Remember, Remember: November Updates
The November 2026 exam session is in full swing, with the English B exams held last week. To all of your students who sat these exams, we hope the marking gods smile kindly upon them. Here in the UK, after months of glorious (sometimes too hot) weather, the mercury has begun to drop. Coupled with the clocks going back for daylight saving time, we’re heading into the cold, dark months of winter. No such problems for Susan in Indonesia. Lucky her! At least I get to attend Guy Fawkes' Night and see a burning effigy of the man who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament 400 years ago!
We recently hosted our first-ever InThinking Think-In Short, a free 30-minute webinar where we walked attendees through the new site structure and showed how to make the most of our Student Access feature. We will hold more free Think-In Shorts in January and February, at times that let subscribers in different time zones join at a reasonable hour!
You don’t need to wait until then to start using Student Access, though. This allows you to set tasks from the site, some of which are automatically marked, and give feedback to your students. You can also track progress in the markbook. Personally, I find this really useful, but maybe that’s because I know how to use it! I’m currently teaching ‘Born a Crime’, and the Paper 2 reading and listening activities are easy to set in class or for homework. When I was away leading an IB workshop for InThinking, I set tasks for my students to complete and checked in to see how they did. I recommend you watch the video guide to setting up Student Access here, and this video on how to set tasks for your classes.
We’ve been busy creating brand new content for you, including all-new Themes pages and downloadable posters for you to print and put up in your classroom. We’ve also completed the makeover of the Paper 1 Text Types Expectations pages, our most popular part of the site. You can now find a model text for every text type, based on a Paper 1-style exam prompt.