http://www.flickr.com/photos/britt_w/

A few days ago we received a tweet from @digitalmaverick inviting us to the 140 Character conference http://bit.ly/kHE7X as his guest.

We use Twitter and social media channels all the time to talk to teachers. And we do love it so.

So we said: @digitalmaverick 140 times yes! Thanks so much for inviting us. We’d be intrigued and excited to attend.

This is brand new type of conference about social media, the tools that are turning our understanding of communication on its head.

The conference was marketed as “Real-Time Internet / State of “NOW”. How could we resist?

Twitter defines itself by limiting what you can say to 140 characters, including all spaces and punctuation.

Hence the conference name and its hash tag: #140conf. Then you can search for the keyword “#140conf” to hear what’s going on, live.

So I turned up at the O2 arena (never seen it before – what an incredible and space distorting structure!) in my Moby T-shirt. Natch.

@jeffpulver, the organiser and visionary, opened with passionate and fascinating keynote about the way we consume and create media.

@jeffpulver “Listen. Connect. Share. Engage” << love it!

You can see an Open University interview of Jeff here and it’s well worth a watch: http://bit.ly/KX2vx

Then a star turn by @stephenfry who cogitated on the nature of celebrity tweeting, & the power of a million followers.

He called himself a “Twillionaire” The first of lots of Twitter related jargon we were to hear that day.

@stephenfry also exhorted us to remember that Twitter was called Twitter for a reason. It’s about people, not technology.

What followed was stream of expert panels and keynote speakers. I’ll highlight those I personally found interesting.

I particularly enjoyed @JeffreyHayzlett, the CMO for Kodak, who is blending real time comms & crowd sourcing to shape products.

The Twitter and Small Business panel struck a cord. Small businesses (like us) benefit from the opportunities social media grants us.

Because we can make customers feel *personally* looked after. That’s a struggle for large companies.

The Twitter music panel was also an eye opener, as it had a DJ, musician, digital marketing exec from Warner and a Producer.

They told interesting tales about an industry in flux. They were also, by far, the grooviest panel yet

PS: Follow @mannynorte , the Kiss FM DJ, if you want to know someone who knows Jay Z and Beyonce.

JP Rangaswami (@jobsworth) the Chief Scientist at BT told us how his Twitter following helped him find his daughters missing gerbil.

This is where twitter really works. Not when it’s used as a broadcast tool, but as a participation tool. Please RT!

Josie Fraser (@josiefraser) a Social & Educational Technologist focused on the Re-Tweet (someone “re” tweets your tweet to their network).

RT @BrainPOP_UK Josie Fraser, a Social & Educational Technologist focused on the Re-Tweet (someone “re” tweets your tweet to their network)

The “Police who Tweet” panel was eye opening as it seems that civic bodies are on board with social media and woken up to listening!

The panel I was holding out for was the Education panel. For obvious reasons…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/britt_w/

David White (@daveowhite),Drew Buddie (@digitalmaverick), James Clay (@jamesclay),Shirley Williams (@shirleyearley) & Sue Black (@Dr_Black)

What was apparent was that they had formed (or enhanced) friendships via Twitter. If not, maybe it was just shared joy of teacherhood .

Immediately, as Teachers are trained to do, they involved the audience. It did feel up to this point, that the audience were rather passive observers.

They turned that on its head. @jamesclay – you were particularly disruptive and it was a pleasure to see

The main issue was “How can tools like twitter be used in learning?”.

It seemed the challenge wasn’t teaching the tool, but teaching the behaviours; how to gain from digital social comms, safely & wisely.

So was attending #140conf worth it?

Downsides: No Twitterfall (http://bit.ly/Wghue), no wifi & slightly passive nature of the event.

Upsides: The ideas and passion were clear. There was also lots of intelligent and exciting debate. An important event.

Social media is the future. Whether we like or not. The door has been opened to freedom of expression, global community and real time media.

Thanks for the authenticity, @jeffpulver and @digitalmaverick for his inclusion and generosity. Both of you are worth following.

Welcome back to school, all our fellow BrainPOPpers and POPettes, old and new.

