POPtalk

Mark Anderson (a.k.a. ICT Evangelist) and teachers at Clevedon School in North Somerset have been trying out the BrainPOP featured movie and app in various different classes throughout the school. He’s kindly provided a mini case study on how they’ve integrated BrainPOP into their vertical tutor groups.

“Clevedon School is a large 11-18 Outstanding School in North Somerset, just south west of Bristol. We operate a vertical tutor system where students from years 7 to 11 are mixed up in each tutor group.

So in any tutor group you normally have a few students from every year group. In our tutor times students regularly complete vertical activities, one of which is the use of BrainPOP.

We use BrainPOP because it is so easy to use, it really engages students of all ages (we complete the activities in vertical pairs) and the content is really clear and easy to understand.

“I really like it because it is fun and I always learn something” one student said to me from Year 9.

The BrainPOP free daily Featured Movie is a often a calendar aligned event. This is particularly good because it always means that whatever activity you are doing, there’s likely to be a relevant topic to the day.

More recently, Clevedon School have been trialling the use of iPads in education and I’m one of the trial leaders and have been using the BrainPOP iPad app in my tutor times.

The best thing here is that the content is right at the students’ fingertips – it’s right in front of them. Here, the content is brought alive and students can easily share and look at progress on each other’s activities as they move through. It certainly gets the students motivated and focused at the beginning of the school day.

We also provide opportunities for 6th form students to go back to their lower school tutor group to mentor students and free up the member of staff to do some small group work and mentoring with selected students. BrainPOP is a favourite resource for the 6th form students to use with the younger students.

Even with no planning or preparation it affords them the framework to run a session that everyone can engage with. It provides them with a high quality resource that they can rely on to deliver a message, support an area of the curriculum or spark a discussion.

The fact that BrainPOP uses seasonal themes and makes the most of anniversaries and other important dates means that they are always able to deliver something relevant and interesting to a group of students with diverse interests and educational needs.

I have seen it used to great effect to build confidence in 6th formers, giving them valuable experience and confidence in front of a class or in terms of public speaking. We all know how good it feels to be able to rely on a resource because we always know the quality is second to none.”

Mark Anderson, Head of ICT

Related Posts:

• BrainPOPping all Summer Long
• BrainPOP in your pocket
• Sharing the TeachMeet Takeovers from BETT 2012
• Why you need to go mobile with BrainPOP
• Greatest learning Apps of all time

We like to send our school subscribers little challenges every now and then as a little reminder that learning is always fun with BrainPOP. And when subscribers submit completed treasure hunts, word searches, and other challenges, we like to reward them with BrainPOP goodies because we’re just nice like that

So when Jennifer Finlayson’s Primary 6 class sent us their completed word searches we made sure to send them a selection of the very best BrainPOP badges (modelled below) as a reward for doing such a good job.

Of course there are other things just as important to us as making learning fun!

For one, we value customer feedback. And another, we love hearing your tales of good classroom practice. We simply can’t maintain our high standards if we don’t listen and learn from you.

To this aim, and because Currie Primary School are such long term BrainPOP customers, we asked Jennifer if she could give us a run down of a typical BrainPOP lesson and she happily obliged.

My favourite movie is: all of them!

Because: there is such a wide range of movies I always find one to suit my needs!

My class like: Tim and Moby

Because: they think they are funny and they like that the movies always follow the same format

Brief description of a typical BrainPOP lesson

Introduction/background:

A lesson about synonyms and antonyms. These are new concepts to the children and, although they might understand the concepts, they are unfamiliar with the terms.

Getting Started/Preparation:

• Ask the children to discuss in pairs what they think a synonym (then antonym) is.
• Give clues i.e. syno means same, nym means name.

What we did:

• Once the pupils had generated definitions for each and we had discussed these, they worked in pairs to come up with as many examples as they could, and recorded these on mini whiteboards.
• We then discussed these as a class to produce a class bank of synonyms and antonyms.
• Then we watched the BrainPOP clip to reinforce what we had learnt, and this also went beyond our learning to touch on homonyms – which was useful as, although we hadn’t discussed it, this was planned for a later lesson.

