So, aware of this, and whilst trying to hold the camera steady, we motioned frantically for her to turn the subtitles on. She looked utterly mystified.

But how could she NOT know about the subtitles? How could she possibly have missed the announcement, right? Right..? (jump to 1:35 below)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=E95HxpEVZew

The BrainPOPpers had lived with the subtitles for a while so assumed everyone knew they were a new addition. And Dawn, lest we forget, is one of the most switched on ICT teachers going. She must have seen our tweets, read our Facebook updates and enjoyed our blog post “7 terrific subtitle tips for BrainPOP“. She uses BrainPOP all the time in her own classroom.

It’s a fact that even with all the social media channels at our fingertips it’s still easy to miss updates. In fact, the more friends you have, the more people you follow, the more feeds you monitor, the easier it is for stuff to appear and disappear too quickly.

There’s a reason Twitter calls its tweet data stream a “firehose“.

But there is a simpler, less fashionable way to keep all you lovely BrainPOPpers informed: email. Most of us sign up to enewsletters. Who doesn’t get half a dozen emails a week (a day?) from companies espousing the latest this, that and the other?

The problem is…do you ever read them?

Most marketing emails go unread, unopened and unloved (sniff). But emails are still a key way to keep in touch with a community, to impart valuable info and make sure everyone who wants it is up to date with things.

So, to help stop a “Dawn moment” ever happening again, we have launched our very first “Moby eNews” - the chance for interested parents, kids and educators to keep in touch with the world of BrainPOP UK via good old email.

New Movies email update example - Click to see larger version

Moby's News email example - Click to see larger version

However, we decided not to do a “one size fits all” newsletter. Instead we divided it into 2 flavours:

<<< The “New Movies” email, which will go out once a month. This will simply let you know what’s new. Not with us but with the bits you love and use: Tim & Moby resources.
>>> The “ecosystem” email, which will go out when we have items to bring to your attention that we think will be valuable. If something awesome occurs this will tell you e.g. the launch of our Featured movie App.

They’re in the BrainPOP style - visual, colourful, playful. Less words, more action.

We’ve also asked you to sign up as Teachers, Parents or Kids. Each of these groups has different requirements. For example a teacher might be extremely excited to find out our quizzes are now integrated with the Promethean Learner Response systems and a parent might want to hear about discounts from PTA networks. There’s some cross over by definition but we’re keen not to bother you with things that won’t be that relevant.

You can sign up over there, on the left, or on our Facebook page or BrainPOP UK itself. Go on, you can easily unsubscribe any time.

If you’re a total info junkie and want it all then we can only suggest you follow, like and watch our very own social firehose

PS: We love our new emails but we have to offer our own gushing feedback to the following two services who got us there:

Plasticle: The design of Moby’s eNews was a precious job, that needed handling by experts. We commissioned the guys at Plasticle, a specialist email design firm, to create two templates for us. We cannot speak highly enough of the Plasticle team. They not only produced what we think are the most exciting & vibrant email designs we’ve seen in a very long time, they listened and actioned all our feedback, gave awesome advice, and delivered on time. Really, they rock.

Mailchimp: Someone needs to deliver those emails. We chose an emailservice called “Mailchimp” who, after a lot of research, testing and testimonial reading, became the well deserved home of our eNews updates. Plus we love Monkeys, so much so we even named our smallest size subscription after them. Mailchimp also rock.

The featured movie is always free – to anyone who visits BrainPOP UK, not just subscribers or those on a free trial.

It appears on our front page and is kind of a “spotlight” movie. Today we changed it from the long standing “Swine Flu” movie to the enlightening “Surrealism” movie. We try to change it regularly as we can. Or remember

How do we choose what gets to be a featured movie?

It really does depend. We usually check the days headlines by visiting BBC news and the brilliant CBBC Newsround website and see if there’s been any interesting stories that might come up in the classroom. We also try to tie featured movies into events and topics e.g. Pi day.

Here are some we chose in the last few months (you may need to be logged on to view some of these movies):

• Satellites – when American and Russian satellites collided
• William Shakespeare – to celebrate National Children’s book week
• Email & IM - when we reached our 100th follower on Twitter (but we can’t remember who it was!)
• Floods – due to flooding in North Dakota (these photos are amazing!)

Once we even made our “Sun” movie the featured movie simply because it was a lovely sunny day outside. And why not?

If nothing in the news or around us seems appropriate we’ll usually turn to you guys and ask.

A good way of doing that is to turn to our Twitter crowd to see if there’s any teachers on there that can be helped out by one of our movies.

For example @stevebob79 recently asked:

We reckoned we could help out so we said…

“@stevebob79 We’re very proud of our Blog movie for KS2. Would make a cracking starter. I’ve made it free, just for you: http://bit.ly/ePnGA“

So the Blogs movie became our (free) featured movie because @stevebob79 had a need for one. Simples. He also suggested a way we could tweak it to make it more effective which we did.

Our tweet was also spotted by another one of our followers, @HGjohn, who said:

In fact, HGjohn (John Sutton of CreativeICT blogs fame) went on to mention us and the movie as a recommended resource in his newsletter. Peter Rafferty (@Raff31) also said:

As my Granny said, if you don’t ask, you don’t get!

So there you have it for the humble featured movie. If you want to suggest a featured movie that you can use with your class we are all ears.