News. On the TV, on your phone, online, on the radio, in newspapers, in the corridors at school, in your classroom? Of course!

With every BrainPOP  movie we make, we do our best to answer the question posed and, in doing so, we aim to encourage and inspire the natural curiosity that kids of all ages have in the world around them. We understand that learning can never be confined to a classroom. Much the same as discussing current affairs isn’t ever confined to Jeremy Paxman and crew in the Newsnight studio.

“One of the great things about BrainPOP UK is that it’s really up to date. When explaining world events in class, I often use one of the clips to help illustrate the lesson.”

Ken Brechin, Head of Science, Cramlington Community High School

In the past month we’ve endured royal wedding fever, seen the SNP achieve a majority in the Scottish Parliament, witnessed a devastating earthquake in southern Spain, and heard the news last week that there was a bomb attack in Pakistan.

BrainPOP can help address the questions kids ask about what they see, hear and read about in the news. It’s a great way to encourage children to not only investigate an issue themselves but to form their own opinion about it and confidently discuss it in class.

Here are a few tips on how to take advantage of the broad range of topics available to support (and promote) class discussion:

1. If a major world event has occurred and your class are asking questions, why not try a key word search? Here’s what we turned up with a couple of keyword searches this morning: Terrorism and Earthquakes. Try for yourself and see. If a topic doesn’t appear that you think should have, let us know and we’ll investigate.
2. Subject categories are another way to look at a general area of interest that could be relevant. If we consider the same themes, there are two categories which immediately spring to mind: Citizenship: Living Together in the World and Geography: Features and Processes
3. Looking at the related movies lets kids make their own learning journey. Let’s take the Queen as an example. A quick glance and we see related movies ranging from current affairs to history, United Nations, Queen Elizabeth I, Magna Carta and British Empire. A veritable feast of thought-provoking and cross-curricular topics.
4. Deep Beep, our curriculum matching tool, can show you how to easily fit a lesson based on a news event into the curriculum you follow. If you follow Curriculum for Excellence for example, try drilling down to a social studies objective. Likewise, if you follow KS3 QCA Schemes of Work, drill down to a PSHE & Citizenship objective.

Curriculum for Excellence example

KS3 QCA Schemes of Work example

And if you’re setting a class project, having children research news issues independently or work in small groups, we have a range of topics available to help encourage best practice when researching and referencing sources: Study Skills.

Oh yeah, there’s even Reading a Newspaper too!

If you look at the movie player bar on any movie you will now see an “S” button.

Clicking this button will show and hide subtitles for that movie. Like this:

Why have we added subtitles?

There’s a range of benefits to transcribing the movie and displaying subtitles.

1. The most obvious benefit is to students with a hearing impairment, or even students at the back of class who may not be able to hear Tim & Moby as well as those at the front.
2. Subtitles encourage reading – just having the subtitles showing will make the students read without even knowing they’re doing it (stealth reading?). Be default this will improve reading and spelling skills.
3. We highlight key vocabulary in the movie directly where we can but the subtitles means that ALL vocabulary is picked up and displayed.
4. Some schools have headphones in their ICT suite and some do not. Or as a teacher you may not want the noise of a movie playing on one machine to disturb other parts of the class. Subtitles mean the sound can remain off, if needed.
5. Shared multimedia text – the class will be reading the subtitles, hearing the audio and seeing the animation as as a group. This means that reflection or extension work post playing the movie can be confidently delivered knowing the subtitles will have helped everyone to better understand the concepts Tim & Moby are delivering.
6. Pausing – stopping the action is a tip we’ve promoted before. But with subtitles on you can stop and focus on key vocabulary too, encourage note taking or allow the class to catch up on specific points.
7. You can turn the subtitles on and off at any point, without interrupting the movie. This means you remain in control of displaying the text.

We’re sure you will find other ways to use the subtitles to suit certain teaching experiences. If you have a tip or trick of your own please share it below.

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

1. 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.
   
2. Then watch the movie (and do your whole teaching thing, of course).
3. Then take the same quiz again.
4. 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.
5. 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.