This week I explored BrainPOP, a website hosting animated content to support educators and engage students (grades 3 and above). BrainPop offers movies, quizzes, games, mobile apps, experiments and prepared activity pages in the following subjects: Math, Science, Social Studies, English, Technology, Arts & Music, and Health. While many of BrainPOP’s resources required a paid subscription (I tried setting up a teacher account and a basic subscription would have cost $220), they offer lots of free resources in each subject area.
I explored BrainPOP as an educator looking for content (see Image 1) related to intended curriculum for 9th grade Health. I searched for content via keyword search on muscles, nutrition and gender identity-all these topics were covered (but few of them for free).
(Image 1)
A great feature about BrainPOP is that all its content is aligned with Common Core state standards through its partner website BrainPOP Educators. Instead of searching via keyword search, the site allows also teachers to filter content by state, subject area and standard. In Images 2 and 3 you can see that I searched for Washington state standards for 9th grade Health education and found resources on obesity and eating disorders. This is a great feature that I value about this resource since Common Core state standards for Health education are relatively new.
(Image 2)
(Image 3)
BrainPOP would be great for middle school aged students and high school freshman. I feel that the animation is aimed at a young age group that students ages 16-18 would not appreciate (which is unfortunate since the content is well-researched). I would use BrainPOP in my 9th grade Health classroom to supplement learning activities so that students could assess their knowledge before and after watching content.
purcell 