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San Antonio, here we come! BrainPOP will be at the 2013 ISTE conference from June 23-26, and we’re excited to share all of the new features and resources we’ve been working on.

We’ll be showcasing our much-anticipated offerings and welcoming special guests to share their tips and tricks at our booth throughout the conference. We’re thrilled to be part of the Games & Simulation Arcade (hosted by the ISTE Special Interest Group for Games & Simulations) for the second year in a row. This “ISTE Playground” will feature an afternoon of game-based learning sessions, and we’ll be presenting along with some of the leading game creators we partner with on GameUp.

Heading to ISTE? Don’t miss out on all of the BrainPOP action and check out our full online schedule. We’ll be at booth 10076, so stop by to connect with fellow teachers, pose for a photo with Moby, and take home some brand-new swag.

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BrainPOP Webinar: Artful Thinking Routines With the DIA Art Center’s April Lee

Tuesday, June 18 at 3:30 pm ET 
Designed for educators of all disciplines, this webinar focuses on the Artful Thinking Routines – a group of protocols designed by Harvard researchers to help people think deeply about artwork. We’ll look at web-based collaboration tools for this program, examining individual artworks and other ephemera while considering the effective use of online platforms for future educational experiences.

Event Password: moby

https://brainpopevents.webex.com/brainpopevents/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=663973046

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Addition Blocks is the newest math game to be featured on GameUp!  Back in 2011, the Federal Department of Education’s Digital Promise Initiative announced the STEM Video Game Challenge, and Georgia based mathematics teacher Martin Esterman created Addition Blocks to help students build fluency with basic addition facts.  Combining “Tetris like” spacial reasoning with multiple digit addition, the game went on to win the competition and establish Martin as a force in the world of independent education video game development.

Martin presented about the importance of helping students build fluency with addition facts and how Addition Blocks supports that goal as part of the the BrainPOP Educators webinar series in May 2013.  You can view an archived version of the webinar and hear from the man himself.

Addition blocks is a great game for building fluency, but can be very frustrating for students who are still developing conceptual understanding.  Be sure to read Martin’s Research Summary to determine which students this game is most useful for!

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BrainPOP Webinar: BrainPOP: Looking Back and Looking Forward

Wednesday, June 12 at 3:30 pm ET 
Round out the school year with a review of all things BrainPOP and get some great ideas for next year. We’ll discuss best practices and teaching strategies for integrating BrainPOP and BrainPOP Jr., ensuring you get the most out of your subscription. We’ll cover the assessment Mixer and BrainPOP Educators, making sure you’re in the know about all the valuable features that support you in the classroom.

Event Password: moby

https://brainpopevents.webex.com/brainpopevents/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=661115782

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Digital Badges: Lessons Learned
Monday, June 10, 2013 – 4pm / Eastern Time
REGISTER HERE for the webinar.

Presented by Lisa Dawley, Ph.D., CEO of GoGo Labs, and Julie Stratton, teacher at Cape May County Technical High School in New Jersey

Are you considering digital badge implementation in your school or classroom? In edWeb.net’s next webinar, Go-Go Labs’ Lisa Dawley will share her experience over the last year, designing, implementing, and evaluating Mozilla open badges with high school students and teachers around the country. Teacher Julie Stratton will share lessons learned through the process so you can more easily add digital badges to your own program or curriculum. You’ll gain insight into strategies for partnering with technology and content providers as well as for using Mozilla open badge function. They’ll also look at curriculum design considerations and student motivation to earn badges (or not!) Join Lisa and Julie on June 10th to learn how to implement digital badges with your students.

*Please note that this webinar is not hosted by BrainPOP and all professional development certificates will be issued by edWeb.net.

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Lauren Bounds is a 1st Grade teacher at the Thackston School in Knoxville, TN. In this guest blog post, Lauren tells the story of using BrainPOP as inspiration for making a solar system movie with her students.  Most notable Lauren explains that the process – “was not as overwhelming as I thought it would be.”

It was a bit overwhelming at first when I first came across the idea (in a wonderful BrainPOP webinar) of incorporating movie making into my class by making our own version of a BrainPOP video. I loved the idea, but simply couldn’t grasp where I could begin or even if I would be able to accomplish the task with such a young class (1st Grade).

So I did the only thing I could think of:  I shared the idea within our classroom community. My students were ecstatic about the idea of making their own BrainPOP video and immediately began a “discussion” about who would be Moby. We decided to brainstorm ideas about a video together and they came up with some really remarkable ideas with minimal help from me. After seeing their enthusiasm and hearing their ideas I felt a lot more confident in our ability to take on this project. We first began with deciding the topic of the video. We had been working on a unit about the Solar System (which they loved as well…I have great kids who get excited about a lot of wonderful things!) When the idea for the solar system BrainPOP was introduced, it was voted as the topic in a unanimous vote. I agreed wholly with their topic choice.

