School's Out for the Summer...

The summer holidays are just around the corner but this doesn’t mean that you can’t make good use of DB Primary whilst out of school. A great deal of learning happens out of the classroom and with our average summer consisting of several rainy days we have a few suggestions on how to keep your pupils occupied and engaged over the summer hols!

Create a summer holidays community

Before the end of term you could create a summer holidays community and put links to various activities in there. You could have a community blog on which all members can comment about what they are getting up to during their time off and a forum for everyone to discuss good ideas for summer fun.

If you have any eager beavers in your class perhaps you could set up repeat weekly task over the holidays so they always have something to do. This could contain links to topics that will be studied next year.

For those book worms in your class you could set up a forum topic to describe the books that the pupils have read over the summer. They can then all communicate and recommend exciting summer reads.
 

What was your favourite memory from the last year?
 

Create some forum topics so everyone can keep in touch over the holidays, perhaps reminiscing about the last year. Perhaps start a topic asking pupils what they would like to do next year at school. Which topics are they looking forward to? Where would they like to go on a school trip?

No matter what you do, remember to have a great summer and watch this space for more exciting news about your DB Primary learning platform! 

And the Winner is.....

Thursday 7th June saw many budding young film makers walking up the red carpet for the Cambridgeshire Young People's Film Festival Awards ceremony. We were one of the proud sponsors and were delighted to be asked to present the award for the year four "Read All About It" category.

Faye Kidd reading out the nominations

Cambridgeshire Education ICT Services put on a spectacular evening which demonstrated how learning has well and truly moved in to the 21st century. Each film was made by the pupils and the quality was extremely high. Congratulations to all the nominees and winners, and a big thank you to all involved in setting up the event. We very much enjoyed ourselves and it was wonderful to see how creative each school had been.

You can see the winning films here.

Presenting DB Primary Version 4.1

Monday 27^th June saw our new release, verison 4.1, go live! This new release introduces some brilliant enhancements and improvements to DB primary which have been driven by customer feedback and inspired by increasing demands on time and resources in schools. Here is a selection of some of the new features which could save you time:

Task Mark Book

Isn’t it nice when you have all the information you need in one place? The task mark book provides teachers with an easy way to check their pupils’ performance. It presents a table view of all the pupils’ marks enabling teachers to compare results. It also carries an export function to enable teachers to export a copy of the results to a spreadsheet.

 

‘Any File’ task choice

We now have an option to choose ‘any file’ when setting a task. Choosing Any File for your task means that any file located in the My Work area may be submitted in response to the task. This will be useful when you wish to let the children choose the best way they would like to complete their work depending on their preference or ability. 

Repeat weekly tasks

I wonder how many times we have forgotten to do something? Well now you can set a task to repeat on a weekly basis. With the function of now being able to add links into the task instructions you needn’t worry about forgetting to set those weekend spellings again! 

Importing/exporting email addresses

Getting your address book in order can always be a hassle but not any longer! You can now upload your addresses in bulk from a csv or xls file. Similarly, if you would like a separate record of your contacts you can export the information from DB Primary on to a spreadsheet.

And finally...

We have seen the arrival of the wiki skin! There are now 4 different wiki skins to choose from to give your community page a little extra something. Choose from Nature, Maths, Books, or Art if you fancy adding a little something to brighten up your community homepage. For example, below is a picture of our Nature Skin.

       

Parental engagement made easy

With Father's Day just around the corner what better time to talk about parental engagement with DB Primary?

One of the keys to successful parental engagement is involving parents in the roll-out of the platform. We have a number of examples of letters home which schools might like to use in order to introduce the platform and address the wider concept of e-safety.

It's common for parents to have some initial trepidation about how their child will be using the platform, and what they will be using it for. Consequently, it can be useful to lay down an e-safety contract which pupils can agree to, addressing points such as not using 'text-speak', only logging in during specified hours and reporting any instances of inappropriate content. We can provide customers with examples of contracts to use, and are happy to discuss any concerns that pupils' parents might have – and common points which parents raise can include how children's images will be used on the platform, who can view their child's homepage and account, and how pupils' platform use can be monitored.

DB Primary has a number of great features which ensures safe interaction online. These include Safemail, a profanity filter, email monitor, record of chat conversations, inappropriate content reporting system and teacher-moderated areas. Parents can also be assured, that by using their parent account, they can monitor their child's work, contact teachers directly, and if enabled by the school, the ability to monitor their child's sent and received emails.

There is a lot of evidence to show that parental engagement improves pupil attainment and also boosts home-school communication. Are your pupils' parents engaged with their child's classwork? If not, then now's the time to create parent accounts! Contact our support team for more information or some advice on how to roll out DB Primary to parents within your school community.

Help young learners love literacy!

There has been a lot of discussion in the media lately about children's literacy levels and reading ability, and as always, your friendly neighbourhood learning platform is here to help!

So how can DB Primary help pupils improve their reading skills?

• Teachers can create pupil Learning Logs to act as reading records - allowing parents and pupils to easily see and comment on individual progress, next steps and learning outcomes
• The DB team can help schools create reading and literacy communities, promoting use of free e-books through sites such as Oxford Owls, as well as providing staff with access to a wealth of English and literacy resources
• Pupils can use the recording tool to record videos of themselves reading work they have written - improving their communication and reading skills
• DB Primary is integrated with Widgit reading accessibility tools Widgit Insite and Widgit Point, which can be used to help pupils of all ages and ability improve their reading skills
• Pupils and staff can use the forum to discuss their favourite stories and books, and use the drawing tool to create pictures to accompany the stories they read and hear in the classroom
• The forum can also be used to create a collaborate story, which pupils can write and read together
• Schools can create virtual book clubs, encouraging pupils to take part in lively discussions about their favourite books, authors, and characters - with photos of children dressing up as their favourite characters on World Book Day!

We would love to hear any other suggestions about ways to use DB Primary for improving reading attainment and getting pupils excited about literacy – anyone can contact us on Twitter with ideas!