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.