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School Closures & Distance Learning

Reacting & Helping to school closures worldwide!

This page is about how our services at both thinkIB.net and studyIB.net can help schools, teachers and students through the current wave of school closures resulting from the Coronavirus situation. As teachers ourselves we can imagine the challenge this poses and indeed we are also preparing ourselves for the possibility, given the uncertainty. Our web based resources are designed to help teachers and students in school and out and so we want to make sure you are aware of the options you have to use our services to help you through school closures. Students in their final year are in a crucial phase and few IB students can afford to let a few weeks go by without progress. 

Solutions from ThinkIB.net

Currently a subscription is valid for both the Maths Studies and the Maths Applications & Interpretation sites. These sites are designed to support the teaching and learning of these courses and when a school subscribes, all of the school's teachers have an account. To get the best of of this, teachers should set up  Student Access which effectively creates a sub version of the site for their class and allows them to share any pages they want from the site to students. Clearly this is going to be really useful if you are trying to teach your students when they are at home. The video below explains how it can be done and the full details and explanations are offered on the  Student Access page.

Once you are done your students can be directed to activites, practice exercises with solutions and self help references that will really help you to help them through the period of school closure. 

Here are a few examples of when you might want to have this access set up.

Sending students an an activity where they need references and links

In this example, I want my students to try this Carbon emissions activity. This will be computer based work. I want my students to be able to read and re-read the questions and tasks. I want them to have access to the google sheet that has the raw data on them and essentially to be able to use the activity page as the hub that it was designed to be. So I will share this link via the schools VLE and then I will know that students have access to everything they need and I am free to move around the class and help students. Also I know that I can direct students to various items on the page as and when I need to.

Sending students to Practice questions and solutions.

In many cases I am still asking students to complete practice exercsies by hand. My colleagues are converts to 'Onenote' and students with tablet computers and styluses! In either case I will want my students to have access to the solutions digitally. This way, they have access to both. So when I set this kind of assignment on the schools VLE, I will include a link to the page with the relevant practice exercises so that students can check their work and have access to the questions again if they need them.

Send students to a topic page 

The topic pages are written for students and so, during and after a unit of work on the Normal Distribution, I will want students to have access to the explanatroy slides, the activities we are doing and the practice exercises and other links we may have referred to. This gives the students the resources they need to review and consolidate and adds to their ability to be independent. Another example set of slides below.

  

Send students to ideas and resources about Internal Assessment

The old studies site has a massive wealth of resources that I want to share with my students. All of these are being adapted to the new Applications site and will be coming soon, but you might already want to share these examples of projects marked against the new criteria.

Solutions from StudyIB.net

So right now and for the duration of 2020 you and your students can have completely free access to either the beta version of the Maths Applications or the Maths studies virtual teacher site. You can read more about the sites on this StudyIB.net page, but essentially, students can watch video lessons on the key topics from the syllabus, review by looking at slide explanations and then test themselves with online quizzes with instant feedback and solutions and then exam style questions with video solutions. All students need to do is visit and create an account. Although this is designed to work independently from the teacher sites above, they do, of course, work very well together. Imagine setting some assignments via the teacher sites as described above and knowing that students could be using this resource to help then when they get stuck. With free access we hope that you don't hesitate to encourage students to set up.

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All materials on this website are for the exclusive use of teachers and students at subscribing schools for the period of their subscription. Any unauthorised copying or posting of materials on other websites is an infringement of our copyright and could result in your account being blocked and legal action being taken against you.