POPtalk

Today is an important day. It’s “Wear it pink” day to raise Breast Cancer Awareness .

Louise, our Office Manager, is a big supporter of the Breast Cancer Campaign charity and introduced the team to Wear it Pink day. We were all only too happy to support this valuable initiative.

So as you can see the BrainPOP UK team and Tim &  Moby are Wearing it Pink today. In fact, Moby had a complete re-spray just for today which we think looks rather fetching.

We’ve also made our “Cancer” movie our free featured movie to help explain this tough, but relevant topic to your pupils.

Some other things you do to show support or learn more.

• Follow the official Wear it Pink Twitter feed.
• Check out their Facebook page and show your support.
• You can read the history of the Pink Robbon .
• Read about the research and the facts about breast cancer on the Breast Cancer Campaign website.
• Most importantly you can donate.

Why donate?

“Breast Cancer Campaign uses all wear it pink donations to fund innovative, world-class research throughout the UK and Ireland to understand how breast cancer develops, leading to improved diagnosis, treatment, prevention and cure.  The charity currently supports around 130 projects worth £15million in 43 centres across the UK and Ireland.”

www.wearitpink.co.uk/about-us

So we’ll be wearing our Pink ribbons today as will the Whitehouse. Will you?

So you’ve started your 30 day free trial and you’re ready to dive into BrainPOP UK with your pupils.

But where to start? Click a couple of movies at random? Take a quiz yourself?

It’s difficult to judge a product without some stimulus on how to get the most from it. So here are our top tips  – they’re not defintive and they’re quite simple so we’d love to hear more of your experiences in the comments. If you send us a top tip we’ll send you a goodie!

1) Take the robot by the horns – try using BrainPOP UK resources to challenge your class

Don’t start with a concept you or your pupils find easy, when evaluating. Start with a movie that you struggle to get engagement with or find it tricky to get the concept across in a simple way.

It might be the Atomic model, Plate Techtonics, Converting fractions to decimals, Punctuation, or even the Stock Market.

Play it to your class and invite feedback on its impact. Use the pause button regularly to stop and provoke discussion or invite questions. See if Tim and Moby acted well as middle men between the concept and your pupils.

2) Timing is everything – mix up when you take the POPquiz

1. Ask your students to take the Graded version of the quiz (where results are emailed to a nominated email address) individually before watching the movie. At this point they will not know what score out of ten they got.
   
2. Then watch the movie (and do your whole teaching thing, of course).
3. Then take the same quiz again.
4. This time you might want to let them see their score or make them email you again. You should be able to see, side by side, whether the movie that accompanies the quiz and the teaching you did around it, has had any immediate impact on their understanding.
5. Then…do the exact same quiz again a week later!

3) Take advantage of Deep Beep – we’re mapped against English and Scottish curricula

Get your lesson plans/Schemes of Work out. Use Deep Beep, our new curriculum movie matching tool, to drill down via the curriculum you are using to the objective you want to cover. There should be a movie there waiting to be used to complement that objective. Bookmark that URL for later or copy and paste it into a document.

4) ‘Tis better to give than receive – help your department or budget holder see what BrainPOP UK can do

Give your login to a colleague. Seriously. Give it to all your colleagues that you think might be interested, in all departments. BrainPOP UK is a cross curricular resource that is often used at all ages. It can be surprisingly handy with 5 year olds as with 18 year olds. We’ve had success stories reported from all sorts of surprising places:

5) Homework – BrainPOP UK is all online, which means you can link home and classroom effectively

Give your students a list of movies and quizzes you want them to watch at home. There’s no worries about giving your students your login details – they will expire anyway and you can always change them if you decide to subscribe. Ask them to choose the email option when taking the quizzes. That way you (should) have a lovely batch of quiz results to browse through for the next time you meet.

6) The kitchen sink – see how BrainPOP UK delivers value for money

Look at our All Movies page. We admit it’s not the most glamorous page but a glance (or scroll) will show you sheer number of movies in BrainPOP UK. And they ALL come with your subscription. Now THAT’S value.

7) Tim, Moby & YOU – encourage speaking and listening skills

Ask your pupils, in groups or by themselves, to introduce a movie and, if you are confident in them, let them pause the movie to prompt discussion and run the quiz too on the interactive whiteboard. You can also use the rewind and fast forward buttons to skip chapters within the movie.

8 ) See how easy it is to integrate BrainPOP UK movies locally – see how BrainPOP UK movies can be delivered outside the classroom

We bet there’s a school event happening at some point during your trial that a BrainPOP UK movie could be just right for, such as an e-safety week, or an anti bullying campaign or even an historical event such as Charles Dickens’ birthday (February 7, 1812, by the way). Link a BrainPOP UK movie on your VLE front page – ask us for a special URL that will take you straight to it without your VLE users having to login to BrainPOP UK.

