Posts on “ international ”

Ayiti is the latest addition to GameUp in conjunction with Global Kids! We’re really excited to share this unique game with you. Ayiti is a turn based, strategy game that challenges players to manage a family of five in rural Haiti, and keep them all healthy, educated and out of debt. At the start of the game, the player chooses a main goal for his/her family: achieve education, make money, stay healthy, or maintain happiness. During the course of the game, the player encounters unexpected events and must make many decisions that contribute to or detract from achieving the chosen goal. Ayiti corresponds with our movie topic pages on Budgets, Fighting Hunger, Money, and United Nations. It’s great for project-based learning because of the inter-disciplinary aspects. Use our Ayiti lesson plan to get ideas for elaborating on the science, social studies, math, and health topics covered in the game. After game play, there are lots of ways you can help students make a difference in the world. More details about each one are found on the Ayiti website (including the names and contact information for the individuals and organizations listed below). Write a letter to your Congressional or Senate Representatives to find out what they are doing… Read the Rest»

BrainPOP is excited to announce our collaboration with Teach for All, a global network of social enterprises that is working to expand educational opportunity in nations all around the world.  Many have heard of Teach for America, the program that puts motivated college graduates into high needs schools in the US, but fewer know that international interest in the Teach For America model spawned Teach For All (TFALL), which was launched at the Clinton Global Initiative conference in September 2007. Today, the TFALL network includes organizations in twenty-three countries in Europe, Asia, the Americas and the Middle East, with programs in an additional 10-20 countries expected to join in the next two years alone.  Are you currently working with a Teach For All partner school?  If so, take a look in the TFALL Synergies community for an exciting opportunity that includes access to BrainPOP!

We’re thrilled to report that nearly 30,000 students at 66 schools in Mexico City now have access to our resources thanks to a new agreement between BrainPOP and Mexico City’s Department of Public Education. The agreement is part of Mexico City’s Educaćion en Red, a large-scale initiative with the goal of widespread online educational technology integration. This newest batch of BrainPOP users will have 24/7 access to BrainPOP Español – our Spanish language resource – and BrainPOP ESL – our award-winning English language learning and teaching tool – from any computer with an internet connection. Teachers will be able to take advantage of the online professional community BrainPOP Maestros. Like its U.S. counterpart BrainPOP Educators, BrainPOP Maestros features lesson plans, classroom tools, best practices, and the insight of more than 4,000 teachers across the Spanish-speaking world. You may already know how widely BrainPOP Español is used in bilingual settings here in the U.S. But it’s also used by more than 4.5 million children in 19 Spanish-speaking countries – in rural communities, urban centers, public and private schools, libraries, and homes. Within Mexico, BrainPOP has partnered with institutions including the National Council for Culture and Arts of Mexico (CONACULTA), the Department… Read the Rest»

At the end of January and beginning of February, I had the privilege to take an educational tour through seven cities in India. While visiting schools, universities, educational reform organization and companies, I shared my love for BrainPOP with everyone! One particularly interesting government school in Mumbai was run in conjunction with a community based project called Muktangan. This school not only educates k-8 students, but also houses a teacher training institute that employs many of the progressive approaches we see in the best schools in the US. I noticed a number of children on computers, so I shared a BrainPOP trial with the school and asked for their feedback. Last week, Uma Kogekar, the instructional technologist at one of the seven Muktangan schools, sent me a message describing teachers’ reaction after a few weeks of using BrainPOP. Ritu, a faculty member in the Education Department who works with pre-service teachers, says, “The trainees will use it to practice grammar!” This was echoed by Avni, a faculty member from the Language Dept, “BrainPOPESL can be used for English proficiency classes with our teachers!” Jennifer, also from the Language Department wrote, “We showed the Shakespeare movie to the kids as we are doing… Read the Rest»

Dr. Kari Stubbs, Vice President of 21st Century Learning, joined 100 people from 20 countries to celebrate the ten year anniversary of the Horizon Report at an alumnae board retreat last week. She represented BrainPOP on the board for the 2010 and 2011 K12 reports. With well over one million downloads and 27 translations in the past ten years, the NMC Horizon Report series provides a key strategic technology planning tool. To follow the live conversation from the event, search for the hashtag #nmchz on twitter. David Sibbet, the world’s leading visual facilitator, facilitated the event, where participants developed a set of recommendations and insights that will inform a major 30-to-40-page publication that is the key outcome of the retreat. How do you take advantage of the Horizon K12 report to facilitate your district’s technology planning?  

