Redefine & Transform Learning With BrainPOP

I was fortunate to have been both a teacher and a principal in a district where innovation and deeper learning experiences was a continual goal. 

As we collectively worked to provide the best learning experiences for students, we understood that the time spent with our students is limited and needs to be maximized. Schools only have students for approximately 6 hours a day, and with this precious allotted time, it is imperative that we provide students with thoughtful and purposeful learning experiences.

Learning Frameworks

Many years ago, when our district went to one-to-one devices, we wanted to ground everyone with strong pedagogy and ensure that we were not simply downloading simplistic apps and simply letting our students go “play.” Yes; students can be engaged in an activity, but are they really learning? 

When giving student-led tours to new families, I could tell that some parents were apprehensive about the use of technology in our school, in that, understandably, they already felt that their children were exposed to too much technology. 

At this point, I would take the time to explain to parents how we used technology within our school building to support deeper learning opportunities, to give students a real-world audience, to collaborate with others, to learn how to present and create, and how we provided a multitude of ways to become the producers of knowledge and demonstrate learning.  

The SAMR Model

Our district (and many others), leveraged the SAMR Model, a framework created by Dr. Ruben Puentedura that categorizes four different degrees of classroom technology integration. The letters “SAMR” stand for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition. The framework helped align us to provide students with tasks that redefined learning to allow for the “creation of new tasks, previously inconceivable.” 

 “SAMR is...really more like a toolbox. The goal isn’t to use the most sophisticated tool, but to find the right one for the job."

More importantly, however, it’s a way to reflect on your technology integration by thinking about a few key questions:

·      How can my lesson be improved using technology?

·      How can I engage and empower students through technology?

·      How can online learning more closely resemble authentic, real-world learning?” (A Powerful Model for Understanding Good Tech Integration)

Over the years, utilizing SAMR as a toolbox to guide instruction, I had the pleasure and pride to see many magical examples of students engaged in transformative learning! 

One Step Further

Eric Sheninger in a blog entitled, “Reflections on teaching, learning, and leadership” discusses how the SAMR Model is a good tool to help educators to know what not to do with technology, but perhaps falls short on emphasizing what the student is doing. In his article, he combines the SAMR model with the Rigor Relevance Framework with the goal being, “both with and without technology, to EMPOWER students to work and think.”

🌎 Empowering Kids to Shape the World Around Them & Within Them 🌎

At BrainPOP, our mission is, “To EMPOWER kids to shape the world around them and within them,” and is aligned to this aforementioned goal of EMPOWERING students to work and think in transformative ways.

BrainPOP helps students comprehend new and complex concepts in ways that are rooted in research about how kids learn best. Teachers are able to deepen learning across the curriculum for students through animated educational movies, interactive learning activities, playful formative assessments, and learner-driven projects that inspire creativity and collaboration throughout the learning process.

The BrainPOP Learning Arc

Just as the SAMR Model, or the Rigor Relevance Framework helps teachers shift the cognitive load and empower students to think and learn deeply, BrainPOP utilizes a learning framework, the “Learning Arc,” to support and drive learning outcomes to guide students’ in dynamic learning experiences.

When asking the question, "How can I engage and empower students through technology?"  The following are some of the creative tools that align to the transformation stages of the SAMR Model and the Rigor/Relevance Framework where students are actively doing the working and thinking:

• Creative Coding - Developed in partnership with Scratch and Vidcode, provides students with block and text-based coding projects spanning the K-12 curriculum.
• Make-a-Movie - With Make-a-Movie, students make their own movies. Students can record narration, manipulate backgrounds, and add transitions between scenes.  Make-a-Movie cultivates planning, organizing, writing, collaborating, and analyzing skills.
•  Make-a-Map - Make-a-Map invites students to make meaningful connections between concepts and reinforce knowledge using BrainPOP images, keywords, and movie clips.
• Pause Points - Pause Points are questions and prompts that activate students’ background knowledge, while building subject-specific vocabulary. Every Pause Point scaffolds concepts and skills within a topic that align to grade-level standards. Students are active learners in these checks for understanding and can type, speak, or draw responses.
• Challenge - Challenge activities are interactive activities where students can apply critical thinking skills related to the content that they learned. Each Challenge contains This auto-graded interactive activity challenges students to apply critical thinking skills through various tasks.
• Primary Source Activities -  Accompany over 200 topics, challenging students to examine and interpret photographs, videos, diaries, speeches and other documents.
• BrainPOP Science - BrainPOP Science (for 6-8th grades) has real-life application, investigations, simulations, data manipulatives and 3D Worlds that enable students to explore real-world phenomena. Students learn to think like scientists as they gather, edit, & organize evidence throughout investigations in a way that real scientists do!

BrainPOP Can Help Students Be Future Ready

As we all know, the last few years in education have been, without question, the most challenging times of our generation. With so much upheaval to students learning, and many students struggling academically (whether you are looking at international scores like PISA, where the US is ranked 22nd, National scores like NAEP, where 33% of fourth-grade students performed at or above the Proficient level on the reading assessment in 2022, or looking at individual states' standardized test results, e.g. Smarter Balanced) there is an urgency to accelerate learning, and better support students in a more personalized, learner centered and equitable way.

In an article that I recently posted entitled, BrainPOP; the Perfect Tool for An Educator's Tool Belt, I share how BrainPOP is able to teach essential academic skills in ways that captivates students’ attention, fosters intrinsic motivation and helps students become confident learners.

Let’s be sure that collectively, we are all striving to transform education and empower kids to shape the world around them and within them through high-level use of technology that has students thinking, doing and working.

*The views and opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities within BrainPOP.