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?

We’re going to be at the Scottish Learning Festival from 21st to 22nd September at the SECC in Glasgow. If you’re heading along you can find us on…

STAND E7

Do not forget this important piece of information. It will be the highlight of your show experience, we guarantee. Just ask these guys:

Moby with new BFFs @amweston and @relativism

We’ll be showing off our new Graphic Organisers and brand new movies all tagged to Curriculum for Excellence.

We’re also giving away handy evaluation booklets you can use with your class to get student feedback about BrainPOP. This way, the kids can let rip and tell you what they really think.

Also, did anyone miss this last year?

Well, if you did, make sure you catch the rematch this year. Moby says it’s going to be a beaut of a highland fling.

Related Posts:

• North of the border - Moby goes to the Scottish Learning Festival
• Bookcases up for grabs
• Highlights from the Scottish Learning Festival
• Calder-lightful! Using BrainPOP UK in Secondary English
• Come and say “hello!” at SLF 2010

SORRY – THEY’RE ALREADY TAKEN!

We’re heading up to the Scottish Learning Festival in Glasgow next month (21-22 September) and we’ll be building a mini version of the stand we had at BETT this year.

For us this entails wielding our handy pneumatic drill and feeling like the stars of DIY SOS for a day. For a lucky Scottish school*, it means free Ikea furniture. We’d like to donate them to your school once we’re done with them (they’re brand new for the show, by the way). All your school needs to do is come and collect them or pay for collection/delivery from the SECC to your school.

2 x Small Expedit bookcases

Measurements:
Width: 79 cm
Depth: 39 cm
Height: 79 cm
Max. load/shelf: 13 kg

1 x 16 square Expedit bookcase

Measurements:
Width: 149 cm
Depth: 39 cm
Height: 149 cm
Max. load/shelf: 13 kg

What do I need to do?

We understand you’re not going to be able to just pick up 5 bookcases, strap them to your back, and walk out the door of the SECC. (See the measurements detailed above if you were contemplating this!) We’ll need to come to an arrangement about delivery dates and times which we can discuss when you get in touch.

We want to make this as straightforward as possible:

Step 1 - Email us at info@brainpop.co.uk or call 0800 141 2404

Step 2 – We discuss pick-up and delivery dates and times.

Step 3 - We have a grand old time at SLF for a couple of days.

Step 4 – We pack up.

Step 5 – Your school gets free bookcases.

If you remain unconvinced, here are some shots of our bookcases working it at BETT 2011:

16 squares of bookshelf goodness!

Handy, don't you think?

Look how much joy our bookcases could bring you!

If you’re interested, please get in touch and we can work out the logistics.

Otherwise, we hope to see you on Stand E7 at SLF 2011. Make sure to swing by and say hello!

*Scottish schools only.

Related Posts:

• What’s in store at SLF 2011?
• North of the border – Moby goes to the Scottish Learning Festival
• Highlights from the Scottish Learning Festival
• Calder-lightful! Using BrainPOP UK in Secondary English
• Come and say “hello!” at SLF 2010

They seek him here, they seek him there…

In November last year, Jen Deyenberg guest blogged about Geocaching, and how she incorporated BrainPOP into her geocaching lessons.

For those of you unfamiliar with geocaching it’s a “high-tech treasure hunting game“. You hide a trackable “travel bug” somewhere and record it’s whereabouts on the geocaching website.

Other people hunt down these “geocaches” using GPS, record their finding, and then move the travel bug to another cache. Thus the cycle continues. Some geocaches work their way around the globe!

We’re very excited as Jen told us yesterday that she has made a special “Scottish Moby” geocache! This is her ambition with the Moby cache:

“Moby is off on his adventures. As he is a Scottish Moby his first stop is Hailes Castle – a beautiful little place on the edge of the Tyne. If you find Moby keep him moving – to any cache you like! Moby loves adventures and is always keen for a photo, so post your adventures and photos with your logs!”

You can learn all about the Moby geocache on it’s dedicated page “Scottish Moby Travel Bug“.

Do you accept the challenge? Can you find Scottish Moby? If you do take pictures and send them to us and we’ll blog them and send you some goodies as a thank you. Look after him and treat him well though.

Remember he may not be at Hailes Castle for long! Who knows how far he can go?

Related Posts:

• Highlights from the Scottish Learning Festival
• What’s in store at SLF 2011?
• Bookcases up for grabs
• Spotlight on…Finding Your Way
• Finding Wind around the World

“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?

Last week Moby and The BrainPOPpers went to Glasgow to the Scottish Learning Festival 2010 to talk about the wonderful world of BrainPOP to Scottish teachers.

Glasgow's Armadillo building

We had a blast - the teachers were so friendly and welcoming. LTScotland is currently integrating a new curriculum - the Curriculum for Excellence - so it was a particularly interesting time to be there.