Outcomes:

Pupils had a good understanding of synonyms and antonyms and were able to provide examples.

What’s the best thing about being a BrainPOP school?

• A wide selection of resources easily available and easy to search for on the site.
• The clips really appeal to upper primary children and often provide a great ‘hook’ into learning at the beginning of a lesson.
• We also enjoy your seasonal/topical clips, for example Halloween, and use these as stand alone stimulus for discussion.

Thank you BrainPOP!

If you’ve got any teaching and learning tales you’d like to share with other schools, please send them to info@brainpop.co.uk or post a comment below.

Related Posts:

• Spotlight on…Managing Your Money
• Getting organised with BrainPOP
• Search me – 3 reasons to try our new keyword search
• What makes a good lesson?
• Lesson ideas and activities for Starship BrainPOP

From time to time, we are incredibly lucky to hear how BrainPOP has profoundly affected a child’s learning.

Some kids find it hard to write. There could be any number of reasons for this but sometimes the writer simply needs inspiration. The following is a guest post from a teacher who describes how one of her reluctant writers found his muse in a certain robot called Moby…

“Hello! I am Miss Read (@missread10) and I am currently teaching a Year 3 class at a Primary School based in Ipswich, Suffolk. I am in my second year of teaching and ICT/VLE co-ordinator at my school. Following finding out about BrainPOP from my visit to the BETT show I was keen to use it in the classroom and to show my children about the technology I use.

So for my own benefit, I used BrainPOP for the first time with my Twitter account open for the children to come and post about what they thought and if I should continue to use it. Armed with some great feedback and comments (as well as an impromptu chat on Twitter with BrainPOP themselves!) I set my children the task to write about what they had learnt from the Rainbow movie we watched.

I have a very wide range of ability within my class ranging from labelling and sounding out words to those who produce reems of A4.

My superstar is classed as a P Scale writer – he usually verbally told our teaching assistant Mrs P what he needed to say and copied from the scribe. But following his exposure to BrainPOP the below is the most he has ever produced!

Since then, he has been writing and adding things in a variety of forms and styles around my classroom – even on my BrainPOP calendar!

Moby makes me feel happy

For as long as Moby (who apparently is a Baby Transformer who has come to learn about Earth) sticks around – I cannot wait to see what my superstar as well as my class (who are all stars) will produce next!”

This is Moby

The significance of this small but important step forward is not lost on Miss Read, nor us. It’s what we hope for when we construct BrainPOP – that at some point a child will make a break through that empowers them to progress and fall in love with learning.

And we don’t apologise for our emotional language – Moby making kids and teachers happy and successful in their learning is what we’re all about and it’s what motivates us in return.

If you have any teaching and learning tales you’d like to share with us – it really is a treat to see what your kids have been up to – please email info@brainpop.co.uk. We’d love to hear from you!

Related Posts:

• Talking BrainPOP and taking Heart
• BrainPOP at BETT through the eyes of Twitter
• Sharing the TeachMeet Takeovers from BETT 2012
• BETTer late than never – highlights from BETT 2012
• Kids take action to reduce paper use

We were delighted and honoured to have so many kids visit our stand at BETT this year.

But we were especially delighted to welcome Fiona, Betsie, Jack, Trafford, Bayleigh from Woodlands Primary class 4h, onto the stand along with their teacher, Mr Handley (a.k.a. @tomhenzley and author of The PGCE Survival Guide). The kids gave a presentation about BrainPOP and finished off with a quick lesson on the Heart.

A sizeable crowd looked on as Mr Handley kicked off with a quick introduction before the kids took over:

Here’s a prezi Mr Handley put together to accompany their presentation: A Child’s View of BrainPOP and we’ve included the full transcript below too.

Mr H: Introduce what we are going to do - talk about BrainPOP, why the children love it and then do a mini lesson.

Bayleigh: BrainPOP is a really cool website that we all love and we use a lot in school.

Fiona: On BrainPOP there are lots and lots of videos, featuring our favourite characters - Tim and his Robot friend Moby.

