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How to Build an Assignment on BrainPOP 3-8—and Why You Should
If BrainPOP is a teacher’s ticket to easily differentiate instruction and track student progress, then assignment builder is the teacher’s passport. While BrainPOP is probably known best for its movies (and for good reason: they’re fun and carefully designed to build background knowledge), its autograded, differentiated learning activities take its impact to the next level. Building an assignment in BrainPOP allows teachers to assign those differentiated, impact-rich activities—and it’s what populates the Teacher Reports with information on how students did on those activities.
Put differently, Assignment Builder gives teachers the power to differentiate today’s lesson—and tomorrow’s, and the day after’s—to ensure that students learn in a way that is engaging, challenging, and accessible.
Continue reading for a breakdown of not only how, but why, to set up and make use of each rich element of BrainPOP’s Assignment Builder.
- Planning, strategizing for, and building an assignment on BrainPOP
- Before you start:
- Step 1: The BrainPOP movie with Pause Points
- Step 2: Select learning activities
- Step 3: Add additional projects
- Step 4: Select students
- Step 5: Finishing touches
- After the assignment on BrainPOP
- Want to learn more about Assignment Builder?
Planning, strategizing for, and building an assignment on BrainPOP
Building an assignment with multiple activities has three steps: you decide which activities—at which grade or difficulty levels—you’d like to assign, select which students you’d like to assign those activities and assign it all to be due on a specific date.
For each “step” of the process, however, there’s not just a “how”: there’s also a “why.” There’s a learning activity with its own instructional purpose, that can be assigned in a differentiated way. Every feature has been thoughtfully built by our team to be the most flexible and helpful companion possible for every teacher in every sort of classroom.
This section will present both the how and the why—side-by-side—to help give you all of the background knowledge (so to speak) to make your selections strategically.
So. You have rostered your class(es), browsed the vast collection of BrainPOP topics, and know which you want to use. Now it’s time to get assigning. First, click assign. Welcome to the assignment builder.
Note: throughout the assignment-building process, if you’d like to explore a learning activity again or check out the kinds of questions a differentiated level will receive, you can select “preview,” which will open the activity in another window.
Before you start:
- You’ll want to consider which student cohort will receive this assignment. Does this group trend above grade level, and need to be challenged? Maybe this group prefers the competitiveness of getting a score. This will help you decide how to differentiate the activities in the first few steps. If you have more than one class, these students can also come from different classes! They’ll just be a part of the same instructional group.
- Pro tip: for each different group of students, you’ll create a different assignment. That’s why it pays to think about your audience in advance!
- Pro tip: for each different group of students, you’ll create a different assignment. That’s why it pays to think about your audience in advance!
- You’ll also want to picture the setting of this assignment. Each activity comes with a time estimate—so, if you’re looking to fill an hour of class time, that’ll have different ramifications than if you want to give students a ten-minute solo activity.
- Pro tip: if you just want to assign one activity, doing it directly from the activity page might make the most sense when browsing topics! Click the assign button at the top, and it’ll take you through the process.
Step 1: The BrainPOP Movie with Pause Points
At the heart of every BrainPOP lesson is an engaging movie—but did you know that you can also assign BrainPOP movies? Embedded within most BrainPOP movies are a tool called Pause Points, which are questions designed to let students stop, reflect, recall, and answer questions during pivotal points of the movie.
While they can be effective front-of-class tools, they can drive even more impact when assigned (via assignment builder) along with the movie. Pause Points allow for differentiation by having three different question sets, each recommended for a different grade band. When building an assignment, you can select which relevant grade band you’d like to assign to this cohort in order to make their learning as engaging and challenging as comfortable for them.
Step 2: Select learning activities
Learning activities like Challenge, Quiz, Vocab Builder, and Related Reading (the last three of which are new and updated for the 2024-2025 school year!) are engaging, low-stakes activities connected to the movie. In addition to letting students build on, practice, and apply their new knowledge from the movie, they also will help get them confident for assessment season, improve their literacy skills, and boost their comprehension skills and vocabulary knowledge. Like Pause Points, it’s certainly possible (and has a valid instructional benefit!) to use these as a front-of-class tool—but they’re at their most powerful when used for individual or small-group differentiated instruction.
In the Assignment Builder, you can make a series of decisions based on your instructional goals for this group of students. For example, for each, you can decide if you assign it in a scored mode, a review mode (unscored, in which students receive feedback as they go), or a combo, depending on how they like—or need—to learn on any given day.
Vocab Builder: For Vocab Builder, you can assign the specific grade level that works best for them on that day.
Leveled Reading: For Leveled Reading, you can select Lexile levels, each corresponding to a grade level of reading. Depending on the students’ needs on any given day, you can choose whether to assign a reading level below, at, or above grade level. This way, you can challenge students enough to foster growth—but not so much so that they get frustrated.
Enhanced Quiz: For enhanced quizzes, you’ll select a specific grade level that works for the group’s needs. Again, your teaching—your instructional strategy! We are here to help you reach your goals.
Step 3: Add additional projects*
Creative Tools are project-based assessments that allow students to show what they know in a variety of ways. Think about which type of project-based learning this cohort of students would most benefit from, or enjoy: if it’s computational thinking, go for Creative Coding. If they’re more story-oriented, try Make-a-Movie. You can also select additional activities—think worksheets or games—for similar tailored instruction.
Step 4: Select students
Once you’ve decided which activities will comprise the assignment, it’s time to decide which students will complete it: you can assign the whole assignment to the whole class, or specific students within each class. You can also assign activities across multiple classes.
Step 5: Finishing touches
You’ll come up with a title, instructions for the students, and a due date. If you don’t want to send out the assignment to their student accounts just yet, you can also schedule it to be assigned later.
After reviewing, you can either “save and finish later” or “assign.”
Voila, differentiated instruction in BrainPOP in five easy steps!
After the assignment on BrainPOP
This is where all of the fruits of your labor get to blossom.
After students have completed and submitted their assignments, you’ll dig into the student data in your Teacher Reports. Remember how we said earlier that BrainPOP’s movies build knowledge, while learning activities hone essential literacy skills? This is where you’ll track all angles of their learning: both their content knowledge and proficiency in the cross-curricular ELA standards that’ll help them fully comprehend the content.
BrainPOP’s reports have been created with the help of teachers to cover exactly the information that teachers want—in the format they need—to make data-informed decisions about future instruction. Each report has three views, meaning teachers can look at students’ progress in as macro or micro a view as they want.
- Assignment Progress shows how each student performs on individual auto-graded activities within one topic assignment, alongside a benchmark comparison of how it compares to the class average.
- ELA Standards Performance Report shows insights on student performance of literacy skills emphasized in their grade-level state ELA standards.
- Activity Progress shows how each student performs on individual questions inside an auto-graded activity, alongside a benchmark comparison of how it compares to the class average. Granular insights into student responses help identify areas where students excel or need additional support.
Want to learn more about Assignment Builder?
If you want to learn more—say, how to share to Google Classroom or how to assign from your Teacher Dashboard—or have questions about any step of the process, please visit the Help Center. Our team is ready and waiting to help with anything you need!
*Creative tools will be temporarily unavailable during Fall 2024 to allow for site maintenance. Learn more.
AnnaLiese Burich is a product marketing manager at BrainPOP with a history of Edtech writing experience. She holds an MA in Magazine Journalism and an MA in English Literature.
