Okay, so you have to sign up for a free trial in order to truly
explore everything this site has to offer, but once you start exploring, I
guarantee you’ll want to appeal to whoever holds the purse-strings at your
school, or at the district level, and ask ol’ moneybags to pay for you and your
students to use this site. This site is
extremely interactive! Don’t get too
excited, you WILL still have to teach! ;)
As you should already know, a computer can’t do a teacher’s job, but
this site will certainly make learning more enjoyable for your students, and
therefore will make teaching more enjoyable for you.
Brainpop has stuff for elementary to high school, but I’m concentrating on high school English since that is what I teach. When I first typed in the web address and was directed to Brainpop.com’s home page, there were a number of links I could choose from (Yes, I teach English, but I just go ahead and end my sentences with prepositions. ;). To the left, I could explore the FREE site for educators, sign up for a free trial, or narrow down my search by selecting TN 9th grade Language Arts standards. The site has the standards listed with links to the lessons that it has available for each of the state standards. Wow! It doesn’t have a link to cover every single standard, but it certainly has a good bit of standards covered (maybe 75%?). I ran into one link on parallel structure that did not work, but every other link I tried took me to the appropriate lesson.
Okay, so now, back to the homepage. There are several links to subject areas, such as: Social Studies, English, Math, Engineering & Tech, Health, and Arts & Music. Again, I am an English teacher, so you know what I picked. On the English page, your main links to choose from are: Famous Authors & Books, Grammar, Study & Reading Skills, Writing (it even covers blogs!), and Free Movies. I started out choosing Famous Authors & Books, and then chose to learn more about Kurt Vonnegut.
Okay, now pay attention because this seems to be how the entire site is set up. You start by watching a movie about the subject, whether it is about Kurt Vonnegut or Pronouns. After each movie you can take a try the activity, take the quiz, read more, and get questions and answers. You don’t necessarily have to do anything in a certain order, however, there might be an order that you want to assign your students. I tried the activity first. I was given 10 fill in the blank questions and then one discussion-type question. After I filled in the answers I knew, it gave me the option to print. It prompted me to type my name so the paper would be labeled, and the date was automatically recorded. It’s set up so it can be easily submitted to the teacher. However, I think the teacher could make a crucial mistake here. I only got 7 out of 10 correct on the fill-in-the-blank; of course, I didn’t realize I would be quizzed afterward. Rather than having the student immediately turn in the paper, the teacher should allow the student to watch the video again, and fill in the correct answers with a pen. This way, the student still gets the information. I also wanted to write down a couple of notes that the site didn’t ask me about. For instance, Kurt Vonnegut’s novels mostly addressed the meaning of life, the purpose of religion, and the good and bad aspects of technology. I believe this is very important, but the computer asked me where he grew up (Indianapolis, Indiana), which I didn’t see as very important. The student has the power to pause (and even rewind) the video while he or she writes down answers or notes. I took my additional notes on the front of the page, but to keep things neater, I would suggest flipping the page over to the blank side for your extra notes.
So, the quiz is multiple choice, and it doesn’t tell you if you got the question right. You just go through and choose answers, and you don’t know what you made until you print it out. There is still an option here, of allowing the student to choose another answer if he or she got the question wrong. I got all of my multiple choice questions correct on the quiz. Just sayin’…. ;) There are other links to choose as well, such as Quotables, Trivia, Language, and Way Back When. If you click on these links, you can get quotes that make you think like this one from Kurt Vonnegut, “Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who had nothing more to say?” You can also learn interesting facts like that Kurt Vonnegut appeared in three Hollywood movies (two of which were adaptations of his own works, Breakfast of Champions and Mother Night). I came across connections to history and social studies while I was learning about Kurt Vonnegut, and I’m sure if and when I have more time to explore, I’ll run across many other content connections.
I’ve covered a lot about what I like about the site, but a major pro about this site is that students could direct their own learning. If I used this site as a guide, I could have students do most of their preliminary work here, and then offer a bunch of additional assignments they could choose from in order to show mastery of the standards. While the rest of the class was working online, I could meet with individual students or small groups to re-teach those who demonstrated a need for it.
Okay, among the many pros, there are a few cons… I mentioned before that I found one link that didn’t work, and that was slightly annoying, but not that big of a deal. I certainly think it is a con that teachers only have 5 days to explore this site on their free trial. During the regular school year, this would not work for me. There is so much going on during the school year, it’s hard to put a 5 day limit on anything. Lucky for me, I’m on summer vacation…sort of ;).
Note: No adult supervision is required for this site. However, I believe that student’s use of this site can be enhanced by some teacher modeling of how to use it.
