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Greg Stragnell continues his series of articles on the use of Digitalbrain in schools

Communities are potentially one of the most exciting and powerful aspects of the Digitalbrain learning platform. They provide a structure for bringing together users who share a common interest whether they are pupils or staff, from the same school or across several schools. Any teacher can create a community and membership can be private, public or granted on request.

Communities provide members with an online area where they can store any form of digital resources related to the work and interests of the community. They provide an area where useful web links can be stored and easily accessed as well as providing opportunities for collaboration through a threaded discussion forum. Leaders and members of the community can upload work or other digital resources which others can access, they can gauge opinion through the use of online polls and maintain a calendar of events relevant to members of the community.
Communities for pupils might include Year or Class communities, a Student Council community, communities for members of particular extra-curricular activities, etc. Such communities would have a teacher or other members of staff as leaders of the community and relevant pupils would be made members. One primary school, for example, has created a community for pupils in years 5 and 6 where the members are set a challenging mathematical problem to solve each week. The pupils can access the community anytime, anywhere and can use the threaded discussion feature of a community to collaborate with other pupils. It is hoped to extend this community to year 5 and 6 pupils from neighbouring schools as well. Several schools are using Year Group communities to set homework – it’s now easy for a parent to see if their child does indeed not have any homework this week!

In another example, a community has been created for year 6 pupils from a group of primary schools to work on the ICT Transition Project. Year 6 teachers from the primary schools and the secondary school ICT staff are leaders of the community and the year 6 pupils from all the primary schools are members. Pupils can access the Transition Project resources and can upload their work into the Shared Work area of the community so that it can be accessed by all the staff. Equally important, the pupils’ work will be accessible to them and to their ICT teachers when they move up to the secondary school in September. In addition, pupils can collaborate with each other, access useful relevant web links and complete online polls if appropriate.

Communities for staff might include a virtual staffroom where school policies and documentation can be stored, departmental communities in secondary schools where schemes of work and learning and teaching resources could be held along with useful internet links, even the staff social community. One school now stores its “Day Book” in a Digitalbrain community where all the relevant staff notices can be kept and archived. Staff can access this anytime, anywhere, from home at the weekend if necessary or from their classroom at anytime during the day. Each of the Primary Strategy Learning Networks have had communities created with all the staff from the network of schools as leaders. In this way staff can share expertise and resources with members of staff at all their network schools, dates of the meetings can be posted on the community calendar and staff can collaborate through the use of threaded discussions.

 

Most members of staff will already be leaders or members of some communities. To see a list of your communities log in to Digitalbrain and access your Home Page by clicking the Smiley face at the top of the screen. From your home page click the Communities icon (the group of three blue people sitting around a table) and you will see a list of the communities of which you are either a leader or a member.


To access the Community Home Page click on either the community logo or the name of the community.

Every primary school also has a number of example communities which can be accessed and used as Year Group communities. These exist in the school portal and provide a template which teachers can easily modify to suit their own purposes. To do this teachers will need to access a community, edit the community home page and add themselves (and other colleagues, if relevant) as Leaders and pupils as Members of the community.

To access the pre-existing communities in your school portal log in to Digitalbrain and, from the school home page select  View  and  Folder listing  from the Digitalbrain menu bar. (If necessary, click the  Home  tab at the top of the screen to go to your school home page).

When you have selected  View  and  Folder listing  notice the “breadcrumb trail” at the top of the screen. This will be in the form of  Files / oxon / schools / sub-domain / frontpage.

Click the name of your school sub-domain in the breadcrumb trail and, in the folder listing, you will see a list of folders which exist in your school portal. Click on the Communities folder to see a list of the communities which exist in your school portal.

Select the community you wish to access by clicking its name in the folder listing and then, when the folder listing of the community itself has loaded, select  View  and  Page View  to see the home page of the community. This has some general information including how to edit the community home page.

You can add pupils to the membership of the community in several ways. You can add members individually, you can copy and paste the pupils’ details into the members group of the community (if they have already logged in to Digitalbrain) or you can create a link from the pupil group in your school portal to the members group of the community. One advantage of creating a link is that any new pupils which join the class will automatically be added to the list of members of the community. You can add yourself and any other members of staff as a Leader of the group in a similar way. Once the members and leaders have been assigned the new community will appear in their list of communities and you will be able to start using one of the more powerful and exciting aspects of the Digitalbrain learning platform.

Detailed instructions on adding pupils and staff to communities can be found at: http://oxon.digitalbrain.com/oxon/resources/Adding_Leaders_and_Members_to_a_Community.doc  or by searching the Digitalbrain Resource Management Database for Communities.