Getting started: Teachers
Welcome to InThinking History!
We are delighted to welcome you to our website for teachers and students of this IBDP history course.
This IB history site is designed to help you and your students achieve success in the IB History Diploma programme.
We strongly recommend that you set up student access. This will provide all of your IB students with free access to the site within the one subscription fee.
Guidance for teachers
To help you create a successful History Diploma course we:
- provide guidance on what is required for each part of the examination
- identify the skills students need for each examination paper
- give you ideas for putting a curriculum together from the wide range of topics and time periods available
To help you teach the wide range of history topics we:
- identify the key themes, concepts and questions that need to be addressed within each topic
- provide teaching ideas and activities for students
- suggest resources
- provide links to useful videos and give teaching ideas for using these videos in the classroom
With student access, your students will have full access to the site. To help students develop the skills and cover the content they need for the exam we have set up each page in the style of an interactive textbook with:
- key content under 'guiding questions' linked to the IB syllabus
- activities (linked to ATL) to help students develop their knowledge and their analytical skills
- links to relevant videos and relevant web pages with questions and tasks
- essay planning activities
- source work activities
To help students prepare for the IB examination we:
- provide source papers for Paper 1 and essay questions and essay frames for Papers 2 & 3
- give examples of exemplar work with examiner comments
- include interactive multiple choice quizzes to text factual knowledge
In addition we also have a section for students setting out the core skills they need for studying IB History and also revision tips: Getting started: Students
Note that we have kept the pages which have teacher guidance and marked exemplars as teacher only pages.
Each month we will publish a blog to keep you updated on:
- additional content and pages that we have added to the site
- key historical anniversaries, and articles and commentary on these anniversaries to help promote discussions with students
- stories in the news that are linked to historical events - again useful for student discussion
- recently published history books
- new documentaries, podcasts or movies linked to IB history course content
- any other useful websites/history competitions/online lectures
- ideas for TOK links to History
- updates on the IB syllabus and examinations
In addition to student access, we would also like to draw your attention to some other useful features of this site.
1. There is an extra pop out side bar on the right hand side of of each page (see below) which gives you some extra options. Particularly helpful are:
- Presentation mode: this is very useful if you are showing the page on a whiteboard in the classroom
- Favourite: If you 'favourite' the page it will appear under 'My favourites' when you click on your name and so be easier to find.
2. There is also a drop down menu under 'Home' where you can click on 'site map'.
This will show you all the pages on this site. You will also be able to see which pages are accessible directly to students, which are teacher only, and which are filtered access - allowing you to have control if you want students to see the pages or not:
The pages below will help you further discover how you and your students can get the most from this site. They will give you ideas for planning your IB course, finding resources and getting started!