Special Guest Series: Moby Goes Global

Posted by allisyn on

Mitch Norris is an Apple Distinguished Educator and the ICT specialist for Kindergarten to Grade 7 at the International School of the Sacred Heart in Tokyo, Japan. You can find him at his website www.misternorris.com or on Twitter at @misternorris.

Here at the International School of the Sacred Heart in Tokyo, we have been using BrainPOP for a number of years. We encourage all of the teachers to use it in their classroom to replace the ‘chalk and talk’ when introducing a topic or even at the end of a topic to reinforce meaning as well as assess for understanding.

So at the moment, Grade 2 has been doing a unit on Nutrition, and being the ICT teacher, I thought I would do the BrainPOP Jr. video on the food pyramid with them. Kindergarten through Grade 2 were lucky enough to receive a shared set of Macbooks this year, so with each student equipped with a laptop and a pair of headphones, they set out to watch the BrainPOP Jr. video on the food pyramid. After the video, they completed the online quiz and saved it as a PDF so their homeroom teacher could use it as an assessment task and the students could use it in their portfolio if they choose.

Next, I grouped the students up, gave them a pre-printed game card, and set them on their way to complete the game. You can see a video of the students playing the game here:

Brainpop Jr Game from Mister Norris on Vimeo.

The students loved the lesson and were all engaged in their learning, through the help of technology and BrainPOP Jr. We may also watch the new Eating Right video soon to further their knowledge of healthy eating and nutrition.

I keep the parents up to date on what is happening in their child’s ICT class on my blog, www.misternorris.com . You can see the post that I sent home to the parents about the lesson here.

I definitely recommend BrainPOP and BrainPOP Jr. to all elementary and junior high schools. The students love it and it’s a great tool for teachers to assess understanding and engage their students in their learning.

How are you using BrainPOP internationally with students? Please share ideas below!