*shhh, secret tip* when we launch our POPboxes (embeddable movies) you will be able to play particular movies right there in the page.

9) Two BrainPOP’s are better than one – use collaboration to engage with BrainPOP UK

Split the class into pairs and ask them, with headphones, to watch a movie and then collaboratively discuss it and then share their insights to the class afterwards.

10) Why BrainPOP UK?

This isn’t a tip but some of the best advice we can give you is to remind you that BrainPOP UK designed to fulfil a specific purpose: to engage children enough that they understand concepts.

• We ARE an amazing answer to how to engage kids with new or hard to teach topics.
• We CAN be used alongside your existing resources and are very easily integrated into your existing plans (and schemes!).
• We SHOULD BE a stimulus for learning – not a series of discreet learning objects – for tackling tiny components of knowledge. Life is not like that. Why should learning resources be?

Any more tips on getting the best from BrainPOP UK?

PS: Thanks to Mr Stucke at http://www.mrstucke.com , who’s currently going through an extended BrainPOP UK evaluation with his school, for the inspiration to write this post.

We are pleased and proud to introduce Deep Beep – our shiny new curriculum matching tool.

What is Deep Beep?

It’s a tool on our website that enables a teacher to find BrainPOP UK movies that match the objectives in their planning. It’s as simple as that.

Deep Beep is in beta, for now, whilst we gather your feedback. It should all work pretty well but we also know how easily stuff can slip through the net.

We need feedback and ideas on how to grow Deep Beep to be as useful as it possibly can be. We are absolutely dedicated to making every aspect of BrainPOP UK as insanely great as the movies and quizzes. Please place any comments here – or by twitter (@BrainPOP_UK) or all the old fashioned ways!

How does it work?

We have painstakingly tagged every movie in BrainPOP UK to not only the English curricular guidance…

Browsing by English curricula

…but also to Scotland’s 5-14 National Guidelines and the new Curriculum for Excellence .

Choosing 5-14 or the Curriculum for Excellence

Browsing by the Curriculum for Excellence

Finding a movie via the Curriculum for Excellence browse

You click through the selections until you find the objective you need and we should have a movie that complements it. Then just click the movie icon and you’ll be taken straight to it. You also might want to save the movie URL as a bookmark or cut and paste the URL into a lesson plan for later.

What’s next for Deep Beep?

It’s kind of up to you – what suggestions you have. This is only Deep Beep version 1. We’ve built it in such a way that we can add curricula, or functionality, fairly quickly. We intend to iteratively improve it over time.

It’s also built in Flash so there’s a possibility that when we come out of beta it can be embedded in VLEs, as a stand alone BrainPOP UK search and browse tool.

One last thing – why’s it called Deep Beep?

There’s two parts to that answer.

1. We spent a long time wrangling with complicated and prosaic titles that tried to describe what it did. Some rejected names included “Movie match maker”, “POPmovie finder”, “BrainMaPPer” and “Unit to Movie Linker Gizmo” (we were getting desperate by this point). So we took another direction instead and decided we could “name” it and sub head it with what it did. Much more fun.
2. It’s a gentle homage to Deep Thought, the Super Computer, created by Douglas Adams, one of the team’s favourite authors. We do love him so.

“…They tweet and they titter, They chat and they chitter, But the Bear snores on.”

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hiyang/ / CC BY 2.0

Those of you who have read Karma Wilson‘s classic picture book Bear Snores On to their kids will know these lines off by heart. When I returned home on the train from Handheld Learning 09, these words just kept popping into my head… but why?

Firstly, I had a great time at HHL ’09. Highlights included the amazing journey that Malcolm McLaren took us on, Zenna Atkins proving that not all quango members are mealy-mouthed bureaucrats afraid of risk and the wonderfully inspiring  James Paul Gee.

But it was in the area of practice, not policy, that the real fun happened. Dawn Hallybone winning a special award from her peers, Tim Ryland‘s proving that Myst is not the only way to inspire kids and teachers to make the curriculum creative and, of course, the LTS gang, with special mentions for Derek Robertson and Ollie Bray (that led to the hashtags #jealousoflts and #jealousofollie).

But the real highlight for me was the conference that took place in parallel to the all the speakers and sessions, on Twitter – marked by the #HHL09 hashtag. There was clearly a huge buzz around the event about the discussions, rants, and jokes that went on only on Twitter.