Betsie: Each video starts with a letter written by a child, asking Tim and Moby a question.

Trafford: And Tim and Moby receive the letter and try and answer it in the video.

Jack H: The video is full of lots of useful information about lots of different topics.

Bayleigh: All the topics are interesting - many are linked into what we study in school.

Betsie: But others are about interesting events or generally super information, that we love to learn about.

Bayleigh: All of 4H love to watch Tim and Moby and often ask to watch Tim and Moby vidoes.

Jack H: We can also go on BrainPOP at home - which is super for exploring with our parents and helping them to learn things too!

Fiona: Often the videos are quite funny too and always try and with a joke or something silly.

Trafford: At the end of each video there is also a quiz to help us show what we have learnt.

ALL: WE LOVE Brainpop because…

Jack H: Because it can help us with our learning

Trafford: Because it is easy to understand.

Bayleigh: You learn things without realising.

Betsie: You can go on variety of different things and explore.

Fiona: You can watch things and they are fun whilst learning.

All: Our Favourite BrainPOP movie is…

Fiona: Fireworks - because it’s cool to see what is inside fireworks.

Betsie: Chocolate - because I love chocolate and it’s interesting to see how it is made!

Jack H: Electricity - because it is really interesting as it works each day.

Bayleigh: Heart - because it’s funny

Trafford: Simple Equations - as it’s really interesting.

Mr Handley finished up their presentation with a quick BrainPOP lesson using our Heart topic.

The kids’ favourite movies again for you:

Fireworks

Chocolate

Electricity

Heart

Simple Equations

A big thank you to Mr Handley and all the kids from Woodlands Primary School for your clear dedication to BrainPOPping. We have your letters and promise to answer them soon!

And finally, it’s no fun visiting the BrainPOP stand unless you get a hug from a big orange robot. Moby was happy to oblige.

Jack, Trafford, Bayleigh, Fiona and Betsie meet Moby

Related Posts:

• Moby makes me feel happy - inspiring a reluctant writer
• Sharing the TeachMeet Takeovers from BETT 2012
• BrainPOP at BETT through the eyes of Twitter
• BETTer late than never - highlights from BETT 2012
• 2012 Spotlights Calendar

We always enjoy seeing how schools use BrainPOP so when Ms Tonks of Shireland Collegiate Academy said it would be okay for Jude (our BrainPOP Elearning & Mobile Consultant) to visit the school she jumped straight into her Moby-mobile. Here’s how she got on…

Before lessons started for the day, we dropped in on a Year 9 class using BrainPOP  in tutor time. I had imagined the class would be watching the daily featured movie but on arrival I discovered that BrainPOP fits into the learning at Shireland Academy in a different and useful way.

Shireland use a unique curriculum model called ‘Literacies for Life’. This is a project-based learning approach that focuses on a common theme throughout all subjects for a given period of time and uses dynamic learning to bring the subject to life. The theme this month is ‘Over the Top’ – learning about WWI.

Ms Dhillon ushered everyone into the room and we watched the WWI movie followed by the quiz. To add a fun twist to the quiz, after each question students held up a coloured card to show their answer – A, B, C, or D – and Ms Tonks and Ms Dhillon  stood at the front and could see which colour was the decision of the class.

The class answered nearly all the questions correctly – impressive how switched on everyone was considering it was only 9 am! No sooner had we finished the quiz than the bell went and everyone rushed off to their first lesson. I couldn’t help wondering what a Science lesson on the theme of WWI would be like (making mustard gas?).

Having everything planned on the learning platform was helpful in squeezing learning into every little bit of the day. The eLearning team have embedded links to the BrainPOP movies (and other resources) being used in each lesson so they’re easy to find for teachers and students. They’ve even animated their own BrainPOP access buttons!

