The International Baccalaureate’s Digital Space Initiative (DSI) aims to enhance the experiences and functionality that the IB offers its community in an online, web-based environment.
The organization hopes to integrate digital technology more and more into the IB experience, in line with the increased use around the world of web-based communities to share educational and social experiences.
A result of DSI will be a more cohesive, more effective and more user-friendly web presence by aligning existing websites. For example, an IB teacher will eventually see relevant, highlighted news, resource and e-newsletter links when logging into the IB website, and will have convenient access to sites such as the OCC and the Community Theme site.
Over the course of the next three years, the DSI will:
- Provide new tools and online spaces that can be used by IB schools, teachers and students to enhance teaching and learning.
- Offer tools and IB web-based spaces for individual and course-related publication, collaboration, sharing and community-building (i.e. blogs, wikis, discussion forums, file-sharing, individual profiles, the ability to form groups and other social networking functionality).
- Be available globally, allowing schools, classes and individual students to share, collaborate, and work with each other.
- Foster an academic environment in which students can develop and refine their scholarly web and digital literacy skills.
- Provide opportunities for classes and individual students to have authentic, global interactions.
Academic input and feedback will be critical to the success of the Digital Space Initiative. Stakeholders will be asked to participate throughout every phase of the initiative, and are currently being organized to provide ideas, feedback and to eventually act as “testers” of the new online experiences that the DSI is creating.
For more information, contact Marla Gerein, the IB’s head of virtual communities.