Here are our Top 5 moments at SLF 2010…

1: Meeting lots (and lots) of Scottish teachers on the XMA Apple stand. Our resident Scottish BrainPOP UK Ambassador, Kim Conway, was demoing BrainPOP UK, showing off our Curriculum for Excellence tagging and giving out our very special Scottish Moby badges. Which we ran out of they were so popular. We’ll have to get more for next year.

Moby gives the thumbs up to SLF 2010

Kim Conway demoing Brainpop UK

Moby gets the girl(s)

2: Meeting Scottish fans and putting faces to Twitter names! We have been lucky enough to make a number of friends up in Scotland in the last 12 months, but most of them were virtual. This time though we could say hi in the flesh and they could get to meet Moby. You can read Jenny’s (on right) account of SLF 2010 on her blog “Student ponderings“.

Moby meets Ann Marie and Jenny at SLF 2010

3: Demoing BrainPOP UK on the Promethean stand. The crowds gathered in large numbers to see Eylan Ezekiel showing off BrainPOP UK resources, including a sneak preview of the Active Expression POPquiz integration, with Promethean ActivInspire and Learner Response Systems. And, because we know how tiring exhibitions can be, the crowd were offered an apple or a cupcake. Can you believe it - the cupcakes proved more popular!

Moby watching the Promethean demo

4: Sponsoring the TeachMeet. We are always proud to be asked to be involved, in any way, large or small, with a TeachMeet. This year the famous SLF TeachMeet took place in the famous “Armadillo” building opposite the Exhibition hall. Moby was chuffed to be asked to wave people into the hall, although the security guards wouldn’t let anyone take any photographs (boo!).

It was this time last year that we premiered our very first TeachMeet movie and we were more than happy to create a brand, new revised version that incorporates some of the changes that TeachMeet has gone through in the last 12 months. Afterwards most of us headed off to the TeachEat to sample some famous Glaswegian curry. Moby didn’t come to that - he had to be in bed. He’d had a long day.

Our new TeachMeet movie premieres at TeachMeet SLF 2010!

5: Moby’s “dance off” with the guys from Learning Teaching Scotland. Ollie Bray and Derek Robertson were presenting the wonderful work they’ve been doing with games based learning in Scottish schools (you can read lots more about it the world leading work on the Consolarium blog) and one of the games they used was Wii “Just Dance”. They challenged Moby to a dance off. First Moby tried to psyche out Ollie Bray and threw a few moves to warm up.

Moby tries to pysche out Ollie Bray before their epic dance off

Then the dance battle commenced to MARRS - Pump Up The Jam.

Did you meet Moby? What were your highlights of SLF 2010?

Related Posts:

• Come and say “hello!” at SLF 2010
• What’s in store at SLF 2011?
• Calder-lightful! Using BrainPOP UK in Secondary English
• Highlights from the Scottish Learning Festival
• Bookcases up for grabs

We all know CPD is important but there’s no excuse for dull sessions. We think the CPD Workshop we held at Rockwell High School in Dundee this week was  successful, because we got great feedback. But, we’re always learning and would love to hear what else we could have do to make them better.

We believe it’s fun to get teachers involved at CPD workshops, not just talk at them – you wouldn’t expect pupils to just sit and listen, so why should you?

The CPD Workshop was led by Kim Conway, our BrainPOP UK Ambassador in Scotland, and boy does she love a bit of  audience participation! Engagement is, in part, about valuing the contribution and role of the learners, and bringing ‘a little something’ was a popular choice for Kim’s Dundee attendees. So, she set out a BrainPOP UK pack, chocolate and badge for each teacher for some competition fun. Welcome to our world, Dundee…

• Lucky badges – Everybody got the same badge apart from two lucky teachers; BrainPOP UK goody bags were handed over to smiling winners – it should teach folk to sit nearer the front next time.
• BrainPOP UK pen – Winning a pen turned out to be a bit of a flop with a mixed response from attendees – we guess a pen’s a pen in the end!
• Class set of BrainPOP UK badges – For coming to the front and answering a complete quiz, well done Darren!
• T-shirt competition – Well done Christine Howie from Clepington Primary School – you should have received your T-shirt by now so please wear with pride.

Quiz time! BrainPOP UK quizzes can be done in different ways, to reflect the different models of assessment and classroom management that teachers might use them. There’s more about this in our blog post, ‘Let’s get quizzical‘. Kim used the Graded Quiz option, using a ‘summative’ assesment model. The graded quizzes were good fun; attendees answered questions but didn’t get immediate feedback about whether they got it  right. It turns out, they got 8/10! Great result, but definately scope for improvement and more BrainPOPping!

Curriculum for Excellence – Another highlight for attendees was seeing our Curriculum Matching Tool, Deep Beep, as each topic is mapped to Curriculum for Excellence.

