Site overview
Wednesday 25 January 2023
Welcome to a quick run through of how the InThinking Physics websites can be of real use both to you in your teaching and to your students:
- ThinkIB is for teachers and their classes – including unit plans, lesson resources, student-led activities, tests with a gradebook and an online course
- StudyIB is for students to use directly – including notes, videos, flashcards and quizzes
Task 1 – get to know us
Work through our Start Here sections, which include 16 bitesize video chunks on our IB Physics teaching philosophy and how to navigate the site most effectively.
Task 2 – site highlights
Check out the Student Course, where you can navigate a full suite of student activity worksheets for both home and lab use that will enable you to move from ‘lord of the board’ to ‘facilitator extraordinaire’. We are also pleased to have published a complete Study Guide for SL and HL content.
Our more traditional unit and lesson plans are located under the headings Standard Level Core, Additional Higher Level and Options. Here’s an example of a lesson on Circular Motion – on the left of the screen you’ll see teacher guidance as well as additional student-facing materials (including problems, experiments and a test).
Task 3 - create a group
Arguably the very best (and most cost-effective) feature of all InThinking Subject Sites is Student Access. There are hundreds of site pages ready and waiting to be set in a matter of seconds by you for your classes – and all are in some way interactive. In fact, Chris sets everything that he’ll use for teaching multiple weeks in advance, which liberates him to be responsive to his students’ questions in the classroom.
Start by creating a Group. When logged in, click your name 🡪 Student access 🡪 Groups 🡪 Create student group. Type in a name for your class and submit. We have pre-selected the pages that you’re most likely to want to give access to, so you can click Next – which will generate a link for you to share with your class. Emma typically sets this up ‘live’ during her first lessons with new classes – it’s so quick.
Some of the pages are automatically available to your students, others can be given access by you and other pages are for teachers only. This can be useful when it comes to test questions and answers as you can either keep them ‘dry’ and only release them to your students when you want (e.g. so they have not seen the questions before a formal test) or you can give them access straight away which is useful when they come to revise.
NB: If you would like to see what Student Access looks like from the student side, please use an alternative browser or device.
Task 4 – set some tasks
You can set tasks in two ways:
- Direct from the page (see Student Access Tools box at top left of any student-facing page e.g. Study Guide, Online Course activities, Multiple-Choice Quiz)
- Student Access 🡪 Tasks (to see all available quizzes and written tasks that we have provided – as well as being able to set ‘essays’ or ‘discussions’)
Try setting a range of tasks for your class and then go to Student Access 🡪 Groups to check out how these appear in your ThinkIB mark book. You can obtain question-by-question analyses too!
NB: Students can browse the site themselves (without tasks being set for them) but their completed activities, scores and responses will not be recorded in the markbook.
Task 5 – connect to StudyIB
StudyIB is like a world-beating revision guide. Instead of just words and equations, every page also contains videos and flashcards or quizzes. Here’s an example from the Astrophysics Option.
We’re proud to have created a course that can educate any young physicist in the world – even if they don’t have access to a Physics teacher. And we’ve price-matched a subscription to the site with the price of a textbook (€54).
As a ThinkIB teacher, you get a free personal account on StudyIB, so you can use these resources in lessons too - all with the same login.