Today my group of fabulous Digital Leader teachers worked together with me to attempt to fit the new  2016 ISTE Standards for Students (which btw are much better) under the Approaches to Learning for PYP (ATL–formerly ‘transdisciplinary skills). I have long believed that there is no need to have loads of separate documents for tech and library media because the ATL seems to house most of it–it’s just not clear on the details. So, we began. We went old-school today and I printed out the ATL statements on strips of paper and stuck them onto individual sheets of paper.This gave us room to move things around, write in questions and ideas and document our own thinking. I handed out the new ISTE standards on strips as well and in teams we began laying them under the ATL we thought it best fit with.

Lo and behold, we were able to do it. We had a convenient sheet called ‘OTHER’ where we stuck any ISTE standards that didn’t have a natural fit. As expected, what was leftover were the ‘Innovative Designer’ standards. In our conversation afterwards, we agreed that these should come up as part of our units of inquiry and be recognised there, but we’ll continue that conversation.

Our next steps are to flush out more detail for what the ISTE Standards look like across the grade levels and include samples and ideas. By the end of this school year we hope to have a document that is both relevant and used across the primary school to document and map our use of the ISTE Standards in relation to the ATL. Watch this space….