Direct access to InThinking pages for students

Student access gives 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.

Individual students are sometimes being asked to stay at home for 14 days, in self-quarantine, if they have visited a Covid-19 hot-spot. Student access can also help in this situation. There has never been a better time to discover what ‘Student access’ has to offer.

This page and the pages below will help you get started and begin to work through these difficult times. 

Reading assignments

If you want to ask your students to read a page of this website a reading assignment will help.  Your teacher's subscription will automatically record when each student has done this reading assignment? 

Writing assignments

Perhaps you want students to write a comment after studying a page of resources.  Wouldn't it be great if these comments were stored automatically in your mark book? They will be if you set a writing assignment.

Discussion assignments

Teachers can start a private forum thread with a question and a link to a page of the website.
Students will open the assignment, read the related page and post a contribution to the forum discussion about the page.
Use a discussion assignment rather than a writing assignment if collaboration is required. In more factual work you could ask students to suggest a sequence of steps in a biological process, like DNA synthesis, or to discuss what would the best sequence of steps would be.

Multiple choice quizzes

Would you like to set a quiz of multiple choice questions about a topic? Would it be great to have the students' marks recorded in your mark book automatically.  This is what quiz assignments do.  First you must go to the bank of questions (qBank) to create a quiz. Select a topic or a sub-topic and you are presented with a list of questions. Re-order the questions if you wish, then give a name to your quiz.  Once created you can use the quiz in an assignment with any of your groups.

Start using student access

To get started you only have to set up a new group, write a group name, choose whether to filter model answer pages and click, next. The "Invite your students" web-link appears.  This link can be posted on a school LMS or sent by email to students.  Once you have set up a student group you will have an automatic mark book and the ability to set and manage assignments.
There is no extra charge, Student access is already included in the teacher subscription.

You might also be interested in the Student revision sister website StudyIB.net/biology which has revision slide shows, mind maps, flashcards and multiple choice quizzes for students.

Step by step guides to help you begin using student access for distance learning.

These pages provide step by step instructions on setting up student access, and managing assignments.

• Setting up student groups 
• Setting assignments - in student access
• Teacher activity - Mastering student access 
• Student access teachers' quiz 
• Inthinking subscriber's help pages about using student access