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The ambition to provide every learner in the country with a
personal online learning space was outlined in the government's recent e-strategy
white paper.
The Oxfordshire Digitalbrain Portal, the personalised online learning space
for all pupils and teachers, has been available to schools this term and several
schools are beginning to make good use of this valuable resource.
Two colleagues describe their experiences with the Digitalbrain VLE so far.
Beth Rolfe from Rush Common Primary School in Abingdon, was one of those involved in the pilot phase of the Digitalbrain implementation in Oxfordshire. Here, she relates some of her experiences using the VLE so far.
The Answer is Digitalbrain
What is the question?
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Q. My folders are bulging with the numerous sheets of paper that are handed out to staff on a regular basis. Yet I never have the information in the right place. If I leave a document at home I need it in school. If I keep it in school I need it at home. What do I do? A. Store it on Digitalbrain. Q. How do I get the worksheet I prepared at home into school without having to carry my laptop to and fro each day? A. You could email it to yourself, or you could put it on a memory stick. Yes, but you could also put it into your webspace on Digitalbrain. Q. What do I do if my class starts a piece of work at school on the computer in school and I want them to finish it at home? A. Tell them to upload it into their webspace on Digitalbrain. Q. How do I enable children to access websites with complicated urls? A. Create a link on Digitalbrain.
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These are some of the ways in which we have made use of Digitalbrain at Rush Common School in the 10 months since we became one of Oxfordshire’s pilot schools.
Stage 1 consisted of allowing the children to edit their home pages. The first group to do this was Year 2 (my year group). They wrote a short paragraph about themselves and inserted a photograph.
Next I created a community for each year group where worksheets, weblinks, photos, etc. could be placed to allow the children easy access both at home and at school.
Following the ICT conference in June I learnt how to change the school homepage using Learning Modules and how to create “adaptamations” where children can practise their weekly spellings using an electronic version of look, cover, write and check.
This term, as a school we have started on the path towards a paperless office and staffroom. We’re not there yet, but the creation of a Virtual Office and Virtual Staffroom community is the first step. School policies, risk assessment forms, report templates, etc. can be stored there, where they can be found much more easily than by searching through a multitude of files. One member of staff was able to read at home the minutes of a meeting 10 minutes after it had finished at school!
Where next?
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One of our TAs has set up a community for more able students within the school and a community has just been created for the North Abingdon partnership of schools to enable us to share Maths resources. The opportunities are endless! Can it work in any school? Yes it can, but you need an enthusiastic person to drive it forward and a supportive headteacher too!
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Roger Higton, Head of ICT at Lord Williams's School in Thame,
was also involved in the pilot phase. He describes his experiences so far.
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The ICT Faculty has “bitten-the-bullet” and adopted Digitalbrain as one of the main ways of delivering the ICT curriculum across Key Stages 3 to 5. It has meant a lot of work but, given only one period a week for curriculum time at KS3 and KS4, Digitalbrain has had a major impact in empowering and engaging students making them more proactive and in control of their own learning. It has, also, provided a means of enhancing home/school links. At Lord Williams’s School we have found that using Digitalbrain has had many advantages – just go to http://lordwilliams.oxon.digitalbrain.com to see the ICT Faculty playing their part in the school’s literacy drive. The School’s Digitalbrain home page also acts as a front for other information including help files produced using Macromedia Captivate (which is great fun to use). The main impact, however, has been on the ICT curriculum itself. With the imminent arrival of on-screen testing (as part of the end-of-key stage tests in Year 9) we have used Digitalbrain to host all the resources for our Year 9 course. In this way we can mimic the style of the test where all instructions are conveyed electronically. At the moment the students are following Unit 9.1 and instructions are e-mailed to students and assignments set within the context of an organisation wanting a new theme park ride. The students know it is me writing the e-mails, but they enjoy the scenario and take it very seriously. For some students, it would seem, e-mail is a safer option for asking questions than putting their hands up in class and I have been impressed to see how many are logged on in the evening. I too can choose when to answer; I can answer at a time convenient to me. Now my students do not have to wait from one week to the next to have a question answered and I can chase them for late homework (using Digitalbrain to communicate with members of a course is very easy, especially if they have arranged for their Digitalbrain e-mails to be forwarded to their OCN account).
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In Year 10 our students follow either an ECDL course or a GCSE short course, both one lesson a week. Uploading all our ECDL on-line resources onto Digitalbrain (use WebDav – it makes life much easier) has meant that students can access them at any time and many of the less able students choose to continue with their ICT work at every opportunity. We have found an additional bonus that the teaching assistants assigned to work with the ECDL group are logging on as members of the course and raising their own skills. The pressure has been such that we will soon be running the ECDL course for the staff at Lord Williams’s. For the students who are following the GCSE short course we use Digitalbrain to supplement materials from their text book. Each part of the syllabus is divided into four areas:
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Setting up these areas was time consuming but once a style and layout was developed it was easy to copy and paste and then edit the content and web links. I do think that it has enabled us to be more creative and give a wider range of learning opportunities. It is also giving us experience in developing the idea of e-portfolios. We have adopted a similar approach with our AS and A2 courses – Digitalbrain has allowed us to embed worksheets, web resources, instructions, deadlines, marks and feedback into one place. This has been communicated to parents through Take Me Home (the school’s newsletter), so that they ask their youngster to log on and see what homework has been set and whether it has been handed in and what marks and comment it received. Hopefully, we will use Digitalbrain to enhance home/school links. What are the drawbacks? Well, initially, it does take time to develop material, but now it is surprisingly quick and the help files and help desk are very efficient. We have had a few problems getting accounts for new students – we are still waiting for Year 7. All these teething issues are to be expected, but as a teaching and learning tool it is becoming indispensable.
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