Have you got a tip on getting the best from BrainPOP UK? Please contact us and we'll add it here! TOP TIP: You can also get inspiration from our growing bank of BrainPOP UK classroom stories on our blog. Take the robot by the horns - try using BrainPOP UK resources to challenge your class If this is your first time with BrainPOP UK ease your way in by starting 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. See if Tim and Moby acted well as middle men between the concept and your pupils. TOP TIP: Use the pause button regularly to stop and provoke discussion or invite questions. Timing is everything - mix up when you take the POPquiz Every movie in BrainPOP UK comes with a multiple choice interactive Quiz (called "POPquizzes"). 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! 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. 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. 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. Bear in mind this only works if you have a 24/7 subscription. 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 your interactive whiteboard. TOP TIP: You can also use the rewind and fast forward buttons to skip chapters within the movie. 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 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. 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. Getting the most from 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?