Introduction to the Biology site: Students
The InThinking Biology site allows student access to the learning activities and a lot of other resources for guidance and support in the Diploma programme Biology course at SL and at HL.
Your teachers can set you assignments using pages from the site, these assignments can be reading, or answering questions and other things. There is a navigation panel so you can look back, and look ahead at learning activities as you wish.
This page is an introduction to the resources on the site.
On the dashboard all of the assignments are shown, grouped as Pending tasks, and Completed tasks.
The blue panel on the left allows navigation to all the learning activities.
The site contains 500 learning activities.
There are four types of assignment.
- Reading assignments: ask students to read a page of the website.
Your mark book automatically ticks the assignment when they have done this. - Writing assignments: instruct students to write a comment after studying a page of resources.
These comments were stored automatically in your mark book? - Discussion assignments: students read some stimulus material then participate in a private discussion forum thread which teachers can monitor.
- qBank assignments: set a multiple choice test for students.
The marks are recorded in your mark book without any effort.
Here are a few examples.
In each learning activity there are usually three tasks, an introduction, a second activity to take things further and the third activity is usually an extension to the main topic material. This material is always taken from the DP Biology guide, the sullabus of understandings, skills and applications.
Your teacher will usually give you instructions about which parts of the activity you have to do.
There is a whole section of the site where revision summary worksheets can be found.
These are A3 pages of concise notes which cover something about each aspect of the topic, but not all the details.
There are model answers which can help you get a clear overview of a topic before diving into the details.
Revision lists provide all the details of the understandings, applications and skills required for each topic.
These are concise revision resources and don't include explanations. You can think of them as checklists.
For each section there is also a word art poster made from the main biological terms from the topic.
These might stimulate a bit of brainstorming or individual reflexion.
There are over fifty multiple choice question sets to use in revision or in lessons.
These are self marking if used online and can be given to students as pre-class homework or as a little end of topic quiz. They are organised by sub-topic. They can be printed if required on paper, use the print button on the top right hand side of the page.
Question sets
There is also a question bank of over 800 IB style multiple choice questions. Teachers can make their own sets of questions and print them, or set them for students to use in assignments.
Finally for each topic there is an end of topic test and model answers.
These are original IB style questions, which you might not have found online.
There is a whole section devoted to the IA. Several pages give students help finding their individual research question.
There is guidance about common errors to avoid as well as information about assessment.