We began by talking about all the steps we would need to take in order to make this video happen and the format that our video would follow. My students made a list to track all the things we would need to complete to finish our project. I had visited our local library and gotten a plethora of books on their level about the planets. The first step they decided on was to use those books as resources and make reports about each planet. I put my students into pairs and each pair made a report and a picture for the eight planets in our solar system and the sun. Once the reports were complete we knew we needed to make a script to follow. They decided on some things that they really wanted to include in the video, such as the planet song we had been singing in class and Moby blasting off to outer space. My next step was to teach script writing and review the writing process. Then I had my students tell me what they wanted Annie to say in the video and we wrote it down together. We made a rough draft, edited it, and finally were ready to film.

We casted the parts of Annie and Moby (we drew names from a hat to decide who would get these coveted roles).  Then each student read their report about one of the objects in our solar system while I videotaped their reading. In an older class I would allow a student to be the videographer or even in first grade if you have school cameras. However, we were using my own personal video camera for this one so I assumed that role. Once we were finished taping the reports we worked on filming Annie’s speaking parts. With just a few tries we captured all the scenes we had written and the video was ready to be edited.

My students were extremely excited when they saw the end result of their video. They begged many times to watch it over and over again. Reflecting back on the whole process, it was not as overwhelming as I thought it would be. When your students are excited about a topic and ideas are flowing freely within your classroom community the process turns into something both enjoyable and rewarding.

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Mooresville North Carolina has gotten national publicity for their successful implementation of a one to one laptop program. So we were thrilled to see that BrainPOP was featured in a video about Mooresville on EdWeek’s “Digital Curricula Evolving” video series. In this video, see how 6th grade teacher, Judy Cohen, assigns BrainPOP videos as homework “to introduce, to reinforce and to remediate.” She also describes how video is engaging today’s students. “it doesn’t replace the interaction, but it does help them to formulate questions.” Cohen is clearly a gifted teacher, and she describes how using online video has profoundly changed the way she teaches.

Visit EDweek to learn more about Mooresville, and approaches to teaching with video content.

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Are you ready to take BrainPOP Jr to the next level with your students? Then go ahead, click that shiny new “lesson ideas” button on every BrainPOP Jr. Topic page!   Clicking this button for a whole new entry point to BrainPOP Jr Educator resources! Find topic specific lesson plans, graphic organizers, teacher videos, games, and more. Our goal is to make a more friendly BrainPOP Educators experience, and reduce the amount of searching you need to do to find great ideas.  Also, we’ve added a social layer!  Once you click through to a learning resource, you can leave a comment describing how you’re using it, or read comments about about how other BrainPOP Educators are using it.

We hope you find these new pages useful, let us know! Search less, find more!

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Guest Blogger Cheryl Phillips in an Instructional Technology Resource Teacher in Prince William County Public Schools, VA.  In today’s guest blog post, Cheryl shares how BrainPOP is now inspiring her students to create their own animation. Cheryl story proves that BrainPOP is much more than just a movie and a quiz!

I’ve have been a frequent user of BrainPOP since its inception back in 1999. At the time, I was teaching fourth graders and using the program whenever I could get my students in front of a computer. BrainPOP was an excellent program for enhancing our curriculum, whether it was science, social studies, math, language arts…it was all there just waiting to engage the students with Moby and Tim along for the ride.

As the years pass, Moby and Tim have grown up right along with the students. We’ve entered into the 21st-century and BrainPOP has a plethora of products which are fully compatible with an all inclusive techno world that our students are now enjoying! My students today include middle school and while I’m no longer a classroom teacher, I now enjoy teaching students how they can integrate their objectives with technology, which is exactly what BrainPOP has been doing for years!

A student favorite is learning to animate. Animation is the perfect tool for students to show off what they’ve learned. You can take any objective and have the students create an animation as their evaluation. The challenge comes when trying to give them an example and this is where Moby and Tim come to the rescue. Once the students learn the art of animation using a program like Tech4Learning’s Frames5 program, we watch a BrainPOP video and study the animation and delivery of information. The students are now watching the video through the eyes of a ‘movie maker/animator’ and not just watching for the content. Upon conclusion, you can hear the collective, “Ah-ha” from the students and they are chomping at the bit to get started!

Our students have come full circle with BrainPOP, from elementary school learning laughing at the antics of Moby and Tim to middle school and learning how to animate. Today, we enjoy BrainPOP for all it continues to offer and then some!  Now the students are creating their own teaching animations with their own Moby and Tim doing the introduction!

Check out these examples of Cheryl’s Students animations about Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  If you’d like to submit your own student inspired BrainPOP movies, we’re thrilled to share them with the BrainPOP Educators community.  Get in touch!

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