Site Guide for Teachers
Get to know the site!
This page is where you'll find everything you need to understand this resource. In the first instance, the goal is to make sure you know about everything that is here and how to use it. Then the goal is to help the user get a feel both for the rationale and aims behind this site, how you can expect it to develop and how you might use it. I truly believe that web publishing is the way forward for education because it is so much more versatile than its predecessors and alternatives. This site is an organic resource that changes, develops and improves regularly. The user has a great input in to all of that as well, helping to correct errors and making suggestions for improvement. Ultimately, the site will develop the way the users want it to. This is not really the type of resource the exists as much in education as I believe it should. Most resources are sold as finished and static. This site is neither!
Selected Pages
Often, when I am trying to show people some quick examples of what is on the site, I find it helpful to have a quick selection of pages available. Right now, I know that lots of people are looking at the IB Asia Pacific conference in Hong Kong and so I have out the following together for that purpose.
Schemes of Work
We have started with a simple exercise in imagining how it all might fit in to the time allowed with these two schemes.... This is always a good first exercise. We think the following will work, but...
SL Normal Distribution
The normal distribution is a fascinating, naturally occurring phenomenon that has very relevant applications to understanding the world around us. When a data set is normally distributed it has some key...
SL Volume & Surface area
This section is all about the volume and surface area of prisms, cylinders, pyramids, cones and spheres! All of these shapes has their own unique properties and this section is about understanding and...
Gender gap index
This page is an activity to start a statistical investigation in to the Global gender gap index. The activity is related to the Sustainable development goal number 5 - Gender Equality. This is a very...
The 6 million question
Big numbers present us with a real challenge! How do we understand their size and the significance of what they represent? Once numbers get past a certain size this gets harder and harder. One, two, three,...
New Exploration & Internal Assessment
The below, and linked pages, aims to help Studies teachers understand the similarities and differences between the current Studies 'Projects' and the current (to be updated once the 'new exploration criteria'...
External Assessment
Below is a full, example Paper 1: short-response questions (3 to 9 marks).A graphics display calculator (GDC) is required for this paper.All answers should be given exactly e.g. \pi,\quad \sqrt { 2 }, or to three...
A quick tour
This screencast below hopefully gives you a really quick idea of what is here!
What's here?
Getting Started
This Getting Started section offers a whole host of information, tips and advice for teachers old and new to help them run, manage and get the most out of the course. There is a building section on the role of the IB core, information and administration, schemes of work and more
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Students Access
See this Student Access straight away to see how easily you can set up a class, share resources with them and more. This is where the site comes in to its own!
Assessment
There is a huge section on Assessment split in to 2 for Internal and External. There is a huge amount of advice and resources to hep teachers and students a like to thoroughly understand what is is expected from them in terms of assessment. There is everything from elaboration on criteria and marked examples, to help with managing assessment in general and revision resources.
Topic Pages
The website is navigated by topic pages. These are the subtopics from the syllabus. They begin with SL (and eventually HL) so you can easily navigate to where you want to be. Each Topic Page has an overview, some slides you can use to help teach and learn the ideas, some activities for classroom thinking , practise exercises and exm style questions and some notes about how this all fits with the Approaches to teaching and learning initiative.
Engaging activities
Each topic from the syllabus has a page for 'teaching ideas'. these are tried and tested classroom activities that are designed to promote mathematical thinking and reasoning. The activities are designed to engage students with mathematics and help them make discoveries on the own. See Percentage Perception
Practise activities
In combination with the more expansive activities above, each topic page has worksheets and practise questions - with answers to help students consolidate knowledge and techniques. There is a building collection of IB style exam questions on these pages too. Also on these pages there is a collection of 'Fill in the gap notes' that are a nice half way step that can help with record keeping and revision. See SL Normal Distribution for an example
Authors and Aims
We believe passionately that teaching mathematics at any level is all about creating opportunities for students to make their own discoveries and links. Whilst we know from experience that this is a tall order to have as an ideal, we believe we should all be aspiring to this as much as possible to try and bring mathematics to the fore and work against the stigma that has grown up around mathematics in school.
With this in mind, we find that the best resources we have ever been given or found are the ones that help us to create these opportunities. Rich, mathematical tasks that engage people from the outset and draw as much as they can on previous knowledge and intuition. These are all worth a hundred textbooks and worksheets, they are more effective than 'How to videos' of the kind found on the Khan Academy and other similar sites. Don't get me wrong, all of these resources can be very valuable, but just not as valuable as a good task.
It is our main aim as teachers to put as many of these tasks as we can in to our schemes of work, whilst balancing them with the demands of less visionary assessment tools. This is the main aim of this website for maths applications students and thinkigcse.net/mathematics that we work on with our colleague in Toulouse for students from 11 to 16. Despite the huge increase in Internet based resources for mathematics, we still find rich activities in relatively short supply. Invariably, the richness needs to be added by the teachers! We hope we can help to bring richness to your classrooms with this website.
Of course, along with this, we accept there is a need for many resources of a different kind, all of which have a role in the whole education of students. We hope, ultimately, to be providing users with everything they could need to help them and their students through this course.
A little about author Jim Noble ... I live and work near Toulouse in South West France and am lucky enough to work in a very well resourced and forward thinking school where my working conditions are fabulous. I am a full time practising teacher of students from 11 to 18 and I love my job. Like everyone else, I am generally overworked and stressed out by the everyday of the job. Along side that of course, my main job is being a husband and father to my lovely wife and four beautiful children! I am grateful to my family for their support of these projects and particularly my wife Lianne for the technical support she gives us. well!
A little about author Oliver Bowles . . I am a French/British national. The two approaches taken by France and Britain/Anglophone countries in mathematics education, in general, highlights, for me, the rigour and applications needs of the study of mathematics. France has the highest number of Fields Medal winners, along with the USA (in 2020), but also has, anecdotally, more young people put off by the abstract/ "can or can't do it" nature of mathematics, as they see it/experience it in school (I haven't taken the time to check this statistically in the PISA or TIMSS questionnaire results on young people's emotive attitude towards mathematics), .
Ultimately, we hope to meet both needs, with a particular attention to the types of "rich tasks" described above.
Note: the success at elite level mathematics may also be related to the "Prépa" system and the "Grandes Ecoles" which, (people who have been through this system tell me) greatly develop young adult's problem-solving capacities.