My students this week have been getting to know the delights of Tim and Moby by watching some of the movies and trying out the quizzes on Brainpop UK http://www.brainpop.co.uk/ We are fortunate enough to be an evaluator school and our kids have started to have a play around with the resources. The students have really been impressed and already love watching the movies; many have said that they make concepts really easy to understand often easier than the teachers can. They have also really enjoyed completing some of the online quizzes to test their knowledge from watching the movies.
I am really looking forward to the next couple of months while students really get to use the brainpop resources. A big thank you to the guys and galls at Brainpop UK for giving our students this opportunity.
Do you use Brainpop? How do you use it in your lessons?
A great spin off from Brainpop in one of my lessons this week was when some of my students requested to do an extension to the brainpop resources we were working on. They really enjoyed the quizzes but then said wouldn’t it be cool if they could make our own quizzes based on some of the movies. They said that it would really help them develop a deeper understanding as they would learn more about the content by thinking up questions and creating a quiz. I thought this was a fantastic idea but didn’t really know of any online quiz sites so I opened up twitter and asked everyone for help. Of course it never fails and within minutes we had 10 or so potential sites to use. My students had a quick look and decided to use Proprofs http://www.proprofs.com/
It is a great site where students can create quizzes very quickly for free to test other students. My students creating quizzes within less than 10 minutes, then they uploaded them to our ning community and they were testing each other by the end of the lesson. Students through this site had great potential and will definitely be using this again in other subjects in the future. Another site we liked the look of and are going to use is Quizlet which I will post about later. So do you use any of these online quizzes in class? What do you do with them? It would be great to hear from you. Here is one of the ones my students created in less than 10 minutes:
http://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/story.php?title=materials-plastic
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We 1:1 computer school so unless I take my students to the computer lab, only 4 students at a time can use computers in our room. As a result, Brainpop (US edition) is generally an “extra” that students can use after other work is done or during our extension time.
Students love it, but I have my concerns. I’m still not sure if it’s truly helping students who don’t already understand the material. I think that there are students who still see it as a passive activity – the fault of the movie if I still get the quiz questions wrong, etc. For others, however, it provides additional information and/or reinforcement of learning.
My greatest concern is that the multiple-choice questions (for some of my students a pick-whatever-and-move-on) don’t lend themselves to higher-order thinking and responding. I liked your idea of having students create their own quizzes as a way of encouraging them to dig deeper.
The first time we used Quizlet, it dumped all our work the first time we went to save. I haven’t jumped back into it, but my son swears by it for studying. Next stop will be proprof.com
Thank you so much for your blog – the #edchat PLN has my mind buzzing with ideas!