Using student access
Using student access
This page explains why all subscribing schools should sign their students up to student access (at no extra cost). This will give them access to the "Student access pages" which contains a huge range of resources including questions with fully worked answers so they can learn from their mistakes. Student access will improve their knowledge and understanding of chemistry making them better chemists who can engage in critical thinking. It will also support you, their teacher, in your work.
Make much of this site available to your students
This website is primarily for IB chemistry teachers but the aim of all of us is to enable our students to realise their full potential and gain as high a mark as possible in chemistry for their IB Diploma.
There are many different ways to teach the two year course and each teacher will have his/her own way of approaching this. The site is arranged in a flexible way so that teachers can tailor it to suit their own individual way of teaching. Irrespective of exactly how you deliver the course. It is well worth setting up student access for your students as it contains much that they can use on their own to improve their knowledge, understanding and enjoyment of chemistry. It is also free to all students in subscribing schools.
The amount of access you give to your students can be controlled directly by you.
All the pages (other than those in "Student access pages") are only available for teachers to see. All the pages in “Student access pages' can be accessed directly by students except those that contain quizzes, tests and questions. These are controlled by you to make available to your students as and when you decide. None of the pages in ‘Teacher only pages’ can be seen by students. Many of the pages in ”Student access pages" contain content that is also on the teacher only pages but has been written specifically for students rather than for teachers. However your students can only gain access to this wealth of material if you set it up for them. I strongly encourage you to do this. Instructions on how to do this are given in Creating student accounts.
Once your students have access you will be able to monitor and record the marks for all the tasks you set them, whether or not the questions etc. come from this website or elsewhere, and also see when and for how long they have spent on them. To get step-by-step information on how to do this with examples see Managing student accounts & mark book.
Advantages to students who have access
You will need to explore the site thoroughly for yourself but students should find the whole of the contents of the Student access pages extremely useful both for covering all aspects of the course as it is taught and for review/revision at the end of the course.
When a student logs on to their student site they will see that all the content is arranged under just six headings. These are Start here, eBook, Activities, Assessment, Review/Revision and DP Essentials. Clicking on one of these headings will show you exactly what is covered under each heading, but in summary:
1. Full coverage of each topic and sub-topic
Contains pages on each topic & sub-topic in the Structure and Reactivity strands together with full coverage of the tools and skills needed written specifically for both SL and HL students.
Each sub-topic (there are 49 of them in the main part of the syllabus together with full coverage of tools and skills) has a table of contents at the top and consists of essentially seven main sub-headings.
Guiding Question - what underpins this sub-topic.
Learning outcomes – covers the understandings, applications and skills and guidance listed in the syllabus.
Relationships and vocabulary – covers links to the nature of science and international- mindedness and lists essential vocabulary and flashcards.
Learning slides – a slide gallery covering all the content and syllabus for the sub-topic together with some worked examples (tasks). These are particularly helpful when it comes to reviewing/revising the whole programme before the exams.
Something to think about – investigates something of interest about the topic and in many cases covers the nature of science as often it looks at the history or validity of the sub-topic.
Test your understanding - Covers three different types of questions. There is a set of ten practice multiple choice questions which students have full access to. There are also 10 'ready-made' multiple choice ‘quiz’ questions on each sub-topic over which you have control of access. Both of these are helpful as they also contain the explanation for the correct answer. Those you have control over can be done in class or as an assignment and the mark automatically recorded provided you have signed your students up to ‘Student access. If you want to make up your own tests you can chose your own questions from more than 850 which can be found in the qBank. The other questions are short-answer questions and there is a separate page with the worked answers. Other than the practice questions, all the quiz and question pages are controlled by you as to when you want to give your students access to them. For example, you might set the short-answer questions on a particular sub-topic as an assignment then, when you have collected in their answers, you can give them access to the worked answers page.
Other resources - these usually include videos etc. that students will find useful to look at in their own time.
2. Multiple choice tests
There are many multiple choice tests for each topic for SL and HL. Each test consists of 20 questions and they are useful to give as tests at the end of each topic. These questions (more than 450 in total) are completely different to the quiz questions. They cover the whole topic and are laid out in the same way as Section A in the Paper 1 exam so give students good practice for when they do finally take the exam. These tests can given to your students to do either in their own time or as a test. All these multiple choice tests can be marked automatically (provided your students are signed up to ‘Student access’) and the worked answers, rather than just whether the correct answer is A, B, C or D, are given so students can learn from any mistakes they make).
3. External assessment
These contain helpful hints on the two different examination papers. They also include example data-based and experimental work short-answer questions and together with the worked answers to give students practice at the types of questions that appear in Section B on Paper 1. Again all these questions can be controlled by you as to when the students can access them. There are also three sets of ‘mock’ examination papers (SL and HL) that students can work on.
4. Internal assessment
There is much that students will find useful including how to formulate the research question, carry out an evaluation and write the report etc. etc. together with examples of some genuine IA reports (with marks and comments) that have been submitted in previous sessions.
5. Extended essays
For students who choose to do their extended essay in chemistry there is a wealth of useful information and advice.
There is much, much more including making links between the different topics, the Nature of Science, Critical thinking in chemistry, TOK etc. etc – just look!
Creating student accounts
This page takes you step-wise through creating accounts for all your students in separate teaching groups.
Short cut to give students access to a page
This page shows you how you can quickly give students access to any page and is particularly useful for quizzes, tests and questions.
Controlling student access
This page shows the different ways in which you can change the default on any student access page from ‘OFF’ to ‘ON’ (or vice versa) for any of your specified teaching groups.
Setting tasks
This page shows you how to set up different types of task within the student access of the InThinking Chemistry website.
Managing student accounts & mark book
This page explains how you can use your InThinking online markbook to monitor and record all your students work.
Using qBank
This page explains how you can make up your own multiple choice tests (which come together with their answers explained) using the questions stored in the qBank on this site.