This weekend saw the passing of two significant figures in world history: Václav Havel, a former head of state who oversaw the switch from communism to democracy in the Czech Republic; and Kim Jong-il, the dictator and supreme ruler of North Korea until his death on Saturday. In the coming days, your students may hear snippets about these leaders, especially Kim Jong-il, who was considered by many to be an enemy of the United States and of the Western world. To help put their deaths ­ and the issue of communism itself ­ into context, we suggest showing our movies on Communism and the Korean War. In the former, Tim and Moby explain the origins of a controversial economic system ­ as well as why it’s been largely unsuccessful.­ In the latter, they describe the history behind the ongoing standoff between North Korea and most of the rest of the world. We also recommend our FYI on Kim Jong-il, which delves a bit further into his leadership and legacy.      

Here at BrainPOP we strive to keep our content current, relevant and consistently engaging.   We work with content experts and advisors to assure the videos and interactive features meet your expectations.  This week we introduce our newest advisor: Esther Wojcicki.  Esther’s impressive list of accomplishments include: founder of Palo Alto High’s Journalism program, chair at Learning Matters and vice chair at Creative Commons not to mention frequent contributer at the Huffington Post and consultant for the Carnegie Foundation.  With these experiences, she brings insight to the development of BrainPOP content in language arts, journalism and social studies. Esther enjoys BrainPOP because the “videos are easy to use, divided into logical categories, short but not too short and cover the material in an interesting way.” Also, working closely with students in journalism courses, she explains, “kids are expected to do some research themselves, find the information themselves and collaborate with their peers.  BrainPOP fits well into this new paradigm since kids can easily watch a variety of videos on their own and then join their group to share new information. Alternatively, they can watch together and then create some kind of project based on the new information they learned.”  Frequent readers… Read the Rest»

It’s been a week of global celebration here at BrainPOP.  We were proud sponsors of the Global Education Conference, shared tales of  science education in Shanghai, and attended the Microsoft Partners in Learning Global Forum. Dr. Kari Stubbs, Vice President of 21st Century Learning at BrainPOP, shares her exciting experience. Salut! Hola! Ni Hao! Ciào! WOW! I’ve just returned from Microsoft’s Partners in Learning Global Forum held in Washington, D.C.  With 700 educators from 70 countries, it was a remarkable opportunity to meet education visionaries from every corner of the globe. The Microsoft Partners in Learning Forums are a series of country-level and regional events that lead to a singular global event that celebrates the achievements of innovative teachers and school leaders. This year’s winners were selected from more than 115 projects, narrowed from more than 200,000 applicants, who competed at national and regional events over the course of the year to qualify for the worldwide competition at the 2011 Partners in Learning Global Forum. BrainPOP, available in American English, British English, Español, Français, Chinese and ESL was the perfect complement to the important work of these innovative teams. I joined a handful of innovators on the closing keynote panel… Read the Rest»

With all the buzz at  BrainPOP about the STEM video game challenge and this week’s Global Education Conference, today we welcome Guest Blogger Laura Brown. Laura is an expatriate science teacher working in Shanghai at Concordia International School.  Recently selected as an Apple Distinguished Educator and  member of the Learning 2.0 Asia Technology Conference executive committee, Laura is passionate about sharing her experiences in using technology in the classroom and assisting other educators to explore its ability to enrich and deepen student learning for a more authentic understanding. Most people are well aware of the significant differences between western-style teaching methodologies and a traditional Chinese classroom. The large class sizes, lack of interactive and engaging learning activities, and the broadcast teaching approach, not only limits a student’s ability to think flexibly, it also does not fully meet all students learning styles and many are subsequently left behind. The Shanghai Education Bureau has recently observed trends that suggest, despite what many would think, the average Chinese student’s understanding of, and ability to apply scientific concepts, is lower than the equivalent age student studying in a western-style classroom. The Bureau has since established a program for International Collaborative Research on Using Multimedia… Read the Rest»

BrainPOP is proud to be a Sponsoring Partner for the 2011 Global Education Conference, held entirely online from November 14-18. With over 200 sessions presented from all over the world, the conference seeks to present ideas, examples, and projects related to connecting educators and classrooms with a strong emphasis on promoting global awareness, fostering global competency, and inspiring action towards solving real–world problems. Through this event, our friends, organizers Steve Hargadon and Lucy Gray hope that attendees will challenge themselves and others to become more active citizens of the world. As a sponsoring partner, BrainPOP is especially excited to support esteemed educational philosopher Dr. Howard Gardner’s Keynote presentation on Wednesday November 16th at 2:00PM. Dr Gardner will be interviewed about globalization, new digital media and it’s  impact on education.  It will be a compelling hour. BrainPOP is a leader in delivery of online movies with interactive features in the USA, but you may not have known that BrainPOP content is constantly updated and translated into differentl languages.  It’s available in Spanish, French, Hebrew and even Mandarin!  Global education is part of our identity! The conference is entirely free.  You can learn more about all sessions and excitement at http://globaleducation.ning.com/