Five for Friday: Forums

Each week, we’ll be exploring five ways to use a specific DB Primary platform feature for you to enjoy and use in your classroom. If you’re looking for innovative and creative ways to use your VLE, read on....

This week we’ll be exploring the Forum feature that can be found within communities. This feature is great for beginning discussions and sharing opinions on a range of topics. Not only does it provide children with skills that enable them to be proactive learners, but with the use of in-built tools, it also allows them to contribute in their own way. Be it through text, drawing their own pictures or through video, the forum is accessible for all children.

 If you’re struggling for new ideas to use in your forum, take a look at this week’s pick of what we have to offer:

 

Create a discussion with a fictional character or historical figure

For an interactive and engaging way to learn, set up a forum post relating to a character from a book or a figure from history and invite the children to pose questions. This allows children to be creative but also is an innovative way of interesting them with history topics. Studying The Tudors? Why not set up a forum post by Henry the Eighth that welcomes questions on what is was like to be a king in the sixteenth century? Younger children might enjoy a discussion with a fantasy character such as Santa Claus or The Tooth Fairy-although be prepared for some challenging questions!

Tell a story (one line at a time!)

Start a forum topic with the first line of a story. It can be as simple as ‘Once upon a time’, but must mark the beginning of the tale. The children are then able to carry on the story one line at a time, keeping consistent with the theme of the previous post. This not only allows children to learn the art of storytelling but also aids good practice with literacy skills. 

Encourage School governance

A popular forum topic is one that encourages debate and free-thinking. Create a whole school community devoted to the school council or school governance and ask the children what they think should be changed. This is a great topic as it allows children to decide what they think is important about their school whilst having to present a strong argument to support their point of view. 

 Draw a picture of your pet

 

This forum topic is aimed at younger children and children who respond well to visual stimulus rather than written.  Using the drawing tool within the forum, children are able to draw a picture of their pet and share it with the class. This allows them to express their creativity and is a topic that could easily spark off a discussion in class.

Book reviews 

A forum topic favourite is to start a discussion on what children have read recently. This is especially good for reluctant readers as it encourages them to be passionate about what they are reading and assesses their comprehension skills. Starting a discussion with the question: ‘What is your favourite book? Give three reasons why’ will allow them to think about what they have read in more depth and develop their own analytical skills.

Five for Friday: Communities

This week, we'll be launching our Five for Friday feature on our DB Primary blog.
Each week, we’ll be exploring five of our DB Primary platform features for you to enjoy and use in your classroom. If you’re looking for innovative and creative ways to use your VLE, read on....
 

This week we’ll be looking at communities to download from our learning library, made by our team of Educational Advisors. Containing a mixture of teaching resources and fun activities, these communities aim to make the learning experience better for all.

Here is our pick of what we have to offer:

 DB Primary: Getting Started

Probably the most useful community in our Learning Library, it includes handy advice on getting started with DB Primary and shows you how to make good use of the features. Filled with resources, it includes how-to videos and great advice on how you can engage your children with the DB Primary platform. Perfect for any beginners.

 The Great Fire of London

The Great Fire of London is a historical community aimed particularly at Key Stage one and Lower Key Stage two pupils. It explores the history of the Great Fire of London through a number of resources and activities. Specifically targeting children’s literacy skills, they are able to write their own poem and practice using adjectives when describing the fire. They are also able to view Samuel Pepys diary and use it as inspiration for their own blog.

 Volcanoes

  

Our Volcanoes community is aimed particularly at Key Stage two pupils. Answering questions such as ‘What is a volcano?’ it educates the children on the various types, as well as the structure of a volcano itself. Children are also able to take a quiz on what they have learnt, and even design their own volcano.  

  Under the sea

Under the Sea is aimed at the foundation years. A fun and engaging community, it looks at the various different species of sea life.  In teacher resources, there are a range of DB Primary alphabet flashcards containing sea creatures, such as mermaids, dolphins and seahorses to teach the alphabet in an enjoyable and exciting way. There are also number cards to aid children in learning to count from one to ten.

 

 Christmas 

The most seasonal of all our current communities is of course, Christmas! Enchanting for all ages, this community looks at educating children about why we celebrate Christmas as well as having a lot of fun.  For older children, there is the opportunity to learn about the origin of Christmas carols as well as trying their hand at our festive word-games. Younger children will enjoy our Nativity slideshow and snowman colouring sheet.

For extra fun in lessons, why not print out our Letter to Santa template and let the children create their perfect Christmas wish list? Don’t forget to open your advent calendar too, but not before December the first!

Bulk Management Tool

We are excited to announce the arrival of a fantastic new time-saving feature! DB Primary Version 4.2 has seen the creation of the bulk management tool. Community leaders are now able to create a learning log for each individual in the community at the click of a button. Once they have created learning logs in this simple way, teachers can use them to review their pupils’ personal progress and set individual targets.

The bulk management tool will also allow you to upload files directly to the pupils’ work area. Therefore if you have a notice or a work resource you can ensure that every pupil has a copy at the touch of a button. You can also remind the pupils about events that are happening or give them important class information by adding in a blog entry, which will appear on their personal blog spaces.



This tool was one of the new features that we have developed based around our much valued customer feedback.  Watch this space for details of the other new and improved features that DB Primary 4.2 has to offer.

Welcome Back

It’s the start of a brand new school year and so we have introduced some brand new features to DB Primary with the release of version 4.2!

As always the new features have been developed around our much valued customer feedback and this release has seen the introduction of  the teacher bulk management tool, the glass skinned login page, the alien style starter theme and Espresso content integration to name but a few!

Over the next few blogs we will be introducing the new features in more detail, not to mention some of the many improvements we’ve made to the existing features so watch this space...

In the mean time if you have any questions about our learning platform then give us a call on 01273 201701

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.