Excellent and Engaging Short Videos about a Wide Variety of Subjects
Community Review for BrainPOP
My Take
BrainPop is very engaging for the students, as the videos do a good job at explaining concepts and providing visual examples to supplement their descriptions, which is why it's great for ELL students and low literacy students. The students are familiar with Tim and Moby and get the humor that is embedded in the videos. There are so many topics that are covered that it has served us in math, reading, writing, science, social studies, and even wordstudy. It's a great site!
How I Use It
My co-teacher and I use BrainPop a lot in our 5th grade ICT classroom. Oftentimes, we use it as a hook at the beginning of a lesson (or unit), to provide an overview of a new topic or concept that we are about to introduce. Even with topics that should be familiar with students, we have started lessons with a BrainPop video as a review. Sometimes at the end of a lesson (or unit) we will watch the video again, to reinforce what was taught in the lesson, activity, or unit and then complete the quiz as a class, which the students love! For classrooms that do lots of group activity, students could be assigned videos to supplement center work or advanced students could be assigned videos on more advanced topics that they will encounter soon, to give them a headstart on those concepts and to allow them to make connections to what they are learning at that moment. Struggling students could be assigned videos of topics that need reinforcement and be required to complete the quiz at the end of those videos so that students (and teachers) have an immediate and quick assessment of their knowledge.