New to BrainPOP
Enhancing the Teacher Experience Across Products
We’ve made it even easier to integrate BrainPOP into daily instruction! Learn how and why we redesigned the BrainPOP and BrainPOP Jr. teacher homepages and assignment builder to align with our evidence-based learning framework.
The BrainPOP Learning Arc
The learning framework (or “learning arc”) visually represents how teachers can use BrainPOP flexibly to drive learning outcomes, leveraging BrainPOP topics as an anchor to guide students’ dynamic learning experience. This framework can be adapted across concepts, classrooms, and levels of comprehension.
Build Background
Engage students in learning new (and sometimes complex) topics by activating their prior knowledge and scaffolding their understanding of grade-level concepts through a BrainPOP or BrainPOP Jr. movie. Every movie weaves grade-level learning concepts and essential literacy skills within playful animations and engaging narratives. Essential literacy skills are transferable, high-impact reading, writing, and language skills that are universally needed to drive student proficiency and growth toward grade- and state-level standards.
Apply and Assess
Students apply their knowledge through auto-graded quizzes and Challenge activities as teachers assess grade-level concepts, common misconceptions, and essential literacy skills. Teachers can then use this data to inform future instructional decisions.
Deepen and Extend
Movie making, concept mapping, and coding help students build connections between concepts and content knowledge, providing them with new and creative ways to show what they know and apply transferable essential literacy skills.
New BrainPOP and BrainPOP Jr. Homepages
Teachers will now experience a new homepage when they log in to their individual accounts. The new layout improves topic discoverability and makes assigning topics across all subject areas even easier. In addition, homepages highlight the BrainPOP learning arc. At first glance, teachers will see how to build background, apply and assess understanding, and deepen and extend instruction.
We’ve added a few new sections, too!
Recommended Topics
Timely topics are mapped to universal curriculum trends throughout the school year to make planning ahead even easier. Updated monthly, these topics are hand-selected by BrainPOP learning designers as exemplars for building essential literacy skills alongside grade-level content knowledge. Topics also include movies with Pause Points.
Topic of the Day
Highlighted topic pages provide explicit support for mapping BrainPOP and BrainPOP Jr. activities to the learning arc. They may include thematic months, national holidays, and callouts for newly released movies.
Tips from Moby
Weekly tips and creative ideas will simplify planning for what and how to teach with BrainPOP that week.
And that’s not all! We’ve also improved our assignment-building process, so topics can now be assigned directly from the homepage.
Improved Assignment Builder
The assignment builder enables teachers to create assignments that include multiple BrainPOP activities. The improved workflow also empowers them to make more informed decisions about maximizing BrainPOP in their classrooms, making it easier to assign work that aligns with each student’s learning goals.
Within the assignment builder, teachers can:
- Preview learning activity descriptions and evaluate how they fit into a lesson.
- Assign to multiple classrooms at the same time.
- Check which activities include Microsoft Immersive Reader and which are auto-graded.
- Quickly identify the estimated time needed to complete each activity.
Building Alongside Teachers
BrainPOP feature launches and product enhancements are continuously informed by the contributions, feedback, and partnership of teachers across the country. As we build new ways for teachers and students to engage with the BrainPOP learning arc, we invite educators to participate in interviews and other research opportunities hosted by our User Research Team. If you’re interested in learning more, you can sign up here for more information.
Esther Finkelstein is a product manager at BrainPOP.