Tim and Moby support Curriculum for Excellence

We had some great feedback from attendees which we’ll definitely take on board.  Here’s a small selection of quotes…

Which parts of the CPD workshop were most useful?

“Going through the curricular areas to see what was available in terms of matching CfE outcomes and experiences”

“Demonstrating the movies and examples of quiz format. The curriculum matching tool is really useful”

“Associated movies and further links”

“The demonstration of how the site could be used within the school. Hands on approach”

What could be improved?

“Once we know how the quiz works/procedure for answering/giving wrong answers – more time can then be spent on becoming more familiar with other features”

“Don’t use up time trying to coax teachers up out of their seats”

How do you intend to use the skills/knowledge you have learned today in your school?

“I intend to pass on to other staff members and inform them of the free trial so they can take advantage of this fabulous resource”

“Will use it until September for literacy and Numeracy and let the children have a go and get feedback from them too”

“Pass on info and ask staff to trial – make a school decision based on usage and value”

“Share with colleagues. Poss use parts of some movies to introduce topics, stimulate discussion”

How might BrainPOP UK help you in future?

“Introducing topics or evaluating knowledge of topics”

“Allow children to back up the classroom learning after a lesson or as a teaching tool during the lesson”

“If movies are developed for infants would use it”

And, what important things did we learn for future CPD workshops?

Thank you to Louise from Dundee City Council for her help making this workshop happen and to Kim for her unyielding dedication to BrainPOPping.

What makes a great CPD session? What would you expect at a BrainPOP UK session? What horror stories can you share, and tips from the best?

Looking forward to seeing you at a BrainPOP UK event soon!

Related Posts:

• Scotland gets POPteach
• Highlights from the Scottish Learning Festival
• What’s in store at SLF 2011?
• Bookcases up for grabs
• Finding Moby

How often do you hear the following phrase, directly after someone receives a prize:

“I never win anything!”

Well, we hope the following schools utter this immortal phrase when they read their emails this morning. Because they all won some nifty prizes when they came to chat to us on our stand at a recent Aberdeenshire authority event and signed up to a free trial.

1. First prize – A 6-month school subscription to BrainPOP UK, a limited edition Moby T-shirt and a mug:
   Morag Andrew at Fishermoss School
2. Second prize – A limited edition Moby T-shirt, mug and mouse mat:
   Allicia Coates at Mearns Academy
3. Third prize – A limited edition Moby T-shirt and mouse mat:
   Jill Duncary at Clerkhill School

Well done to all 3 of you.

So next time give the competition a try – you never know when it might be YOU!

Related Posts:

• Highlights from the Scottish Learning Festival
• What’s in store at SLF 2011?
• Bookcases up for grabs
• Finding Moby
• Scotland gets POPteach

We met the lovely Annette Iafrate (twitter: @annette__i ) at the recent Scottish Learning Festival Teachmeet in September 2009.

She is a big BrainPOP UK fan and told us stories about how her class used Tim and Moby as characters in their climate change wall posters.

Well, suffice to say (after we waved a whole book of Moby stickers at her), she kindly agreed to tell us the story of that lesson. We just LOVE pupil made Tim & Moby stuff! Anything we can share and enjoy that comes direct from the classroom is the juice that keeps us motivated…

“Hi BrainPOP,

I’m currently doing my probation (NQT) year at Knightswood Secondary, Glasgow.

I have a fantastic S1 Geography class, with whom I have been working through a unit on weather. Towards the end of the unit I decided to include a few lessons on climate change. We focused on the causes, environmental impacts and what pupils can do to help prevent it.

I decided to use the BrainPOP UK movie on Global Warming and quiz as a plenary to the lesson. I signed up for a free trial as I had been directed to the site after reading Ollie Bray’s blog.

I used the global warming movie because it brought together everything we had been learning during the lesson.

Using the clips with the lower school (S1/2) was useful because they are short, fun and cater to different learning styles.

They engage the pupils with their bright and colourful animations and at the same time are packed with geographical content. The quizzes are great too because the pupils are given instant feedback.

After watching the movie the next lesson pupils were given was a task to design a poster to be placed around the school that makes people think about their actions and what they can do to help limit climate change.

I specifically asked them to make the posters fun so as to attract pupils their age to read them. Some pupils had asked me to play the global warming movie again as they wanted to include Tim and Moby in theirs. The poster was then taken away to be completed as homework, and the photos you see below were the end result.

I have also used some of the movies with other classes – PSE and tutor group – the bullying and Swine flu movies.

Annette Iafrate”

Sounds like you used Tim & Moby to inspire some real creativity. You have also inspired the team to establish our own climate change manifesto. Thanks so much for sharing your lesson with us, Annette.

Related Posts:

• Highlights from the Scottish Learning Festival
• What’s in store at SLF 2011?
• Bookcases up for grabs
• Finding Moby
• Scotland gets POPteach