I thought it would be helpful to address some of our most frequently asked questions, so I’ve invited our Subscriber Relations team to share some FAQs and tips. Please let us know if you find this helpful, and if you have other questions.

How do I use my free trial?
First, make sure you received your email to activate your free trial. If not, you can have it resent! After you have activated your trial, head to the BrainPOP homepage (www.brainpop.com) and click the “Log In” button. Enter your username and password, then click Go.

How do I use my BrainPOP Jr. subscription?
If you have a subscription to BrainPOP Jr., make sure you are logging in at www.brainpopjr.com. BrainPOP Jr. and BrainPOP are separate sites, thus they require you to log in to each one (so even if you logged in at BrainPOP, you’ll need to log in at BrainPOP Jr. if you wish to use it).

Is there a way to have my students log in automatically?
Sure! We provide automatic login URLs that you can use as bookmarks, desktop shortcuts, or hyperlinks. The tools to generate these URLs can be found here for BrainPOP, or here for BrainPOP Jr.

We have a ton of new lesson plans up! Take a look! They began getting a little unruly, so we added in a filter to make it easy and efficient to quickly find what you’re looking for by subject and grade. Hope you find it useful! Please keep them coming — your submissions are so valued by the educational community! Many of you have been integrating BrainPOP into your curriculum for a while now — please take a moment and share the creative and unique ways you’re using BrainPOP with your students so others can be inspired. Our January lesson plan contest has a few days left — those whose lesson plans are published win a BrainPOP Educators t-shirt! Keep your eyes out for our February newsletter, where we’ll announce our contest winners.

Third grade teacher, Heather Hamker, from Avon Lake, Ohio, was recently the Featured Teacher on our partner, Promethean Planet. She created a fabulous interactive lesson on Dinosaurs that showcases BrainPOP on her interactive Promethean board.  Seeing her classroom in action is so inspiring!

We are gearing up for FETC around here! Florida’s Educational Technology Conference will be taking place in Orlando, Florida from January 21 - 24. BrainPOP will be there, along with some special guest educators! Will you? Please come and visit Booth 567. Here’s what we’ve got planned:

WEAR IT & WIN! - Visit BrainPOP Booth 567 at 9:30am on Friday and pick up a free BrainPOP Educators t-shirt (while supplies last). Wear it around the Convention Center and if we spot you, we’ll give you a subscription to the school of your choice!

JUST SAY “NO” TO BORING! - Pamela and Matthew Garrity will highlight BrainPOP in their session, “Just Say ‘No’ to Boring,” a look at the role of different technology resources in creating successful elementary school computer labs.

Friday, January 23

10:30 - 11:30am

North 310H

Are you presenting at FETC or any other upcoming conferences? Please let us know if you plan to feature BrainPOP!

Remember BrainPOP’s Election Spotlight? Now is a great time to revisit our movies and activities related to the presidential election. Pave the path to get ready to watch the inaugration with students with BrainPOP. Use our quizzes to see what students remember, and our FYIs and Activity Pages to dig a little deeper for some trivia, higher order thinking, and quirky, fun facts.

The Innovative Educator offers a great resource for watching the inauguration with students. NYCDOE has a ton of suggestions and links as well. Have you discovered other resources? Let’s pool ideas here!

BrainPOP is a great resource for teaching students WHY they have the day off of school on Monday! There’s still time! Picture this: Start the day off tomorrow or Friday with a Pop Quiz to see what students already know about MLK Jr.  You can also use our KWL chart from the Activity Pages to chart what students Know, Want to know, and later, have Learned.  Print and photocopy the first Activity Page and the Vocabulary page for students to take notes on during and after the movie, and send them home to be completed for homework! On day 2, spend some time exploring the FYI activities for some high interest reading and a pretty great comic. Finally, take the quiz again and revisit the KWL chart to assess student learning. Voila! Let me know how it goes!

For some of you, testing is already underway, while others are still in the midst of preparation. Did you know BrainPOP offers an entire category of topics related to Study and Reading Skills? To ease the overload and add some fun to your day, checkout BrainPOP’s movies that relate to testing!

Test-Taking Skills

Test Preparation

Reading Skills

You can also have some fun with this Experiment, from our Test-Taking Skills topic. And BrainPOP Jr. offers movies and activities on Main Idea, Making Inferences, and Reading Nonfiction, and How-To Essays. I would often visit BrainPOP Jr. with my fourth graders to reinforce certain topics.

Please post comments below and share how you are using BrainPOP to help with test prep! Thanks, and good luck!

It’s that time of year again… I’ve been out visiting schools (one of my favorite things to do!) and remember the toll test prep pressures took on my students and me. My grade level really found BrainPOP helpful in changing attitudes towards test prep and making it a more enjoyable experience for all involved. I’ll spend the next week or so sharing some of my own tips, and I invite you to share yours as well!

POP QUIZZES!

*BrainPOP Jr. models the process of elimination by x’ing out wrong answers. You can model the same thing for your students with BrainPOP, and use both the online and printed versions of both quizzes for hands-on student practice! If you’re using an interactive whiteboard, get those students up there getting rid of the obvious wrong answer(s), and practicing any other annotation you teach.

*Help students develop test taking skills by having them practice writing their own questions and answers. One of my favorite things to do with my interactive whiteboard was to use the windowshade tool to cover up the question, leaving only the multiple choice answers. By analyzing the answers, students learned how to figure out what the question must be. Great higher order thinking! The reverse also works well - cover up the answers and have students write their own based on the question. If you don’t have an interactive whiteboard, you can easily print BrainPOP’s quizzes and white out the questions or answers to do this.