What’s New on BrainPOP: September Recap
Posted by jglassman on
September has been a super busy month at BrainPOP. Here’s the roundup of what’s new.
New Features
Newsela
BrainPOP has joined forces with Newsela to bring you articles from well-regarded media sources, such as the Washington Post, Scientific American, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the Associated Press. Connected to BrainPOP topics across the curriculum, the articles are available at multiple tiers, enabling all students to access the same content at their “just right” reading level.
Digital Citizenship
With Digital Citizenship week coming up soon (October 16-20), BrainPOP is now offering free access to our Digital Citizenship collection, including ready-made learning pathways exploring important topics such as Information Privacy, Media Literacy, and Digital Etiquette as well as Teaching Resources to help you get started. The free offer will continue after Digital Citizenship week is over.
Assignment Progress Tracker
We’ve made an update to the Assignments tool! Now educators can view students’ work on an assignment and track their progress. You’ll see a list of students, along with the movies, quizzes, and other features you’ve included in your assignment. You can review quiz scores and leave feedback. Access this view from My Classes or by clicking “assignments” on the bar at the top of your screen.
BrainPOP at Home
Build the home-school connection with help from BrainPOP! First, let families know they have access to BrainPOP at home — see our blog post BrainPOP Beyond the Classroom: Building the Home-School Connection for letters to customize and send home. Then, print out and send home these fun, interactive BrainPOP activities for your students to do with their families. (Spanish version available).
BrainPOP Movies
BrainPOP is now a member of the CSforAll Consortium, a hub for the national Computer Science for All movement. In support of our commitment to Computer Science, we recently launched Creative Coding with our partner Vidcode–a feature that invites students to apply their understanding of our topics across the curriculum, through a variety of coding projects.
To accompany the launch of Creative Coding, we produced the following two new coding topics this month:
Functions
Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Repeating can be a pain! This new movie is all about functions and how they help you code repetitive actions.
Variables
In this new movie, Moby and computer whiz Nat use variables–labels for storing important bits of information–to help complete a complicated task. Discover the role variables play in each programming step, from declaring to initializing to debugging!