It was great to be part of this, but I made an effort to spend time in the breaks and breakouts to seperate myself a little from all the shiny sparkles of being in such direct contact with such inspirational and connected teachers. There were plenty of people attending, or who were representing the vast majority of the profession. And it was them that made me think of that wonderful picture book!

And so, to explain my use of  Bear Snores On as an  Allegory.

So with HUGE apologies for any offence given… Ollie, Tim, and Dawn (et al) are the first animals in the Bear’s cave – ie the  mouse and hare in the story! (you decide who is what!)

The majority of the rest of us at the conference were the other animals drawn by the light and the warmth of the fire made by the “small hot sparks“. We ” tweet and titter” and “chat and chitter” – partying in a warm happy place for a short time, while there is a cold dark winter outside.

Which brings me to the real point of the allegory. The rest of the education world is the Bear – fast asleep, despite all the noise and warmth – hoping to sleep through change and stay out of the elements! In the story, nothing all the other animals do (eating, drinking, dancing, or  tweeting!) seem to have any effect on the bear at all! It takes a “small pepper fleck” to wake the Bear, as “…mouse seasons stew.”

I believe that this is the challenge for all of us who attended this event. What is the spicy and (let’s face it) irritating ingredient in what we do that will get up the noses of our colleagues to get them to wake up and notice the great party we have been having! What will we do differently?

We all need to be more confident to spice up our work and let a few flecks of pepper fly! Yes, they will be annoyed that they have not been part of it. They will ‘growl and grumble’  initially, but after seeing the sheer number of projects, and evidence of spreading practice across the country directlty resulting from attendence of Handheld Learning 08, they will ‘sigh with delight’ as they see the transformation in learning that we all want to see in education.

So – here ends storytime.

I want to thank  Esther and Zoe for making me read Bear Snores On so many times, and to all the great people I talked and tweeted with at HHL09.

We’re excited to welcome Dawn Hallybone as an official BrainPOPper today.

Dawn, a Senior Year 6 teacher and ICT Co-ordinator at Oakdale Junior School, has very kindly offered to give us her take on using BrainPOP UK.

Dawn is perhaps best known for her ground breaking work with game based learning in the classroom  – see her presentation here using Nintendo DS in the classroom. She is also deservedly a finalist for the Hand Held Learning 2009 Special Achievement Awards winner of the Hand Held Learning 2009 Special Achievement Awards!! (Well done, Dawn!)

If you’ve been fortunate enough to hear her speak you’ll know what an inspirational teacher she is, and how passionate she is about integrating exciting and engaging ICT into the realities of classroom life.

“I am not sure when or where I first heard of this product but have a feeling it may have been at BETT.

I remember being drawn by the bright colours and the characters of Tim and Moby. This is true as well of the students themselves when they first use it; however there is a lot more to this package than colours and characters.

BrainPOP UK is an online environment, where as a teacher and as a pupil you can watch short (5 minute) videos explaining a range of subjects across the National Curriculum.

The videos are well presented and convey the information in both a child-friendly and factual way as well as injecting humour – a must I feel with some topics! After each video there is a short activity and a quiz, although you do not need to complete this if you chose not to.

I used BrainPOP UK a lot during the Summer Term with my year 6 class, and found their videos covering puberty and PHSE invaluable as they dealt with these topics sensitively, but with a sprinkling of humour!

When I asked the class which part of the topic they had enjoyed – they all agreed watching Tim and Moby as it:

• ‘…made it clear’
• ‘…did not talk down to us’
• ‘…I felt they understood us’
• ‘…I liked the fact that the letters are written by real children’ (a fact that I nor they knew until we asked via Twitter – another recommendation by one of the class when I admitted that I did not know).

Once we had used it for this topic – the class were eager to explore other areas – they wanted to know what else Tim and Moby talked about!!! We then discovered some great resources for Literacy and Maths which we watched before we sat the SATS.

Again this idea came from the children not me and proved a hit as one they were all watching, learning and relaxing before their tests. There are numerous ways of using the resource. I tend to use it to introduce the topic, and use the quiz at the end as I find that this equips the children with a good degree of knowledge before we start any topic.

BrainPOP UK is a subscription service, but the range of subjects that they cover is vast and they are constantly looking at ways of improving and are great at listening and responding to suggestions from both pupils and teachers.

They also offer free videos each month – a great idea particularly when the Swine flu hit schools and children were worried. We embedded this onto our school blog and children were able to share this with their parents at home.

It can also be watched on a trial basis, which as a teacher I feel invaluable when trialling out resources with my children. It can look really good and sound really good in a sound bite or blurb on company website but it is when it is used in a real context that, for me, is the real test!

I and the class thoroughly enjoyed trying out BrainPOP UK during the Summer term – now the only question is – where did I leave that order form?”