Welcome to the December updates and notices for members of the InThinking Business Management community!

We are delighted to have just welcomed our 2,200th teacher member to the InThinking website - a warm welcome to Jennifer QuingQuing Guan and your colleagues from HD Shanghai School (上海赫贤学校) in China. I hope you and your students enjoy using the site!

For those who celebrate Christmas, an end-of-term ATL Activity has been added here. It is based on the popular "Tell me the brand without telling me the brand" activity, adapted for the festive season and based on the IB's three regions.

In addition, a second holiday season activity can be found here (ATL Activity 4 - Creative Christmas Cheers). This activity connects content (marketing) with context (students choose their own business to write a festive poem) and concept (Creativity).

A new feature to the site is a collection of multiple choice questions. In time, there will be MCQ tasks for all parts of the syllabus content, including the BMT. An example, for Unit 3.2 (Sources of finance) can be found here. These are interactive tasks that your students can use in their own time for revision, or you can set these as tasks for assessment / homework, with the marks added to your markbook. Please refer to the instructions via the Student Access tab on the homepage for instructions on how to set this up.

For Unit 3.2, the highly popular Tridominoes activity has resurfaced - there are two versions of this engaging classroom activity that your students will enjoy as a fun way to review different sources of finance. The Tridominoes can be accessed here.

A new exam practice question for Unit 4.6 (HL only) has been added here. It is based on Tesla's decision to stop producing right-hand drive vehicles for the UK market.

A new poster for Unit 5.3 (lean production) has been added here. It is based on the Japanese philosophy of muda, focusing on the 8 sources of waste using the DOWNTIME acronym.

For BMT 13 - Critical path analysis - additional exam practice questions have been added here.

Teachers can also download a set of exercises for use with students in class by clicking on the Teacher only box below. The worksheet includes a cloze (fill-in-the-blank) task, true or false quiz, exam practice questions based on given network diagrams, and multiple choice questions. Scroll down to the "Revision exercises - Critical Path Analysis" tab here. Answers are included for all exercises.

With more students preparing to hand in their first draft IA (or as they work on submitting their final draft), further advice on the word count limit (WCL) has been added here.

Following two recent workshops held in Asia Pacific, I have added additional top tips for the use of supporting documents here. This includes advice for those who choose to use an audio-video source as one of the supporting documents.

Also, make sure your students read the top tips on this page to help them understand the new assessment criteria before submitting their final draft.

They should also use this IA checklist to complete the business research project.

A new Paper 3 exam practice question paper has been added here (Lisa Accessories). There is also a full mark scheme included to support teachers. Many thanks to Sylvaine Plan for creating this in collaboration with InThinking. Sylvaine teaches DP Business Management and is the Extended Essay Coordinator at Premier International IB Continuum School, in Nepal.

Finally, please remember that all your students can enjoy completely free access to the site. At the time of writing, we have 21,469 DP BM students who enjoy free access. You can register your students via the Student Access link from the homepage. You may also have noticed that the filtered page tags have now changed to Student pages: ON and OFF. This allows you to more easily control the pages that are visible to your students. For the pages you wish to give them access, simply turn the access to ON but you can, if you wish, deny students access to a page by changing the setting to OFF.

Wishing you and your students all the very best for the holiday season ahead.

Paul Hoang