I have recently been looking at the google analytics's for "student pages" and was surprised to see how few students are using the site. If all the 90 schools using the site were doing what I do then there should be about 2000 hits a day and there aren't. It seems that schools aren't using the full potential of the site so I thought I'd  advertise the possibilities again.

Firstly there have been some changes and the student site is much easier to navigate than before.

They don't get all the tabs but do get the full menus on the left. These are not all active though only the ones that you have selected from the list of pages that I think are OK for students to see. This doesn't include all the examples of research questions for design experiments. You shouldn't give students access to exemplar lab reports if you are going to use the lab for assessment for example so be careful.

 

Practical work

I don't use any paper copies of worksheets in my lab. The students access the worksheet from this website. I of course don't give my students access to the exemplars unless they are non assessed ones. As the website editor I have actually made it impossible for any school to give their students access to the teachers notes for assessed practicals as I don't want to have my exemplars being passed from student to student. I also don't want my students to have access to the lists of possible research questions in the section on design experiments so these are teachers only too.

example

 

MC questions

The multiple choice questions are meant for students. I give my students access to them all year but they are most useful towards the end of the course as revision aids. An alternative would be to open them weekly as homework exercises. There are about 60 of these exercises covering all of the core and AHL, perfect practice for paper 1.

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Problems

Over the past year I have been writing 2 problem sheets each week for my students. You will have seen them appearing on the what's new banner. They get a couple of days to do them (in my dreams) and then I give them access to the solutions. This is to give them some practice of the sort of problem solving required for papers 2 and 3.

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solutions

 

Exam solutions

During revision students practice past papers. The IB marks schemes although useful are sometimes a bit difficult for a student to follow, for that reason I decided to produce my own worked solutions that I make available to my students at the end of term.

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