Welcome to the first Digitalbrain Newsletter!

These are exciting times at Digitalbrain and we thought a quarterly update in the form of a newsletter would help keep you in the picture.

In this issue you can find out about developments to Learning Manager, take a look at how a couple of schools are making very different use of Learning Manager and catch up with an overview of the recent Learning Platform events.

You can also find out who’s who in our Customer Support Team, and find out about our Blended Learning Team.

We really want to hear about your experiences, ideas and news so please send anything you’d like to share to marketing@digitalbrain.com, and we will do our best to ensure it goes into future issues.

Developments to Learning Manager

Autumn 2006 will see the introduction of a number of enhancements and exciting new features to Digitalbrain’s Learning Manager product. With accessibility and ease of use at heart, we have made improvements in the following key areas:

• A new contemporary look and feel
• New design applied to major functionality
• New enhanced features in email
• A new school and Local Authority level address book
• Updated functionality in the calendar

The new homepage will feature customisable areas and updated tool icons. Teachers and learners can edit homepages and customise their own areas quickly and easily.

Email will be more intuitive to use and the redesigned calendar will contain many new features including, a faster loading text editor. All data in existing calendars will be seamlessly migrated to the new version.

A shared address book will come packaged with the email application, enabling ease of use when searching for the email addresses within a school or LA.

For further information and updates regarding these new features and ongoing releases visit our updates portal at http://updates.digitalbrain.com

Spotlight on schools using Learning Manager

Its always interesting to get feedback on how our different customers are using Learning Manager. Millfield Science and Performing Arts College and Bournemouth and Poole College explain how Learning Manager fits in with their establishments:

Millfield Science and Performing Arts College

This 11-16 mixed comprehensive Lancashire school has 819 pupils with 53 members of staff. They embedded Digitalbrain’s Learning Manager in 2004 with an ICT strategy to fulfill learning objectives to support personalised learning, raise attainment and increase the use of ICT across the curriculum.

After two years using Learning Manager and following an implementation plan carefully designed and supported by Digitalbrain, Millfield have successfully achieved their goals. Janette Webster, Head of IT, explains the impact of Learning Manager within the College:

“Digitalbrain is having a profound effect upon our students’ personalised learning. Students use Learning Manager at home or at school to access learning and revision material, receive tutor support, and communicate with their teachers and other peers. Learning Manager is a managed solution so we have been able to focus on personalised teaching and learning and not IT issues.”

Bournemouth and Poole College

The Learning Resources Team at Bournemouth and Poole College was awarded the CoLRiC Award (Council for Learning Resources in Colleges) for the pioneering work that the College Librarians and Information Learning Technology (ILT) champions had achieved with e-learning technologies. The award recognises how the team has helped lecturers integrate Digitalbrain’s Learning Manager and e-learning technologies into the main college curriculum.

Assistant Principal Quinton O’Kane commented:

"The College has a ‘virtual learning environment’, which contains on-line learning tools, master-classes and learning aids. We have to some extent been experimenting with new ways to embed e-learning materials into everyday teaching and this award recognises this developmental work."

To read more about the excellent job that The Bournemouth and Poole College have done embedding Digitalbrain’s Learning Manager Click Here.

Digitalbrain attends Learning Platforms Events

Earlier this year a number of learning platform events were put together with the help of LGfL, E2BN, SEGfL and YHGfL. Organised by the DfES in collaboration with Regional Broadband Consortiums, they aimed to provide guidance and advice to Headteachers and School Leadership teams to echo the DfES targets to provide:

• A personalised learning space for each pupil with the potential to support e-portfolios in every school by 2007-2008
• A learning platform with (at least) basic functionality in schools by spring 2008

However the events also looked at funding and deployment, training and embedding issues, and general learning platform developments. As Chris Stolberg from Learning Technologies, DfES said:

“ Learning Platforms are absolutely intrinsic to the delivery of learning and teaching. We are not talking about teaching ICT in schools. We are talking about delivering learning and teaching outcomes in schools through the effective use of ICT. Working better, smarter, faster and helping to relieve you from some of the boredoms that you currently face, ICT can do that if it is embedded. Usage and embedding are crucial.”

