.
If you want to see what sessions people have already signed up to run - look here!

Reminder: All sessions are unofficial,  informal, peer-to-peer. No one is representing the IB.

IB Educator Chat started in March 2020 as a way for teachers to share their experiences during the pandemic. Over 100 sessions were run by IB educators from across the world. This was an informal, peer-to-peer iniative, which allowed teachers to share their ideas, best practice and to collaborate. Now we are ready to revive it!

When it initial started it was going to be a one off Zoom chat, to share how our schools are dealing with the pandemic. From that first call I could clearly see a need for more chats! At the time I was working full-time, while writing two books, doing other bits and pieces for different companies AND it turned out I was prengnant (and did not have an easy first trimester). Running IB Educator Chat was definitetly rewarding, but at sometimes overwhelming, as I had sessions running every day at all different times, would often wake up to many texts or emails with people needing technical support or other support, and because I was teaching full-time and working on my books, I hardly got to attend any of the sessions myself! I'm now on maternity leave, with a healthy baby boy, and have more time to dedicate to running IB Educator Chat.

There will be some small changes - to make it easier to manage and hopefully smoother for people who are attending on leading sessions! Instead of having sessions running all the time, I will do them in bursts. This might be one week, once a month, or it might be three days, every two weeks - it really depends on what everyone else thinks would work best! I also will not have people sign up to attend the chats, as this was hard to manage - however, if people who are attending a session want to gather emails before hand, I will provide a doc for participants to fill in.

Before kicking offIB Educator Chat again, I'd love to gather your thoughts and ideas to help me make it run more smoothly. Please fill in this Google Form! As soon as I have gathered a significant number of responses, I will share the responses on this blog and will open up the event for people to volunteer to run sessions!

For upcoming subject retreat days I put together a presentation about assessment. It includes diagnostic, formative and summative, as well as showing teachers how to use G.R.A.S.P.S. to create authentic/meaningful tasks.  This is just a short presentation and there is so much more I could add, but I didn't want to overwhelm.
Link here.

I worked with the subject coordinator for math, and she said she is keen to focus on GRASPS for her upcoming assessment day. I had a stab at turning some activities/ideas/themes from some of the textbooks they are using into GRASPS activities. Any feedback would be wonderful, as I am not a math teacher! Consider these examples a work in progress! GRASPS for Math.

I made a short presentation about inquiry questions for our upcoming subject retreat days. From what I have seen in my school, along with various others is:

• teachers struggle with writing debatable questions
• some teachers throw in 25+ factual questions, because they write all the content/skills/knowledge of a unit into a factual question. These should be included in the learning process. Inquiry questions are broad and link to the statement of inquiry
• Often teachers don't use the key or related concepts to help them write any of the inquiry questions. I tend to go here first - for example, if my key concept was 'community', then I would have: Factual - what is a community? Conceptual: How does community shape who you are? Debatable: Is belong to a community more important that individuality?
• Teachers don't use them to scaffold the learning. When someone first told me to use them in this way it was such a game changer for me! I show all the questions at the start of the unit, but we first unpack/answer the factual questions. We cover the conceptual towards the middle of the unit, and we end with a reflection linked to our debatable question
• Some teachers write way too many inquiry questions to possibly cover! I always try to go for the model three factual, two conceptual and one debatable. Of course this is not concrete and each time I cover a unit, students generate additional questions.
• Use debatable questions that really get the students to argue and debate! They can also be used to help make Service/Action connections!
• Here's the presentation.​

I put together a presentation about statements of inquiry for some upcoming subject retreat days. Hopefully this is useful to you.LINK.

I put together this website to help my students prepare for their eAssessments.
I've just updated it today with the PCUP material which the IB just released. For Arts and Design, students can see the full PCUP.  For Language Acquisition I don't provide the links, because for some of the tasks, they should see the prompts only ten minutes before the assignment (oral exams). Subject specific information is under 'May 2021 Exams and E-Portfolios'.
Here's our website - feel free to use/copy.

A short session I made for one of our advisory classes, focussing on Research AtLs (1. Use critical literacy skills to analyse and interpret media communications 2. Collect and analyse data to identify solutions and make informed decisions).
The students play a game developed by "The Clemson University Media Forensics Hub" called Spot the Troll. They then have a class discussion and also there is a prompt to 'take action'.
Feel free to make a copy.