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
- 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.
- Then watch the movie (and do your whole teaching thing, of course).
- Then take the same quiz again.
- 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.
- 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.
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