Brainpop has stuff for elementary to high school, but I’m concentrating on high school English since that is what I teach. When I first typed in the web address and was directed to Brainpop.com’s home page, there were a number of links I could choose from (Yes, I teach English, but I just go ahead and end my sentences with prepositions. ;). To the left, I could explore the FREE site for educators, sign up for a free trial, or narrow down my search by selecting TN 9th grade Language Arts standards. The site has the standards listed with links to the lessons that it has available for each of the state standards. Wow! It doesn’t have a link to cover every single standard, but it certainly has a good bit of standards covered (maybe 75%?). I ran into one link on parallel structure that did not work, but every other link I tried took me to the appropriate lesson.
Okay, so now, back to the homepage. There are several links to subject areas, such as: Social Studies, English, Math, Engineering & Tech, Health, and Arts & Music. Again, I am an English teacher, so you know what I picked. On the English page, your main links to choose from are: Famous Authors & Books, Grammar, Study & Reading Skills, Writing (it even covers blogs!), and Free Movies. I started out choosing Famous Authors & Books, and then chose to learn more about Kurt Vonnegut.
Okay, now pay attention because this seems to be how the entire site is set up. You start by watching a movie about the subject, whether it is about Kurt Vonnegut or Pronouns. After each movie you can take a try the activity, take the quiz, read more, and get questions and answers. You don’t necessarily have to do anything in a certain order, however, there might be an order that you want to assign your students. I tried the activity first. I was given 10 fill in the blank questions and then one discussion-type question. After I filled in the answers I knew, it gave me the option to print. It prompted me to type my name so the paper would be labeled, and the date was automatically recorded. It’s set up so it can be easily submitted to the teacher. However, I think the teacher could make a crucial mistake here. I only got 7 out of 10 correct on the fill-in-the-blank; of course, I didn’t realize I would be quizzed afterward. Rather than having the student immediately turn in the paper, the teacher should allow the student to watch the video again, and fill in the correct answers with a pen. This way, the student still gets the information. I also wanted to write down a couple of notes that the site didn’t ask me about. For instance, Kurt Vonnegut’s novels mostly addressed the meaning of life, the purpose of religion, and the good and bad aspects of technology. I believe this is very important, but the computer asked me where he grew up (Indianapolis, Indiana), which I didn’t see as very important. The student has the power to pause (and even rewind) the video while he or she writes down answers or notes. I took my additional notes on the front of the page, but to keep things neater, I would suggest flipping the page over to the blank side for your extra notes.
So, the quiz is multiple choice, and it doesn’t tell you if you got the question right. You just go through and choose answers, and you don’t know what you made until you print it out. There is still an option here, of allowing the student to choose another answer if he or she got the question wrong. I got all of my multiple choice questions correct on the quiz. Just sayin’…. ;) There are other links to choose as well, such as Quotables, Trivia, Language, and Way Back When. If you click on these links, you can get quotes that make you think like this one from Kurt Vonnegut, “Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who had nothing more to say?” You can also learn interesting facts like that Kurt Vonnegut appeared in three Hollywood movies (two of which were adaptations of his own works, Breakfast of Champions and Mother Night). I came across connections to history and social studies while I was learning about Kurt Vonnegut, and I’m sure if and when I have more time to explore, I’ll run across many other content connections.
I’ve covered a lot about what I like about the site, but a major pro about this site is that students could direct their own learning. If I used this site as a guide, I could have students do most of their preliminary work here, and then offer a bunch of additional assignments they could choose from in order to show mastery of the standards. While the rest of the class was working online, I could meet with individual students or small groups to re-teach those who demonstrated a need for it.
Okay, among the many pros, there are a few cons… I mentioned before that I found one link that didn’t work, and that was slightly annoying, but not that big of a deal. I certainly think it is a con that teachers only have 5 days to explore this site on their free trial. During the regular school year, this would not work for me. There is so much going on during the school year, it’s hard to put a 5 day limit on anything. Lucky for me, I’m on summer vacation…sort of ;).
Note: No adult supervision is required for this site. However, I believe that student’s use of this site can be enhanced by some teacher modeling of how to use it.
I think that BrainPop is reasonable when it comes to showing videos and quizzing kids on factual knowledge. Videos are fun and quite comprehensible, but I think they might be too fast-paced for my ESL kids...some of my students struggled to keep up. Elementary quizzes do tell you, if you got the answers right or wrong and it can actually read the questions and answer options to the kids (which is nice, if you have non-readers). In my classroom, we used BrainPop as a whole group activity (I only have two computers and many more children) on days I just could not teach any more or for practicing note-taking (during data gathering for reports the kids were writing).
ReplyDeleteNatalia, I also used BrainPop as a whole group activity. I mostly used it as a hook to the beginning of a lesson. Sometimes I would use it as a station because I only had a small number of classroom computers as well.
ReplyDeleteErin, It is always good when a site provides information for the upper grades, especially in English :)
And just so you know, Kurt Vonnegut also appeared in the Rodney Dangerfield classic, Back to School: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQnAhSzb4gY (caution: there is swearing in there!).
ReplyDeleteThanks for the detailed tour of BrainPop. I am glad to know there is good stuff for high schoolers in there as well.