BrainPop

BrainPop and BrainPop Jr. are "Animated Educational Sites for Kids". The most important thing for newcomers to know about BrainPop is that you will need a username and password to access most of the movies. Hopefully, the school where you teach has paid to have a username and password for BrainPop. If not, I strongly encourage you to investigate on how you can get your school a username and password.

The intended audience for BrainPop Jr. would be K-3 and BrainPop would be 3-5 grades. The movies are divided into subjects. (I will be focusing mainly on BrainPop. You can access BrainPop Jr. by going to http://www.brainpopjr.com/ . )

The subjects for BrainPop include Science, Social Studies, English, Math, Art & Music, Health, and Technology. There are also featured movies and free movies to check out as well.

Here is an example of how you could use BrainPop in your classroom. Say you are studying the American Revolution. You would log onto BrainPop, click on Social Studies, click on "See All Social Studies Movies", and finally click on American Revolution. Once there, you can click to enlarge the video. You would then click on play, of course. Once the video has played, you are given the option for your students to take one of three different types of quizzes... (1) graded quiz, (2) review quiz, or (3) printed quiz. These options are available after every movie. There will also be different activities you can print off to have the students complete, a timeline to share, and an experiment to do.

It is possible to view movies without a username and password; however, the choices are very limited. BrainPop does have several different movies featured each month that you can view for free. You can check out the free movies by going to http://www.brainpop.com/free_movies/. I highly recommend going to http://www.brainpop.com/ and looking around the entire website for yourself.

In my opinion, BrainPop is a great tool to incorporate into the classroom. If you are lucky to have a Promethean board in your school or classroom, BrainPop will become an instant interactive tool for you to use!! I have seen first hand how students love watching BrainPop movies. I give BrainPop an outstanding two thumbs up!!!