2009, Block 4: Saturday 10:45-12:00

Elizabeth Dallaire knows that education for girls is crucial for the developing world to achieve better health, economic empowerment, and stability.  As a UNICEF Canada Ambassador and spokesperson, she works tirelessly to ensure that the importance of education, particularly for girls, is understood.  To this end, Ms Dallaire works with the Kenya Girls scholarship program for nomadic girls, whi

It is not enough to talk about other countries and cultures. A new world and new thinking requires that we interact with others from diverse backgrounds. When teachers participate in short-term international immersion experiences, they bring to their classrooms a richness that cannot be found in books.

Québec’s bilingual and multicultural character makes it an ideal choice for both French and English speaking students from around the world. Québec’s institutions of higher education, located in both urban and rural settings, are renowned for the quality of their degrees and offer a vast choice of programs in one, two, or several languages.

This session will present the IB Student World Conference, a gathering of IB students from across the globe. The 2010 conference will center on the IB community theme, Sharing Our Humanity, and engage students using methods from TOK and CAS. Co-sponsored by the Northwest Association of IB World Schools and Oregon State University, the conference will be in Corvallis, OR in August of 2010.

This session will bring together ideas for conducting pre-, formative, and summative assessments, all with the purpose of determining the quality of and improvement in students' abilities to inquire. John Barell will focus on gathering evidence so that we can understand and communicate inquiry to students, teachers, administrators, parents, and state curriculum planners.

IB serves nearly 3000 schools and 750,000 students worldwide, through three main regional offices – the Americas, Asia Pacific, and Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. The three directors of these offices will come together in this session to share what is going on in their part of the IB world.

This interactive session will address the challenge of supporting students with a wide range of academic backgrounds to achieve success in the IB program. Presenters from Rampart High School will share successful intervention ideas and research findings that address the efficacy of these interventions as well as allow participants to analyze individual student profiles.

The IB organization is undergoing considerable change as it prepares for the growth anticipated for 2020. Alongside this restructuring and reorganization, the IB academic staff is also preparing to meet the challenges of 2020. Judith Fabian, Academic Director for the IB, will provide an overview of developments in all IB programmes and how they will be supported by the organizational changes.

Since 2003, the University of British Columbia (UBC) has worked closely with the local IB community to obtain a better understanding of the unique assessment and grading practices of the Diploma Programme. These efforts, coupled with comparative data on student success in the first year of university, have resulted in UBC refining its method of evaluating IB students for admission.

Atlanta International School, with the support of the Center for the Advancement and Study of International Education (CASIE), recently completed a survey of instructional technology in international and IB schools to gain further understanding of the ways schools are using technology and how technology can be used to best support student learning.