POPtalk

After scoping out the festival in 2010 we decided to bite the bullet and book a stand at Scottish Learning Festival 2011. Aside from the prospect of haggis for breakfast and generally enjoying a jaunt north of the border, we had plenty of reasons to attend.

Let's get started!

1. Putting faces to names

We have a lot of friends and customers in Scotland and it’s always nice to put a face to a name. Cathy from St. Thomas’ R.C. Primary School made a big impression in her kilt attire so we made sure she took away a tartan badge or two to match

It’s also always nice to meet tweeps like @digitalkatie and @kirstyforbes. Always a pleasure, ladies! Kirsty was the lucky winner of 3 months free access to BrainPOP and a goodie bag. We hope you enjoy having Moby in your school, Kirsty!

Kirsty sports her winning certificate

2. Mapped to Curriculum for Excellence

We got to meet lots of Scottish teachers and show them Deep Beep, our curriculum matching tool. Deep Beep means you can drill down to the experiences and outcomes you wish to follow and find appropriate topics for your lesson in just a couple of clicks. All BrainPOP topics are mapped to Curriculum for Excellence and Deep Beep should help make lesson planning easy.

Moby loves to see a busy stand

3. Help with your evaluation

We know what it’s like to be bombarded with promotional literature and suffer information overload at these events so we wanted to create something to assist you. Proper evaluation of BrainPOP should involve your class if possible. The more colleagues and students helping with the evaluation the better. That’s why we created evaluation booklets - have your class help out.

With our evaluation sheet you let the kids check out the site, give you their honest feedback and you can use it to convince your Head Teacher or PT that BrainPOP’s worth an investment. Download the Evaluation Sheet here:

Click to download

4. Exceptional keynotes

We heard some truly inspirational keynotes and speaker sessions. Sir John Jones’ keynote, The Future Is Not What It Was, was a particular highlight. He received a standing ovation and even had some of the audience in tears. If you didn’t manage to catch him last week, we recommend you take the time to watch him now: Sir John Jones and other keynotes. Exceptional.

5. VIBs in the house

We know that it’s a thousand times more useful for you to talk to a fellow teacher so special mention has to go to our VIB (Very Important BrainPOPper), Mhairi Healy from Calderglen High School. Mhairi made sure that visitors to our stand heard first hand about how she uses BrainPOP with her class. Her unyielding enthusiasm and passion for teaching (and BrainPOP!) got straight to the heart of what really matters in the classroom!

Very Important BrainPOPper

We know there were lots of people posing for photos with Moby. If you took any pics please send them to info@brainpop.co.uk or post them to our Facebook page. We’d love to see some more and we’ll make sure you get some goodies for your trouble.

We’ll see you next year folks!

Now, where can we find a kilt maker used to working with robots?

Related Posts:

• Calder-lightful! Using BrainPOP UK in Secondary English
• Meet Deep Beep
• Scotland gets POPteach
• North of the border – Moby goes to the Scottish Learning Festival
• What’s in store at SLF 2011?

“Great opportunity for staff to review the resources. A fresh approach to using video within the curriculum. All the responses were very positive.”

Rhona MacKenzie, West Dunbartonshire Authority

What a lovely thing to say. But what’s Rhona talking about? One of our new POPteach workshops.

BrainPOP itself is so simple to grasp there’s not much call for conventional “training”. So we don’t offer it.

The key challenge is to raise awareness of what BrainPOP UK can do in context – for YOU in YOUR lessons. A workshop where the focus is “BrainPOP plus CPD”.

A POPteach workshop is an opportunity to gather a group of educators together to talk Tim & Moby. They may be subscribers or they may be total newbies to BrainPOP resources – all are welcome. It may be facilitated by a BrainPOPper or a VIB. Or both!

Our pilot POPteach workshops have been held in Scotland. At the most recent our Scottish Ambassador, Kim Conway, worked with the West Dunbartonshire Authority to hold a twilight CPD workshop. Ten teachers from seven different schools attended. As is the BrainPOP way they got showered with cool BrainPOP merchandise including badges, pens and chocolates. We offered fruit too, but curiously that didn’t turn out to be as popular.

Kim ran through the site, highlighting gems such Deep Beep, Spotlights and POPboxes and offered practical examples of how BrainPOP can be employed in the classroom.

Participation is a key part of a POPteach workshop. Kim likes attendees to join in with the POPquiz, and it wasn’t long before teachers were leaping up to the whiteboard to select answers.

These are only tentative baby steps with POPteach – we’re still polishing the format and always looking for feedback.

Each attendee is asked to give the experience a mark out of 10. We’re proud to say we received a 10/10 across the board. Did the chocolate sway people? Who knows. A good result either way. These are some of the workable ideas the teachers took away with them (everyone at this workshop had not used BrainPOP before, though some were aware of us):

• Use movies within classroom as discussion starters.
• Tell the staff. Log in and try it out.
• BrainPOP will tie in with my current topic. I intend to share BrainPOP with my colleagues – it is a useful resource.
• Using movies with class related to current movies being sponsored.
• Would like to use the videos for science.
• Share with staff.  Use  free trial period in lessons with my class (P6) particularly in relation to e-safety.
• Make use of the free trial in cross curricular areas and across stages.
• I intend to use BrainPOP in line with Es and Os within the classroom if the video enhances the concepts we are covering.
• Share with the rest of the staff and try out during the trial period.
• To enhance my lessons. To incorporate into topics using ACfE links.
• All useful. This was excellent. Great for pupils (+staff).

It’s only fair to mention what was noted we could do better:

• Could have had more ‘hands on’.

In particular it was great to hear how useful Deep Beep, our Curriculum Matching Tool, could be. Some teachers mentioned how easy it would be to incorporate BrainPOP links into topics they are currently teaching.

One thing that was said to us was “Good to see site, often ended up on it through Google but didn’t know what it was”, which is a lesson for us and a good reason why we might be holding more POPteach events round the country soon.

And finally, as is our wont, we couldn’t help but offer some lovely BrainPOP UK prizes! Congratulations to Kate Watson from Levenvale Primary who won a BrainPOP UK T-shirt, Carolann McVey from Levenvale Primary who won a goodie bag, and Marion Henry from St Mary’s Primary School in Alexandria who walked away with a class set of badges.

Related Posts:

• Calder-lightful! Using BrainPOP UK in Secondary English
• Highlights from the Scottish Learning Festival
• Meet Deep Beep
• Bringing ‘a little something’ to CPD in Dundee
• Through the Looking Bowl – Teachmeet Fishbowling with BrainPOP UK

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?

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.

Related Posts:

• Highlights from the Scottish Learning Festival
• Scotland gets POPteach
• Calder-lightful! Using BrainPOP UK in Secondary English
• What’s in store at SLF 2011?
• Bookcases up for grabs