In case you missed some of these events we’ve summarised a selection of the key presentations below:

BECTA gave an overview on strategic plans for the implementation of a Learning Platform and the changes that this involves. They also discussed the evaluation process for the procurement framework.

You can read the latest publications in full at the following links:

Planning for personalised online learning

The self-review framework: a summary

Highlights from the schools that took part included a presentation on School Management, featuring Ardleigh Green School and Using a Learning Platform, featuring Mayfield Primary and Parkhill Junior Schools.

School Management

Ardleigh Green School in Havering believe that “together has power” according to Headteacher John Morris, with regard to managing and implementing a learning platform. The school has embedded Digitalbrain’s Learning Manager within the curriculum and spoke about how they use adaptamations and the advantages of creating a virtual staff room.

Using a learning platform

Mayfield Primary School in Ealing, has been using Digitalbrain’s Learning Manager since 2005 and has achieved remarkable goals, engaging pupils, parents and staff and supporting pupils’ personalised learning with tailored activities.

Parkhill Junior School in Redbridge let their Year 6 pupils explain to the audience how they use Digitalbrain’s Learning Manager to communicate and collaborate with another school in New Zealand. This includes using Learning Manager to make movies and music (using the online courses) and an informative online news section.

Further highlights from the events included the National College for School Leadership (NCSL) who made a presentation about the Strategic Leadership of ICT (SLICT). SLICT Provider, Michael Haynes spoke about the SLICT Programme, which aims to enhance the capacity of school leaders to act strategically in leading the development of ICT in their schools. It identifies the following key components to the strategic leadership of ICT:

• Create a vision for your school
• Self-review and reflection on progress and circumstances
• Plan a way forward; short term targets and a longer term vision for your school

You can download videos of the presentations delivered throughout the LGfL events by following this link: http://www.lgfl.net/lgfl/sections/leadership/web/events/pfl/

Digitalbrain’s Blended Learning Team

Many of you may be unaware that Digitalbrain has a dedicated Blended Learning Team. Our team has more than ten years experience producing e-learning content and have created pedagogically sound, standards compliant material for standalone online courses and as part of blended learning solutions.

In the last twelve months they have developed a script-to-screen process that allows the rapid conversion of scripts into learning objects. Writers and illustrators can create dynamic, compelling content with minimal involvement from developers or technical staff, which reduces timescales and costs to our customers. 

Most recently the content and Blended Learning Team have created highly successful learning materials for FE Colleges and the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

The Customer Support Team

Some of you may already be familiar with our Customer Support Team, but for those of you who aren’t, the Team is dedicated to dealing with all platform related issues. We’ve compiled a ‘who’s who’ so you can find out a bit about the people behind the voices on the phone.

Howard Atkinson has 20 years experience working in customer service, 9 of these as Customer Services Manager. His most recent role was with an Internet Service Provider as second line technical support. Howard has a strong background in computing and has been building and repairing computers since 1980 and has been working at Digitalbrain since January 2005 .

Paul Riccio was a Night Supervisor for Mersey regional ambulance control for three and a half years before moving to Brighton to take up a role as the Customer Service Team Leader with a leading Internet Service Provider for four and a half years. Paul has been with Digitalbrain since July 2005.

Andy Hudson has just joined the customer support team at Digitalbrain. He has ten years experience in technical and customer support and his previous roles include providing technical support to members of the Government’s Home Computer Initiative scheme, database support and second line technical support.

Sam Peters is the Customer Support Manager and has been with Digitalbrain for since 2003. His previous work experience is with the Environment Agency’s videoconference service and as an IT Programme Manager. Sam has in–depth knowledge of our products, customers and how Digitalbrain is used. He is also our representative at the National Digitalbrain User Group (DUG). You can visit the DUG here http://ndug.digitalbrain.com