The Calgary Board of Education makes learning as unique as every student

The Calgary Board of Education (CBE)—the public school board in Calgary—supports their strategic shift towards personalized teaching and learning with an online student-teacher portal.

The challenge

To usher in a new educational pedagogy and create personalized learning experiences that cater to each student's unique interests and strengths.

The outcome

A popular and much-loved educational platform that increases collaboration between students, teachers, and parents.

Iris personalized learning

Habanero developed Iris, a member portal built on the foundations of personalized learning and the CBE’s vision to shift their approach to education.

The four components of Iris include a student learning plan, a learner profile, an educator workspace, and a resource library. Both students and teachers access different areas of the same portal, which means students can have their own space to plan for success and teachers can access a shared knowledge base to collaborate with other teachers.

Student learning plan

Here, students can write notes about their own goals, strategies, and progress – complete with the ability to add images and video. This profile is available for a student’s teacher to view as a way to keep up with each learner. Students can comment and post updates about their education, creating a timeline they can reflect on as they move through the school system.

Learner profile

The learner profile is a communally created environment where educators can write and categorize information about a student’s learning. Teachers can see what kinds of experiences other educators have had with a student, speeding up the amount of time a teacher needs to spend getting to know a learner. This has increased the quality of interactions between students and teachers.

Educator workspace

This is an environment where teachers can organize the data contained in Iris into manageable collections of information as a way to guide classroom activities. The workspace makes it possible to tailor educational experiences to the strengths and interests of each student and works alongside the resource library to help guide the planning process. Teachers can share their workspaces with other educators and work collaboratively to ensure the best possible outcomes in the classroom.

Resource library

This is a CBE-curated feature available to educators in every school. Here, teachers can find resources related to every part of delivering exceptional education experiences, including information related to programs of study and theories behind frameworks. It’s possible to search the library for information and filter the results by popularity, category, and subject.

  • 100,000 students enrolled in the 2012-2013 school year
  • 221 schools across the City of Calgary
  • 50 specialized learning programs to meet diverse learning styles, interests, and abilities

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