Start planning now! We’re featuring a brand new Spotlight on Book Month for January, including famous authors, great interactive activities, and more! Be sure your students know the basics of writing a Book Report. Learn more about the classic, Frankenstein, our featured free movie, or the more modern adventures of Harry Potter.   You can explore famous authors from Homer to Kurt Vonnegut, and in BrainPOP Jr., Ezra Jack Keats and Cynthia Rylant. Our Winter & Snow Spotlight will stay available through the end of January as well.

Happy New Year!

To welcome you back from vacation, we’ve added a brand new video tutorial that I am super excited about! Check out Note Taking With BrainPOP and see how to take advantage of the Activity Pages and FYIs to teach this important skill to your students. A special thanks to Melissa Farran, 4th grade teacher at PS 261 in Brooklyn, NY, for sharing her expertise and her incredible class with us. Take a look, try it out, and please let me know what you think!

Mike Jackson is a fourth grade teacher in Bellevue, WA. We met at the NECC conference this year, when Mike helped us out in our booth, sharing his experiences with BrainPOP with other educators. He’s currently working on his National Board Certification, and shares his experiences using BrainPOP below!

I have been using BrainPOP since its debut in 1999, when I was teaching at an American International School in Hong Kong. Being so far from the US, we were constantly looking for quality resources to integrate into our curriculum to ensure the students attending our school, while their families were stationed overseas, were getting an “American Style” education. When we discovered BrainPOP it quickly became a favorite resource to enrich our teaching.

Now that I am back home in Washington State, I am doing all I can to turn other teachers on to this valuable resource.

My two favorite aspects of BrainPOP are its ability to allow children to explore their curiosity, and my ability to differentiate my curriculum to all levels of understanding in any given lesson. (more…)

I am a big fan of Lucas Kent’s book, 6 Steps to Success in Teaching with Technology. Lucas clearly approaches technology integration with an experienced teacher’s mentality. I highly recommend his book, which addresses the range of comfort levels teachers have with technology and how to best, sensitively meet everyone’s needs. Very down to earth and practical! Without further adieu, I’m excited to introduce Lucas Kent as this week’s guest blogger!

I am always looking for e-learning products that are useful and will stand the test of time for our school board. So many products come and go, and don’t really address the long-term needs of schools. (more…)

This is so much fun! I just sent a Moby e-card to my best friend in China! The idea of doing BrainPOP e-cards has been in the works for a long time, so it’s exciting to see it up and running! Hope you have fun with it!

I just read about this grant opportunity for NYC teachers. I was awarded one of these a few years ago. Teachers Network is a fantastic organization. Great opportunity to fund BrainPOP if you’re looking for funding options! Got any grant tips to share? Please post below!

Teachnet grants are awarded to New York City public and charter school teachers in grades pre-K through 12 who design outstanding curriculum units that integrate the Internet into an original project for the classroom.

Successful applicants receive $500 and publication on teachersnetwork.org.

Applications Due January 20, 2009.

Consider BrainPOP’s Spotlight: Winter & Snow your seasonal headquarters. You’ll find great content on all-things winter, from movies about Winter Holidays and Mount Everest, to those on Snowflakes and Hibernation. You can also send personalized, free e-cards to your favorite Moby loving friends and family!

Now through January 10th, save 25 percent when you purchase Family or Classroom subscriptions to BrainPOP (grades 3 and up) or BrainPOP Jr. (grades K-3), or Combo subscriptions for your family or classroom (Combo subscriptions include access to both BrainPOP and BrainPOP Jr.). Homeschoolers, you’re also eligible for this discount. Be sure to enter holiday08 as the coupon code.

Finally, check out our easily adaptable lesson plan on Hibernation to kick off your winter studies! Happy December!

Fear not! The resources on Ancient Cultures you’ve been searching for are here!  We are confident that students will love learning about these important cultures from the past with Moby, Tim, and Annie as their tour guides. Start with the Roman Republic Activity Pages before you even watch the movie! These will be perfect to return to for note-taking during the movie and to revise afterwards. Many teachers and parents find it useful to have students take the Quiz before watching the movie as a quick assessment of what they already know. Then jump in! We’ve got your ancient cultures covered, from The Fall of the Roman Empire to  Mesoamerica, and Homer to Cleopatra! We’re featuring the Roman Republic and  Ancient Egypt (from BrainPOP Jr’s Spotlight) as our two free movies in this Spotlight.

Let us know what you do with these resources by posting below or submitting a lesson plan! We’ll even send you a BrainPOP t-shirt if your lesson plan is published!

We are so fortunate to have teachers like Robert Miller, who teaches 4th and 5th grade at Port Orange Elementary in Port Orange, Florida. He let me know he was doing a presentation on BrainPOP and BrainPOP Jr. at his school, and agreed to share his tips and resources with us. Read on, and please let us know how it goes if you use Robert’s resources, or if you’ve got some of your own to share!

I have been using BrainPOP within my own classroom for years, but last year Port Orange Elementary upgraded to a School subscription using improvement funds.  By surveying the level of use of BrainPOP in our classrooms, I decided to lead an in-service to get the entire faculty fired up on a great resource already easily available… and also for selfish reasons of showcasing a product that would definitely be utilized school wide after exposure, thus ensuring interest and support to guarantee a vocal lobbying group for renewal funding!
If you check out the handy workshop resources under “Professional Development,” you will find logical outlines to share. From my in-service RSVPs,  I would be working with more primary grades so I made BrainPOP Jr. a focus. However, it was still very easy to include corresponding material from BrainPOP (I had both sites running under different tabs of my web browser… just a quick toggle back or forth to answer questions about either).

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Today BrainPOP was visited by one of Promethean’s super-talented TLC’s, Ben Posner. Ben showed us Promethean’s new Activexpression devices and helped us brainstorm ways to use them with BrainPOP. Activexpressions are Student Response Systems, or SRS devices. If you’re not familiar with SRS devices, they allow teachers to get instant feedback on what each student knows or has to say. Newer SRS devices allow students to respond in a variety of ways; the Activexpression devices even allow students to text short answers with a mobile-phone like design.

One topic we explored was how students could use SRS devices like Activexpression to write collaboratively. For example, In BrainPOP’s Thirteen Colonies Activity: “Think About It,”, each student could use the devices to text one reason why colonial immigrants and modern immigrants have similar reasons for coming to America. Their various texted responses would appear on the interactive whiteboard at the front of the room. Then the class could decide how to arrange or edit the various responses into one paragraph.

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty excited that students can now put those texting skills to work for an educational purpose! What are your thoughts? Are you already using SRS with BrainPOP in your classroom? Tell us about it!