The elearning team kindly showed me a few more innovations they use to get the best out of their learning platform and resources:

• In tutor time, teachers use flip cameras to record the work done – the evidence is then stored on the learning platform.
• ‘E-Pic’ – a library collection of resources students would find helpful tying in with the theme of the month. This could be free materials or clips or BrainPOP movies all accessible through an animated walkthrough, saving students and teachers hours of internet searching!
• Attitude Rocks – short clips designed to prompt discussion about various situations that might arise in school. I thought the accents sounded familiar…sure enough, it turns out the voices had been done by students and teachers from the school.
• Apps for Good – students have to come up with ideas for apps that don’t already exist but also do something good for the community. Quite a tall order considering the huge number of apps already out there! Undaunted, students are already coming up with ideas and designing the apps themselves, the best of which will actually be put into production by a digital company.

I hope I’ll get the chance to call in and see Shireland again soon, it’s always good to get stocked up on good ideas to pass on to other BrainPOP schools. Meanwhile, I hope we can persuade Shireland students to blog for us in the future…they certainly have a lot to write about!

Related Posts:

• Remembering on 11/11/11
• Moby badges, Cups of tea and Stan Lee
• One click and you can do anything
• BrainPOP UK Quiz Integration with Promethean ActivExpression and ActiVote Learner Response Systems
• Calder-lightful! Using BrainPOP UK in Secondary English

Today we’ve invited Louise and her son J to share how they use BrainPOP at home. Having been an avid BrainPOP fan for well over a year J was super keen to tell us why he likes BrainPOP. We’ll hand you over to his Mum to take up the story…

“As a child who is always keen to investigate topics and, at the same time, is an enthusiastic technology user BrainPOP UK is a daily ‘must visit’ site.

J is a boy with motor coordination and planning difficulties (dyspraxia), but the site is completely accessible to him. A few clicks of the mouse and the odd bit of typing and he’s able to get to where he wants to be – independently.

J loves to start with one topic and, by using the intelligent search, he will choose a movie to make his first ‘viewing’.

As he watches Tim and Moby he chats along with them and answers their questions. For J this is an important part of learning. He needs to see the pictures but also see and hear the words too.

Frequently he will laugh heartily at the content and, of course, he has some favourite movies (Bogies is his all time number 1!).

He loves to share the movies he likes with his pals and they will all take turns to answer the POPQuiz at the end. Judging from their reactions, it’s a great hit for children from 5 to 13.

At the start of each week, to help J with his planning and organisational skills, we talk about topics we’ll be covering or places that we are going to visit. J will carry out preparation work by seeing what BrainPOP can tell him.

Sometimes, BrainPOP is used to consolidate learning done in other settings. For example, in the picture above, he was checking up on Sir Francis Drake by watching the Pirates movie. We’d been on holiday the week before and visited Buckland Abbey, which was Drake’s home.

Whilst on holiday, J used the iPhone app to see the daily free movie when he wasn’t out building sandcastles. It too is simple to use and contains the same great graphics the website has.

The best thing about BrainPOP for J is that it is completely his domain. The content is informative, fun and he drives his own exploration and learning. It keeps him engaged and Tim and Moby do not get fed up or complain about repeating themselves.

He seeks out the new movies and is keen to share his new found knowledge with us.

What a lovely way to learn!

PS: J, as a peice of extension work for his blog post above, designed it as a PDF Independent Learning with Tim & Moby designed by J and also recorded a short Audioboo:

Related Posts:

• Why you need to go mobile with BrainPOP
• BrainPOP and Pupil Support
• Health, Wellbeing and a pound of fat

When we were up in Glasgow recently, we treated ourselves to a wee school visit. Well, we say “wee”, but Calderglen High School in East Kilbride has roughly 1800 pupils so that was a misleading statement to say the least.

We were invited along by class teachers, Mhairi Healy and Lindsay Purdon, to observe an S2 English class in action. The teachers decided to bring two S2 classes together for a creative World War One lesson.

40 kids rolled through the doors and we were immediately impressed at how quickly they got organised.

The lesson objectives were clear:

1. In groups, come up with a slogan to encourage men to sign up and help the war effort
2. Create a propaganda poster and include your slogan.
3. Make a presentation to the rest of the class where you make a persuasive argument to young men to sign up and fight.

To provide a little context and focus everyone’s attention, Mrs Healy and Ms Purdon played the World War I movie. Then, in groups of 4 and 5, the kids got to work.

