How to use DB Primary to save time and enrich learning in the classroom?

Hear how one ex-teacher would have loved to have a tool like DB Primary and how she would have used it to enrich learning in her classroom.

Community Page

Your Community Page is a great place to share information about your current topic. You can have multiple pages, so you could have one for your topic, Literacy, Numeracy, Science, etc.

One really nice thing about the pages in your community is that you can add a Collaboration area. This allows pupils to contribute to the page (again, saving you valuable time!) Put the hard work in their hands by asking that everyone contributes a fact about your topic. On your Literacy page, start a story and ask each child to contribute the next part of the story. Post a maths puzzle and ask the children to explain how they found the solution. Whatever you do, make it interactive and put the children in charge of populating the page!

Emails

Explained the homework but forgot to tell the children something important? Send out an email to give them extra details or information. You could also email the parents to let them know their children have homework to complete and you could even attach a ‘cheat sheet’ for the parents so they know how to help their children complete the learning. 
Spend some time teaching the children how to send emails. Take time to focus on teaching them about audience, content and clarity.

Forums

Use the forum as a discussion area for your class. This feature would be particularly useful to discuss PSHE topics. Post a weekly question for the children to think about and answer and then you could have a circle time with the class to talk about their ideas. You could also use the forum space to post questions about your class reader or as an area to carry on a collaborative story.

SEND community

Set up a separate community just for your SEND children and children who might benefit from some pre-teaching. Use this space to upload files for those children to access to have a look at before the lesson. Make your LSA/TA a member of this community too so they can help the SEND children with the pre-teaching activities.

Files

Upload weekly homework sheets, spelling lists, pre-learning tasks and even homework answers (once homework has been completed!) into the community’s Files section. This allows for less printing (meaning less time at the dreaded photocopier) and if you decide to upload answers to homework, the children can self-mark! It also allows parents to see what you were expecting, too (if you allow parents access to view the community page).

Tasks

As well as assigning activities from the Learning Library to your pupils, you can also set other types of tasks for them to complete. Other types of task you can set include writing a document, painting a picture (lovely for the younger pupils in the school), writing a blog entry on their homepage, requesting them to create a new forum or answer an existing forum topic or contributing to the community wiki page. One of the great things about setting a task outside the Learning Library (for example writing a word document) is that you can customise the way you assess it by inputting your own marking scale. When you set the task, you can also include instructions and add any resources they may find helpful.

Learning Library

The Learning Library is full of great pre-made activities you can set your class to complete either during school time or as homework. These activities cover a range of different subject areas and topics and can be set as individual tasks, or as part of a Pathway. You can create your own Pathway by adding a sequence of different activities to be completed in a particular order, or you can download and use one of the pre-made Pathways! Any activity which has right or wrong answers will be automatically marked for you and all the scores will be put into a table for you in your class management area of the Learning Library. This lets you see who has completed each task and how well they did.

Another great thing about the Learning Library is the ability to build your own activities such as spelling tests, quizzes, crosswords and sorting activities. This means you could create an activity for your weekly spellings, have the children complete the task, and it will be marked for you! Create quizzes to consolidate end of topic learning and get the children doing the hard work by submitting multiple choice questions to include in the quiz!

Want to know more?

If you would like more information regarding DB Primary and how it can be used to enrich learning in your classrooms – get in touch.