Distance Learning and Blended Learning
Blended learning is the epitome of integrating technology into your daily teaching. When schools have to close for a variety of stressful reasons, there is an opportunity to think about how you use technology to achieve a continuity of learning. Are you maximising these opportunities? With over 70% of its content available to students, the ESS Inthinking website can be used to supplement and support a change in your paradigm. Give it a go and see how your students respond. Once they know their way around the site, they will probably feel very supported and engaged.
Direct access to InThinking pages for students
Student accessgives students direct access to the Inthinking site, as part of a teacher subscription. It enables teachers to set assignments, using learning activities from selected pages of the site. Teachers can easily create groups of students, set work for all students in the group, and monitor the activity of students in each group.
Schools that have been forced to close temporarily due to the new coronavirus, Covid-19, are making extensive use of ‘Student Access’. These schools need to engage their students in distance learning and the Inthinking website is proving to be a very useful tool for this.
There has never been a better time to discover what Student Access has to offer.
IB Graduate's Guide to Inthinking ESS Website
- Encourage students to use the Topic sections as an interactive textbook. These are concise summaries of the ideas in a topic, supported by embedded videos.
- Ask students to produce questions for each other based on the content. Start by focusing on lower-level command terms like State, Identify, and Outline. Students can even make quizzes for each other using Quizlet.
- Use the Activity sections of each Sub-topic to set activities for students to complete either individually or in groups. Many activities have a suggested table to support learning. These can be copied into an online document, such as a Google Doc, and completed online and shared in the class and with the teacher.
- In the Activity sections, there are several Review activities for students to use to check their understanding.
- In the Activity sections, there are videos to watch with guiding questions, e.g. 2.1 Whitebark Pine Trees and Clark's Nutcrackers
- Think laterally; some activities can be adapted for the online environment.
- Could your class complete a debate such as Speciesism - The Case of The Octopus using a Google Meet or by recording an audio pitch using the computer's sound recorder?
- Could students attempt to produce a system diagram, e.g. 7.1 Societies Choose How to Use Resources, and then send you a photo of their attempts?
- Produce a case study presentation and do a screencast to send you with Quicktime (Mac) or Loom (Windows), e.g. 6.2 Climate Change Impacts on Ecosystems and Societies
- For "practical work" there are many activities which can actually be done online or independently. Here are just a few:
- Collecting and analysing data 2.1 Yellowstone National Park Wolves
- Collecting data
- Data analysis Water Temperature and Dissolved Oxygen
- Measuring Change 1.2 Burning Candle as a System
- Creating surveys using this guidance Value Surveys
- Learning how to write methods Improving Planning Skills - The Sandwich Challenge
- Have students test themselves using the 2024 Quizzes
- Use the flashcards in the ESS Quizlet Links
- Read about How is ESS Assessed?
- Read the advice on writing part c essays The 9 markband essay Question and review example essay responses Essay Questions Part C - what's needed
- Complete the A3 Revision Posters
- Adapt the Revision Ideas
- Prepare Sketch Notes
- Send your students exam questions to practice via your VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) and have them send you their responses. Ask them to time themselves.
- For slower review strategies, follow through on the review podcasts and videos.
This graphic from Jennifer Chang Watall suggests what a week of distance learning might look like.
As always, there may be ideas that you have to enrich the site and make it more useful for this rather odd time in our schools. Please feel free to send me any suggestions you have - and I hope that we can make this as supportive a system as possible for our students.
Zoe and Laura