It was wonderful to see how quickly each group immersed themselves into the tasks assigned, easily deciding who got what job. They had one class period to come up with the slogan, design a poster, and write and practice their presentations. They all worked really well considering the time pressure. Slogans and design seemed to be a doddle to this lot – why don’t we find it that easy?!

One hour up!

Attention to the front again to watch the BrainPOP UK movie on Public Speaking. We loved how the teachers decided to use the movie – rather than play the whole thing, they started it halfway through to cover the most relevant points for the second half of the lesson. It worked really well as a way of focusing the class’ attention after the discourse and loud creativity of the previous hour.

Presenting to BrainPOPpers (and everyone else in class)

All of the groups did well with their presentations. Given the little time they had to prepare, we were excited to see how varied the presentations were and how innovative some of the groups could be.

And the winner is…

After some “x-factor style” deliberations we picked a winner – a group with an original idea which they carried off with real enthusiasm for the goal – to recruit young men to the British Army. They were men who were in the army themselves and could proudly say it was great to be fighting for their country; we were convinced to sign up ourselves!

The winning group were given some specially made tartan badges and Ms Purdon got a prize-winning cup (a.k.a. BrainPOP UK mug).

We finished off with a fun Q&A session and, fortunately, the kids had some good questions. We were asked what our favourite movie was and Ann picked Etymology (Moby speaks in this one!) which promptly led into a discussion and explanation of what etymology actually was – very appropriate for an English class.

We had a fantastic time at Calderglen High School. As well as the English Department we visited the Gaelic Department – one classroom! We were warmly welcomed though our Gaelic was left wanting…

Good luck Calderglen for the rest of the school year and Glee fun in English! It was a pleasure visiting your school and we hope to be back again soon. We’ll leave the last word to adorable BrainPOP fan and VIB, Mrs Healy:

Related Posts:

• Highlights from the Scottish Learning Festival
• Scotland gets POPteach
• North of the border – Moby goes to the Scottish Learning Festival
• Meet Deep Beep
• What’s in store at SLF 2011?

As part of the incredible StoryTyne event held last week in Newcastle. I have posted about Tim Rylands presentation and about some of the other speakers.  I was lucky enough to co-present a workshop with Bill Boyd and Alan Yeoman. I called my workshop ‘Where Fact meets Fiction’ - and tried to make it as interactive as possible. After a short explanation of why I was there and what BrainPOP UK can bring to enhance teaching and learning, I shared the key ingredients to a BrainPOP UK movie:

Ingredients

• 3 key learning ‘points’
• 3 levels of ability - talk, animate and label for all three!
• 3 minute target - keep it pacy.

• Consistent & Clear
• Accurate
• Narrative Driven
• Engaging and Remarkable
• Fun

But, rather than reading more about it - see below for a short vid of my session!

Related Posts:

• StoryTyne - BrainPOP UK joins a stellar cast!
• StoryTyne - Tim Rylands spins a tale
• Spotlight on Space
• The winner by a knock out
• Quick! I’ve only got 10 mins

Every now and then, a new event is born.

Surrounded by the fog rolling off the Tyne, and nestled in the hills surrounding the stone city of Newcastle – a brave Doctor delivered unto an unsuspecting crowd a day called….StoryTyne.

The crowd was wowed and challenged by a soothsayer in a mottled coat, from the land of Ry who spun new tales about an Epic Citadel. He showed us the doors that led to fields of rich texts, herds of words, and potions of potential.

A crew, even more motley than that coat, then led said crowd through magic windows into places and spaces, full of strange beasts, wolves, orange robots, playgrounds, monkeys, bears, and people.

More than that – the crowd was given the very ingredients to create the magic themselves.

So what happened next? The answers are here and here.

Will you take up the challenge - to do something different?

You decide!

Related Posts:

• Green screen fun and short, short stories
• StoryTyne - BrainPOP UK POPTeach workshop
• StoryTyne - BrainPOP UK joins a stellar cast!
• Scotland gets POPteach
• What is your character like?

When Stacey Newman, a home educating parent, posted the comment below on POPtalk, we asked if she’d like to review the site.