We hope your summer break was a proper break. We know the sun only made a few appearances but when it did we hope you got out there and enjoyed it.

You might have read about some of the stuff that’s coming up from BrainPOP UK this Autumn term? Well, it’s time to draw back the curtains and announce some of them in more detail.

1. Our new Curriculum browse tool. We’re going back to the drawing board with this one. It will allow all our users to quickly and efficiently find and view a BrainPOP UK movie by a number of different curricula. And it will even be exportable as a Flash widget to plug into a webpage.
2. POPboxes – we’re very excited about these. Soon you will be able to pick a favourite BrainPOP UK movie and embed it into your very own VLEs and Blog pages. There will be different flavours available depending on whether you have subscribed to BrainPOP UK or not. The official announcement on how to get one is coming soon.
3. POP Press! - Our new termly email newsletter  – keep up to date with all things BrainPOP UK as the year progresses.
4. Complete tagging for the new Curriulum for Excellence for Scotland - every single one of our movies, old and new, will very soon be browsable by this curriculum AND the old 5-14 curriculum. We’ll be at the Scottish Learning Festival and the Teachmeet if anyone wants to chat about it.
5. We love BrainPOP UK…stuff. BrainPOP UK Tshirts, Moby and Tim cut out masks, Moby badges, BrainPOP UK posters, stickers…there’s going to be lots of fun resources to use as creatively as you like in your class or win in competitions. All we’re interested in is hearing about how you used them.
6. New and exclusive UK only movies on UK specific subjects - we’re keeping these hush-hush for now but we will be announcing them when we’re ready.
7. We’ll be on the look out for BrainPOP UK schools to do case studies, provide testimonials, write blog posts and help us test new technology in the classroom. If this is something you want to do you know how to contact us.
8. More fun on our Facebook group, our Twitter feed, our Youtube channel.
9. 160+ new movies are coming! Quick! Get your lesson plans ready, ladies and gentlemen, because you are soon going to be treated to movies such as:

• Rise of the Roman Empire
• Isotopes
• Galaxies
• Ants
• Graphs
• Adding and subtracting integers
• The computer mouse
• The Cold War
• Punctuation
• Sun protection
• Roald Dahl
• The Lord of the Flies
• Mahatma Gandhi
• Did I say there’s going to be a movie on Bogies? I didn’t? Well, there is.
• And Pirates! Garr!

We’ll be blogging the full list at a later date so keep an eye out.

So there’s lots of BrainPOPpy awesomeness coming your way. We are bursting with ideas on how to help you use technology to engage your students.

Work with us to make the ideas go from theory to classroom practice. And have enormous fun along the way.

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.

But did you know each movie also comes with an interactive multiple choice quiz? We call them POP Quizzes. You can find them in the bottom left of each movie page.

You can take a POPquiz right away if you like but you will be offered the option to take it at the end of the movie too.

Each POPquiz is 10 questions long and can be taken in one of three ways.

POPquiz questions are directly related to events in the movie and do two things very well:

• enable the teacher to assess the learning that happened during the movie (which is often shown front of class).
• to provide extension activities to reflect on the learning.

The Graded Quiz

This is taken directly on the screen.

The results are aggregated and you can choose to:

1. Print your score.
2. Email your score to any email address you like (this is particularly useful for the teacher as they can nominate their address so they get all results sent to them).
3. View your mark out of ten on screen.

If you choose the third option you will be able to go back and review all your responses and to reveal the correct answers.

The Review Quiz

The review quiz will not let the student move to the following question until they have provided the correct answer to the one they are attempting.

Upon choosing an answer Moby pops up and tells them if they are right or wrong before taking them back to the question to try again or moving to the next. This provides immediate feedback. Plus kids love seeing Moby pop up (you can’t see it here but Moby’s head shakes from side to side if they get a “Try again”. Take a POPquiz and see for yourself).

The Printed Quiz

I guess this is pretty self explanatory and still a pretty popular option. It allows you to print as many copies of the POPquiz you like and then distribute out to the class to collect later for marking.

I’d like to thank Olivia Newton John’s “Let get physical” 80′s lycra clad exercise hit for inspiration for my title pun so in homage you might want to take an actual 80′s music POP quiz.