Dear InThinking subscribers

Welcome to the June 2024 Updates and Notices. Please see below for some of the latest additions to the InThinking Business Management website:

• As teachers in May centres take some time to reflect on the first exams for the new syllabus and (perhaps) revise their curriculum plans, I am grateful to Todd Fedan who has created and shared his own pacing guide with the InThinking community. This can be accessed here, along with 4 other sample course outlines for your consideration. Todd teaches at Stamford American School in Hong Kong.

• In addition, a new feature ("Exam Context'') has been added to the website in the relevant section to highlight where and how a specific topic has been assessed in the external exams. An example can be found here for investment appraisal from the recent SL Paper 2 examination.

• Additional top tips and clarifications for the new Paper 3 (HL only) have also been added here. This includes advice on trade-offs, stakeholder perspectives, and the need to write a synoptic response for the 17-mark essay.

• If you're part of our WhatsApp group, you will have seen the fun and engaging revision video about SWOT analysis, created by Nathan Olbricht using artificial intelligence. The song is called "SWOT it out!"... and can be accessed here or on YouTube. Nathan teaches at Sir Winston Churchill High School, Calgary, in Canada. Many thanks for creating and sharing this, Nathan!

• For Unit 2.1 (Human resource strategies for reducing the impact of change and resistance to change), a new True or False quiz has been added to test your students' understanding of this challenging section of the syllabus. There are 15 questions in total, based on Kotter and Schlesinger's model of change management, all with an explanation of the answers to guide students. The self-marked quiz can be accessed here.

• In May 2024, McDonald's became the world's first company to use scent marketing techniques on advertising billboards in the Netherlands. Read more about this creative marketing strategy here along with other ideas about how to embed the key concept of creativity in your lessons.

• To help DP1 students prepare for their end-of-year (mock) exams, the glossary of key terms has been updated here.

• In addition, an interactive A-Z Quiz of key terms has been added here (there is also a PDF version that you can use with students in class).

• To also support DP1 students to get used to the 31 command terms used in the course, a new multiple choice quiz testing their understanding of the four different assessment objectives (AOs) has been added here. This is a self-marked quiz - it can be quite useful for teachers to also have a go at this quiz!

• An alternative is this multiple choice quiz containing the definitions of each of the 31 command terms in the syllabus. The new MCQ quiz can be accessed here.

For those who teach in November centres, there are still a couple of months before the pre-release statement for the Paper 1 examination (due the first week of August 2024). InThinking will have supporting resources shortly after the official release from the IB.

Please remember that all your students can enjoy completely free access to the site. 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.

If you wish to join our InThinking Business Management Teacher Support Group on WhatsApp, please check your profile settings to ensure that your full name is displayed along with an appropriate profile picture. Please also check your privacy settings to allow the Admin members to see your full profile. It is important that we all know who the members of the group are for professional communications. We have more than 590 registered teachers in this very active social media support group. The link to join the group is here.

For those who teach in May centres, I wish you and your students well with the remainder of the academic year. For those in November centres, please continue to look out for weekly updates to the website during the months of June and July.

With best wishes

Paul Hoang