Guest Blogger: Presenting BrainPOP at Your School

We are so fortunate to have teachers like Robert Miller, who teaches 4th and 5th grade at Port Orange Elementary in Port Orange, Florida. He let me know he was doing a presentation on BrainPOP and BrainPOP Jr. at his school, and agreed to share his tips and resources with us. Read on, and please let us know how it goes if you use Robert’s resources, or if you’ve got some of your own to share!

I have been using BrainPOP within my own classroom for years, but last year Port Orange Elementary upgraded to a School subscription using improvement funds.  By surveying the level of use of BrainPOP in our classrooms, I decided to lead an in-service to get the entire faculty fired up on a great resource already easily available… and also for selfish reasons of showcasing a product that would definitely be utilized school wide after exposure, thus ensuring interest and support to guarantee a vocal lobbying group for renewal funding!
If you check out the handy workshop resources under “Professional Development,” you will find logical outlines to share. From my in-service RSVPs,  I would be working with more primary grades so I made BrainPOP Jr. a focus. However, it was still very easy to include corresponding material from BrainPOP (I had both sites running under different tabs of my web browser… just a quick toggle back or forth to answer questions about either).

I had a copy of Annie’s Notebook Page for each participant as I modeled a topic. Many teachers predicted that by using just that one sheet with the initial student viewing, so many teaching variables like partner discussions, inquiry, or connections to prior knowledge would open up. My participants also thought that having a hard copy of each of the peripheral materials (Write About It, Activities, etc.) at the in-service helped to see the potential of each rather than just viewing an example from the website.
We shared ideas and other teacher-made resources as well… Some of which were constructed with the Just For Fun resources offered on BrainPOP Educators.

• Feel free to customize our teachermailboxflyerinvite as your invitation!
• I took the information from the BrainPOP in the Classroom printout and made them into small individual cards… Breaking the teachers out in small groups with a handful of cards allowed them to share these and other ideas in discussion. Then, each group shared favorites with the whole audience…. Teachers in cooperative learning!
• One teacher shared customized cutouts of the Moby Alphabet that can be used as individual response cards for the quizzes… now you have a fun tie-in to get those reluctant students to participate and commit to an answer!
• Many teachers in my school are finding ways to sprinkle more science throughout their days… Using the ideas from the Workshop Outlines, I created some PowerPoint slides to show how they can utilize a topic over a week. Customize it to meet your needs and print as handouts for teacher reference.

Again, an in-service can serve as a springboard to introduce a new web based tool to your school or as a great review of new features, methods, (or reminders) to an already existing resource.