Not only did Stacey happily write a review but her 10 year old daughter, Esther, added her thoughts to boot!

We couldn’t believe our luck and, we kid you not, there were tears of joy in the eyes of even the stoniest heart in the BrainPOP UK office when we read them…

“A little background:

I actually stumbled across BrainPOP UK by accident and subscribed for the free trial.  I must confess that with there being so much information available free of charge on the internet that I doubted I would subscribe to the site once the trial period was finished.

Within the first hour I was impressed with the site.

Before I allowed Esther to sit and use it I checked out a good number of the videos and topics available to see how sensitive issues such as reproduction, war and notorious people in history were dealt with.

I am now most definitely subscribing to the site as I can see the advantage of the small fee for such a wealth of information all in one place.  This will cut down on hours of surfing the web for information and further time spent on writing my own quiz questions to see how much Esther has learned and retained.

I was very impressed. Issues are not skirted around, but are dealt with sensitively and I felt, in an age appropriate manner.

The fact that it covers so many topic areas in such an appealing way is fantastic.

We are currently completing a  project on World War 2, a difficult subject to cover with a 10 year old.  Esther was interested in how it all began and why.  We are Christians who have an extremely close friendship with a Jewish family and she wanted to find out more about ‘The Holocaust‘.  I did wonder how such difficult subjects might be tackled with Tim and Moby, the lovable, quirky duo.  I was extremely impressed.  The topic was dealt with very delicately, tenderly and sensitively.

Advantages of BrainPOP UK:

• So much information all in one place – it’s like a one stop shop!
• The videos are engaging and packed with information.
• The videos I have seen are age appropriate and I would not worry about Esther accessing this site without me being in the same room. Safe surfing!
• The quizzes are very useful and can be used in a number of ways. We use the review quiz fairly soon after watching the video clip just to check general comprehension of the topic then later on, sometimes the same day or even a few days later we will use the graded quiz or printed quiz to check retention of the information.
• The extra FYIs that are currently available on some of the topics are also an excellent source of further information.  These are being expanded so that more will soon be available.
• The related links are brilliant and again save time ploughing the Net for more resources.
• The search section for easy access to items viewed in the past is very helpful.
• I also must mention the very helpful BrainPOP UK team. I have had many questions re the site and have contacted the help team by phone and email.  Every person I have corresponded with and spoken to have been very friendly, professional and helpful.

The BrainPOP UK site is a real asset to me as a busy home educating Mum.  I look forward to using the Site often.”

Esther has some thoughts of her own she’d like to share…

“I enjoy everything about BrainPOP UK:

• the videos because they are very informative and give you all the information you need and extra information, which is very easy to comprehend.
• the quizzes because they test the knowledge you have acquired and help you see what you have retained and also what you need to study a bit more.
• the FYIs are very good because they give you just the right amount of extra information without making you bored or making your brain explode with too much information.

The site is excellent but I do think that it would be a good idea to have different levels of quizzes for different age ranges.

I was impressed with all of the site, but I was most impressed with the way they dealt with delicate issues like WW2 and The Holocaust and the fact that these issues are not skirted around or just said in a sentence and not brought up again.  The way they do them is great and I think that it has just the right balance.  I think this because people need to be told what happened in the past to prevent it from happening in the future.

I was also very impressed with the variety of subjects which could be accessed on the site.

The Tim and Moby characters are really cool, very loveable, very funny and extremely easy to listen to.  The stories are very easy to follow.

BrainPOP UK is an incredibly good site and I would recommend it to anybody between the ages of 7-14.”

We really like Esther’s idea for the quizzes – definitely something to bear in mind for future.

As a thank you to Stacey and Esther, we’ve extended their free trial so they now get to enjoy BrainPOP free for the rest of the summer. Lucky them!

As ever, if you have thoughts or feedback you’d like to share with us just get in touch by emailing info@brainpop.co.uk

Related Posts:

• BrainPOP UK – a home educator perspective
• BrainPOP UK – A parent’s perspective
• From nothing to something – our Top 6 BrainPOP UK moments of 2009