Moby Mask! Aaah!

Note the "Extremely Urgent"
notice on the envelope!

The coolest package was delivered to my door yesterday.  It wasn't but a flat-ish envelope, yet it is by far the best thing I've gotten in the mail in a while!  

I opened it up and I know my dog thought I was losing my mind cause with my overly excited response.  But this is something to be overly excited about!

You've "heard" me talk about BrainPop before.  Many, many, many times, actually.

Now I have my very own Moby Mask!  I am very excited to wear it on my first day back in the building in April!  

Thanks for the superb swag, BrainPop!  I am stoked to wear this (along with my BrainPop shirt) for all our BrainPop lessons in the future!

The Expansion of Westward Expansion

As a student, history was never a subject I enjoyed.  In fact, I think I barely passed most of my middle school and high school history classes. (Shocking, I know!)  What I know now is that had I been taught history the way we teach history now (at least at my school) I would have been way more engaged!

Take, for example, the fourth grade Westward Expansion unit.  These kids have spent a solid month digging into all they can find about the topic.  (And they're enjoying it, too!)  Rather than write a final essay on the topic, they are turning their learning into BrainPop movies.

The opening element of all BrainPop movies is the same - a letter from "a friend" to Tim and Moby.  When you make your own BrainPop, it's no different.  Because the students have spent so much time researching, they wrote their own letters, instead of answering one of the pre-written letters supplied.  Their letters probe into the topic they wrote about:

After they completed their letters, we used the computer voice (hey, BrainPop, when are we getting Tim and Annie's voices as options to use?!) to read the letter.  By using the computer voice, the kids writing has to be free from errors - that means capital letters and punctuation must be in proper place.

The same holds true for the rest of their movie.  They copy and paste the text from their typed essay into each scene in BrainPop.  Without proper capital letters and punctuation, the computer voice reads it very, very strangely.  By using the computer voice teachers can tell who used proper writing conventions and who still needs reviewing of those concepts.  All without writing a final draft, but publishing it as a BrainPop instead!

Let's Web-quest!

Sometimes, in my role as ed tech poobah, I get to make really cool activities for teachers to use with their students. This was one of those activities. 

In an epic Mashup of BrainPop and Seesaw, students navigated through a self-paced webquest on Digital Citizenship. Following their previous lesson with me on finding reliable sources online, this webquest dove a little deeper into some of the nooks and crannies in the digital world. 

Since Seesaw added the save as draft feature, it's made it even easier for kids to engage in activities like these, since they no longer need to be completed in one sitting. Because links are now native to Seesaw, it was super easy to link the videos the kids needed to watch directly in the activity. 

If you'd like to get a copy of this Seesaw/Brainpop Mashup, feel free to message me and I'll send the activity link!

Poppin' with BrainPop!

Fourth grade studies Westward Expansion as part of their Social Studies curriculum.  It's a very interesting topic, especially when you do a lot of learning about it with BrainPop!

The kids start off by watching a few different BrainPop movies, made even easier because the kids each have their own BrainPop accounts, so teachers can assign the movies to the kids that way.  From there, they do a ton of research, note taking, brainstorming, and organizing.

Next comes the writing.  This is one of their first formal essays of the grade, and they can choose any topic from the subject area - Gold Rush, Lewis and Clark, Louisiana Purchase, etc.  This part takes a lot of thought, as the kids learn to turn their notes into sentences and the sentences into well-crafted paragraphs.

Typically, at this point, you'd think that the last step would be to type or write a final copy of the completed essay.

But you'd be wrong.

Enter BrainPop!  It's Make-a-Movie Time! 

How does it work, you ask, when you are looking at a final draft of writing?  That, my friends, is for another post.

This post came to be because this week the kids got to explore Make-a-Movie for the first time.  And it was a lot of fun!  The features in Make-a-Movie (once again, assigned thanks to individual BrainPop Accounts,) allow kids to create their very own BrainPop, from letter to labels, backgrounds to images.  

And they are very, very cool!

i Heart BrainPop

Seriously.  I do.

I've been using BrainPop since you could get a two-week free trial by signing up with your email address.  (Thank goodness for free email addresses!)  I've been using BrainPop since the teacher login was the only option!  I've been using BrainPop... well, for a long time.

And I love it.  Even more now that I've spent time becoming a Certified BrainPop Educator (CBE) after a training in spring 2018.  It gave me the chance to do a deeper dive into all that BrainPop offers now.

And let me tell you... the platform is pretty spectacular!

If you haven't explored BrainPop in a while, you might not know that teachers can create their own classes, kids get their own accounts, you can assign and track progress, they have a whole coding platform, and yes, you can even make your OWN BrainPop movies!

Last year, our 4th graders published a writing piece using BrainPop's Make-a-Movie feature.  They did such a great job with the project, and were so excited to publish their writing as a BrainPop movie!

Next week, we are introducing BrainPop student accounts to the 3rd graders and
I.
Can't.
Wait!

BrainPop: Creative Coding

As part of being a Certified BrainPop Educator, I have to keep my training fresh.  So a few months ago, when BrainPop offered up some new tools, I jumped at the chance of giving them a go.  

Creative Coding is a new favorite tool that I am excited to try with my school.  It offers a simple way to bring the skills of coding into the familiar tool that is BrainPop.  Because it's connected to different BrainPop movies, it makes for a fantastic formative assessment tool, as well as an engaging way for kids to explore creativity and showcase their knowledge of content and coding skills!

BrainPop: Make-a-Movie

Our fourth graders are exploring Westward Expansion right now.  They've been working on a non-fiction piece about what they're learning.  The usual, right?

Or not.

Super excited when the team asked if there was a way to turn this into a BrainPop video!  So that's exactly what we did!

The teachers assigned the Westward Expansion video and Make-a-Movie to their students.  From there, we walked through, step by step, turning their writing into a BrainPop video!  Students took their thesis statement and turned it into a question for the traditional BrainPop letter.  Then they created a slide for background information, before adding supporting slides to elaborate on their thesis.  They typed in their content, added graphics, and worked the BrainPop magic!

Let me tell you... 50 fourth graders, four teachers, plus me, the techie.... despite the noise level?  It went really well!  The kids got way more done in the period than I anticipated, and I swear I saw ideas bubbling up over the teachers heads as they helped the kids with their project.  Look for a link to their videos soon!

Thanks for another win, BrainPop!