Brain Pop

  While at the Alaska State Technology in Education conference I attended two different sessions presented by Brainpop.  Most of us know them as the people who produce those movies with the quizzes you can show your kids.  The movies star a cartoon young man and his robot.  The idea for most teachers is that you show the movie before giving the quiz to your students.

There are three versions most people are concerned with.  BrainPOP,  BrainPOP jr (k-3) and BrainPOPELL but I am looking at only at BrainPOP for this entry because I'm a high school teacher.  The first session highlighted the huge number of games offered so you can increase the gamification of your classroom while the other session was designed to discuss BrainPOP certification.

Through each session, I learned more about the extensive material offered by this site.  In addition to movies and quizzes, students can use the movies to create a graphic organizer of the material. They are even allowed to insert portions of the movie into the organizer.  As we know, research indicates that it is good for students to create graphic organizers as a way of helping them understand and learn the material.

Students can also make their own movie where they can answer a preset letter or a letter of their own on the topic.  They have everything they need to create the answer, just like the movies provided by BrainPOP.  Now the fun part starts here in that there are usually games associated with the topic and most are now HTML5 which means they will work on iPads.

I played a game or two and enjoyed them.  One game required me to find the value of colored money while the other was a time line of the American Revolution.  Since I teach math, the timeline one required a lot more work.  As I got close to the end of one set of questions, it asked me what the next topic would be.  It was challenging.

Add to that the NewsElA articles integrated into lesson.  NewsELA has articles at different reading lexiles and includes a quick quiz at the end.  There are some FYI which talk about the material in detail and might have a comic, activities and for a few topics, BrainPOP includes a primary source on the topic.

I've never seen primary sources applied to mathematical topics.  This is cool because it teaches students to interpret the data and shows them that there are primary sources out there we can use in mathematics.

They have an educator section with everything you need to integrate this into your classroom including lesson plans.  The other day I wrote about issues we have at school with our internet.  My frustration came out of wanting to use BrainPOP in my classroom but running into bandwidth issues which make it less likely I can use it.  I'm going to try but I can only hope.

Let me know what you think.  I'd love to hear. I  didn't publish yesterday because I was stuck in Bethel with limited internet so couldn't access my blogging account.  Have a good day.