Setting up communities to be used as wiki pages for your class
When you were first set up with DB Primary your class communities were created. These class communities are like online classroom spaces. You can share information with your class on your community page and the pupils can access their class community to contribute ideas, complete surveys, access the Learning Library, take part in forum discussions, publish blog entries and communicate with each other.
As your pupils move up through the school and become more experienced with using DB Primary and have built their confidence with using the online learning space safely and proficiently, you may wish to give them the opportunity to take more ownership over creating and maintaining their own wiki page.
To do this you will need to create a new community, calling it something along the lines of ‘Year 5 wiki’. Once this is created, you will need to click the cogs icon and enter the ‘manage membership’ area. Add your pupils and click on the shield icon to change it to a mortar board icon. This will mean that the pupils are now leaders of this community and can add to and edit the page.
You may also want to simplify the menu shown down the left-hand side of the community page by clicking on the cogs icon and unticking anything you wish to hide. You may also wish to remove the ‘What’s on’ panel from the page.
It is of course up to you how you want to run this project with your class, but one way would be to split the class into groups of 5 or 6 and to set up a page or ‘wiki’ for each group so that they have their own space to edit.
Each group can then be in charge of populating their own wiki and creating extra sub-pages as needed.
Because each child in the class will have leadership status within the class community, they will all be able to edit any part of the community page, so it will be essential to emphasise the importance of editing only their own group’s wiki page.
It may be worth showing them that you will be able to see a log of who has made changes to each page so any silliness with editing other pages will be caught. You can see the history of each page by clicking the spanner icon in the top right-hand corner when you hover over the community page. Choose ‘Page properties’ and then select the ‘History’ tab. This will show you who has edited the page and when.
If a pupil accidentally makes a change which they do not know how to undo, you can click the ‘view’ button in the page’s history to see a previous version of the page which you can then choose to restore. This means the children’s hard work cannot accidentally be lost or erased.