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Carol Rainbow, Primary Consultant, identifies how two schools have used Digitalbrain since their initial training sessions. Here three teachers describe their experiences.

This year the primary ICT consultants have been working in schools helping children and teachers become familiar with the use of a Learning platform, in our case, Digitalbrain.

Janet MacIlveen from North Leigh explains how she uses her community

Maths homework: I set online games and activities instead of sending home worksheets. I do this by adding a link to our class community page. Children log in, click on the link, and play the game that I have set. They then answer questions in a poll to feed back how they have found the homework and the week’s work in class.
Guided reading: During Guided Reading one group sometimes goes to the computer suite and does an online word, sentence or text activity, often from the BBC website. The children access this via a link I create in our class community. This eliminates the problem of children mistyping the web address and is more time efficient.
Speaking and Listening: Children in my class have created PowerPoint presentations in the ICT suite. They have then uploaded these to their web space on Digitalbrain. Some children with internet access at home have downloaded and worked on their presentations at home. Back at school the children downloaded their presentations onto my laptop (which is not on the school network) and gave their presentations in the classroom using the IWB.
Literacy: I uploaded a text into the community resource area and the children downloaded and adapted it. For example this week they changed part of Matilda by Roald Dahl into a play script. It can then be uploaded to the children’s personal web space and displayed on the IWB for others to see.
Discussions: When I needed to ask the children for feedback on our international week I set up a discussion in our class community. The children could read each other’s comments and type in their own thoughts and suggestions.
Extension work: When we are in the ICT Suite, children who finish all their work early can go and choose one of the games or activities I have put into our class’s links section. Particular favourites in our class are:

Leon’s Maths Dojo for building speed in mental maths calculations http://www.iknowthat.com/com/L3?Area=Dojo

Higher or Lower probability game
http://www.subtangent.com/maths/higher-lower.php

Egyptian mummy maker
http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/MUS/ED/mummy.html

BBC Dance mat typing practise
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/typing/

KS1 children: I created an extra page next to our KS1 class pages where we add links the teachers have used in class and would like the children to use at home. This has also been very useful when the class teachers want their class to access a web page in the ICT Suite because the children do not need to know their username and password to access the site. This is far more efficient than the teacher and TA dashing around to type a complicated web address into each computer.

Christian McGuinness from Our Lady of Lourdes writes about Using Adptamations

Following a session at Cricket Road I was really excited about the possibilities and benefits of using adaptamations in the curriculum. Colleagues were equally excited following a staff meeting demo, so we decided to roll the use of adaptamations out across the school.

We started by using the Look, Say, Cover, Write, Check (LSCWC) adaptamation, to supplement weekly word/spelling activities, as this is something that all classes do. I created links from Class Community Homepages to the adaptamations. The class teachers then edited them for their own classes needs. All our children now have access to weekly sounds/words/spellings online.

In year 2, we use the adaptamation as part of our phonics program. Three of the adaptamation groups are filled with weekly words; the others contain high and medium frequency words. The children access and practice these words at home, on a rota basis in classroom clusters, and sometimes as an extension activity in the ICT Suite.

Our SENCo uses the LSCWC adaptamation alongside Wordshark, so the children can practise their words online at home. These children are members of a separate community, The Den, so that only they can see the activities.

The children have responded enthusiastically to the use of adaptamations in this way. They like being able to learn their words on the computer, especially at home. Parents too comment positively about having school based, online activities. More importantly teachers are reporting a positive effect on children’s attitude to learning sounds/words/spellings, especially with lower ability boys.

Following the success of Look, Say, Cover, Write, Check, I added links for Word Search and Crossword adaptamations to Community Homepages for teachers to use with their classes.

We have just started to experiment using adaptamations to support some children's IEP targets. e.g., a child in year 3 is working on some high frequency words and some consonant digraphs, so the SENCo has created Look Say CWC, Gap fill, Crossword and a Word Search to support these targets. The children can then, of course, use these at home. The children access these adaptamations by links from their homepage/links folder or a dedicated online community.

I have just delivered another staff meeting training session to teachers on incorporating the wide range of adaptamations available into Learning Modules in Digitalbrain. We are currently planning how to begin to use these across the curriculum.

Using my class Community by Brigid Quinn Our Lady of Lourdes

My class use their class community for:

Maths - Homework is weekly and differentiated; we use http://www.nrich.co.uk for extension work.
SATs revision - with links to useful SATs websites linked into folders under subject area.
Literacy - Weekly spellings with occasional word level work.
Science - mainly SATs revision - again with useful web site links.
Other subject folders for topic work - for independent research, children decide the format they wish to present this - many choose to do PPP - this allows me to use the Interactive Whiteboard for the whole class to view and print of for display purposes - a good teaching tool.
Homework Folder - children post back their homework for me to mark and I post back.
Discussion pages - for children to post any queries they have with homework. The current discussion on line is making decisions for post-SATs projects.

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