Five handy homework hacks for teachers and how DB Primary can help

As a pupil I was hopeless at remembering to do my homework. As a teacher I was hopeless at remembering to set, collect and mark homework. I never liked setting homework, I didn’t like chasing the children who had yet to do it, and I certainly didn’t like marking it!

If you feel the same, but are required to set it, here are some helpful tips and tricks to make setting homework using DB Primary as stress-free as possible.

What is DB Primary?

DB Primary is a cloud-based platform, which gives schools a safe and secure environment for staff and pupils to collaborate.

Because DB Primary is all web-based, children can access DB Primary anywhere with just a web browser and internet connection – there is nothing else they need to install on their computer!

Interactive activities

Part of what can be extremely time consuming is searching for an appropriate resource to set as homework. You then have to spend time printing the worksheet, handing them out to each child and ensuring that they put it somewhere safe (and even if you do this you can pretty much guarantee that at least one child will lose it).

DB Primary’s Learning Library contains thousands of interactive primary resources which are mapped to the National Curriculum and cover Maths, English, Computing, and Topics. Filters let you quickly choose the subject, topic area and year group to find suitable activities for your class. Many activities are three way differentiated and can be assigned to the pupils to complete. Activities are marked automatically, and scores are added to the class markbook, allowing teachers to easily see how well their pupils are doing.

Spelling tests

Spelling is important across the entire curriculum (yes, even in maths!), and although spelling tests may sound dull, they have a huge educational benefit.

DB primary offers the ability to create your own activity to set your class. You can create your own spelling test, assign it to your class, set a deadline for it to be completed, and best of all it is marked for you! You can even create your spelling tests for the entire term (if you are super organised) and you can set a schedule for each test so that each week they become available for the children to complete.

Share your opinion

Children just love to share their opinions. A great idea for homework is to ask the children to share their opinion about something. DB Primary works around the idea of class communities and offers a wide variety of tools. One of these tools is a class forum. Set up a forum discussion in your DB class community and ask each child to contribute their opinion. You will be able to quickly and easily see which children have responded and setting this type of homework provides you with a great opportunity to talk about how to show respect online whilst sharing opinions which may differ to each other.

Listen to a podcast or watch a video

Setting some homework which involves listening to a podcast or watching a video relating to your next lesson is an excellent type of homework as it involves no marking, but it does benefit the children. The main problem with setting this type of homework is finding a quick and easy way to convey the link you wish them to follow in order to find the media. DB Primary provides a great solution to this as you can post the link to the media on your DB class community page for the children to access. They log in to DB Primary, click into their class community page, click the link you have provided and hey presto they are at the correct web address!

Centralise homework

There is little point in several teachers all trying to set several different homework tasks – all with the same intentions.

DB Primary offers the ability to set up year group communities (as well as individual class communities) and so, any tasks being set can be set for the entire year group by a single member of staff.

More information

If you would like more information about DB Primary, please visit our DB Primary webpage or contact us directly.