At the start of the 2024-25 school year, the Secondary school experienced a major change: We switched to a new Learning Management System (LMS): Toddle.
Prior to this academic year, students were familiar with using Google Classroom and ManageBac for their day to day classwork and grades. On August 20, the first week of school, reality sunk in as the chaos started:
- Email inboxes swamped with notifications
- Struggles to locate assignments
- Unorganized calendars
- Tasks turned in late
- Unclear and inaccurate deadlines
- Several clicks to view grades
Pretty much from the first day of school, I’ve heard students questioning this decision, complaining about the struggles of navigation and wishing Google Classroom would come back. How come a major change such as this one wasn’t run past the students? How come we have to suffer from this decision made by the Secondary’s leadership team?
I have been asking myself these questions for the past months and, based on my experiences, I think students should have had a greater voice in the making of this decision.
Reason for Change
When reached out for a comment on why AISB made the switch to Toddle, Secondary Principal Melanie Kempe states, “About 18 months ago we started receiving feedback from students, faculty and parents that they were having trouble navigating all of the learning management systems that we use.”
“In response to that feedback,” Kempe says, “we went looking for a platform that allows us to reduce the number of places that students, teachers, and parents all have to go to, as part of the learning process.”
“The one [LMS] that came out that would essentially allow us to do all things in one place is Toddle,” Kempe says. “So, after trialing that and touching base with other schools that use it, we made the decision to move to [Toddle].”
In short, managing three different LMSs was overwhelming and simplification was desperately needed. But did this really simplify things? That’s the irony of the change. Turns out, it added more confusion instead of resolving it. There was a reason we used two platforms beforehand: they separated day to day classwork and grades.
Training Poorly Executed
For one, this major change was not executed effectively. Despite the half-hour onboarding Toddle tutorial session that taught how to use the Workbook feature, over 46 Secondary students I’ve surveyed agree that the switch Toddle was not implemented properly. Students were made aware of the change a few weeks before the end of the previous school year and were not prepared for the challenges they would have to face.
One short tutorial of how to turn in an assignment does not nearly cover all the important features on Toddle that students are required to use daily. These struggles can be seen now where the lack of support and guidance causes students to turn work in late or miss important notes and reminders.
Grade 12 student Deppie G. says, “I do think more of those [Toddle help sessions] could have happened to support us more because you know it’s a big change and it was during a hard time [Diploma Program].”
Navigation Challenges
Additionally, Toddle has been a great pain to navigate during class time. Whenever teachers ask their students to work on a task on Toddle, minutes are wasted until the said task is located, opened, and actually worked on. This is because students are clueless as to how each classroom is set up and what the purposes of all the different features are.
Grade 11 student, Matei A. states, “This [switch to Toddle] was a highly unnecessary switch which only resulted in complications. Google Classroom and ManageBac had better interfaces and they were perfectly satisfying the students’ needs.”
This horrible change even disrupted students’ learning and stole valuable time from their class periods, as Grade 11 student Stefan N. shared: “I faced many challenges navigating Toddle in general; assignments not displaying, deadlines, grades, and especially switching classes. I had to go to IT multiple times with issues regarding Toddle.”
Students’ overall satisfaction can be quite accurately captured with the following chart, with nearly 85% of students only being slightly satisfied or not satisfied at all with using Toddle.
“There is no linear correlation as to when resources are posted which makes it really difficult to navigate the assignments. Especially if there are many, it feels like looking for a needle in a haystack.” – Grade 11 student, Trifi R.
Students also report that teachers are frustrated with this change. Almost every one of my teachers has commented to my class about different functions and features that are unmanageable, from not being able to extend deadlines on summative tasks to not knowing how to add feedback and post grades.
Do Other CEESA Schools Find Toddle Effective?
While AISB teachers were understandably hesitant to go on-record with their honest thoughts about Toddle, and authentic student reviews of Toddle were difficult to find online, The Bite got a hold of a former AISB Secondary teacher, Ian Edwards, now working at the International School of Prague (ISP), to share his first impressions.
Edwards said that when he joined ISP this year, the school was entering its second year using Toddle as a LMS. While Edwards appreciates “the pre-loaded features in terms of creating units in an IB curriculum and the IB rubrics (for both MYP and DP)” he would “gladly trade these for more simplistic and streamlined interfaces.”
Even in year two, Edwards says, Toddle has been a “headache” since it “seems developed with a mindset towards everything having a mark attached or being about an assignment that has to be done.”
Edwards goes on to say that Toddle “has the appearance of ease in terms of features and uses, and yet it takes double the clicks and the time to create something that used to be done fairly easily in Google Classroom.”
He says his students “seem to prefer the interface the school used to use—Google Classroom—as opposed to Toddle,” though ISP has no prior experience with ManageBac.
This feedback once again reinforces my stance, seeing as even experienced educators struggle with the inefficiency of Toddle. The LMS does not meet the practical demands of teachers due to its needless complexity showing the significant impact it has had on their workload.
Parents’ Lack of Satisfaction
Not only students and teachers have voiced concern, also parents deal with the daily struggle of flooded email mailboxes without structure and organization. Every assignment, class note, reminder and message their kid receives on Toddle gets forwarded to their inbox. One has to wonder: Is this really necessary?
Out of 46 respondents to The Bite’s survey on Toddle, over 75% of students claimed their parents are only slightly satisfied or not satisfied at all.
Improve Toddle or Switch Back
Although AISB claims to have received feedback from students, teachers, and parents asking for a change from Google Classroom and ManageBac, this was not perceived from my research. Based on my survey, conducted well into Quarter 2, students aren’t grumbling about the change in and of itself, but rather Toddle’s continually poor user experience. The complications that using Toddle has created in our academic lives runs deep.
In the future, I hope a major change such as this one will be run by ALL the students, teachers, and parents, to prevent these daily struggles and frustrations we had to and have to continue facing. In order to decide whether AISB should continue using Toddle, the Secondary leadership team should meet with students to discuss whether or not the user experience is improving by the end of the year. This change IS reversible and my goal is to ultimately have every student’s voice heard to potentially bring back our trusted Google Classroom and ManageBac.
What do you think about the switch of Toddle? Do you think this change was successful? Let me know in the comments below!