Brain Pop

BrainPOP was founded in 1999 by Dr. Avraham Kadar as a creative way to explain difficult concepts to his young patients. Today, it serves as a trusted learning resource supporting core and supplemental subjects, reaching millions of learners worldwide. Expanding learning tools, and helping kids create, construct, and collaborate as they explore their world. Discover how BrainPop works using this training video.

Contribution to Education

This App is an essential engagement tool that allows both students and teachers to be involved in the learning process." "BrainPOP has really evolved by increasing the depth of knowledge needed to answer quiz questions, and playful assessments that allow students to explain their reasoning while playing a game."

User Review

 There is limited free content, so to get the most benefit from this site consider trying the free trial subscription. If your kid likes BRAINPOP's format and content, purchase the subscription. Once kids choose a topic (such as history, math or health) and a video within that topic, they press play and watch the few minutes-long video. Each video is accompanied by interactive activities and quizzes that reinforce what kids have learned. GameUp offers unique games that explore concepts in math, science, health, and technology. Families can talk about any of the videos on BrainPop that pique your kid's interest, but especially those that are emotionally or intellectually challenging, such as those that address difficult times in history like war and terrorism, social problems, as well as personal health and physical development and videos that contain warnings about smoking cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol use.Talk about the different ways of learning. Do you remember more when you have an activity to do after watching a related video? Families can also talk about other educational sites that benefit learning and where to find sources.

Personal Review

 BrainPop is a standard-bearer for quality, self-directed online educational content for older grade school-age kids. This interactive site includes videos, audio prompts, graphics, and games in a blended format that will be very familiar to most kids. Kids can spend hours on this site exploring many of the main topics that contain more sub-categories, like the science and math sections. There are some sensitive topics addressed here, such as war and terrorism, but kids are warned to get a parent or teacher to watch that video with them prior to clicking play. A year's subscription is worth it because there's at least a year's worth of content for a kid to explore on BrainPop. Most games are clever, creative, and address learning concepts not traditionally explored in this format, such as the Judicial Court where kids argue court cases at the Supreme Court. They also offer kids a really nice way to actively engage with the subject matter.

Research

A study assessed student performance by comparing BrainPOP® subscribers to non-subscribers using the results of statewide tests administered at the end of the 2015-2016 school year. BrainPOP’s Data and Analytics team, led by Dr. Kevin Miklasz, looked at results across five states (California, Colorado, Florida, New York, and Texas) and three core subjects areas (ELA, Math, and Science) for students in grades 3-8. The results of the study show that BrainPOP meets the Moderate Evidence of Impact level for ESSA.  Another study was conducted by SEG Research, an independent educational research firm located in New Hope, Pennsylvania. SEG Research provides research, evaluation, and assessment services to educational publishers, educational technology providers, assessment service providers and government agencies. SEG has been meeting the research and assessment needs of organizations since 1979. This research was supported by a grant from BrainPOP.   Students who were in classes that used BrainPOP showed substantial growth in Language, Reading Comprehension and Science and more moderate gains in Vocabulary during the course of the study. Students in classes using BrainPOP increased their SAT 10 scores between 11 and 24 points. Students received approximately 16-20 weeks of instruction using BrainPOP, yet the amount of growth achieved is equivalent to between one and two grade levels of growth when compared to the national norm group. Students enrolled in classrooms using BrainPOP achieved substantially greater gains in Science, Language, and Reading comprehension than students enrolled in classes that did not use BrainPOP. More moderate gains were also seen for Vocabulary. When controlling for students’ initial ability using analysis of covariance, BrainPOP users showed substantially greater gains in Reading Comprehension, Science and Language and moderately greater gains in Vocabulary than students in classes that did not use BrainPOP. BrainPOP users finished the year with scores that were 16 scalescore points higher in Reading Comprehension, 13 scale-score points higher in Science, 8 scalescore points higher in Language, and 5 points higher in Vocabulary than the Control Group on the SAT 10 assessments.

References

Paulo, J. R. (2012). BrainPOP. The Charleston Advisor, 14(1), 20-23.

Kadar, N., Kadar, N., Rowe, V. T. J., & Kadar, A. (2016). U.S. Patent No. 9,378,650. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Stamper, J., Lomas, D., Ching, D., Linch, K., & Ritter, S. (2012). Internet scale experimental design and deployment for educational games using BrainPOP. In Proceedings of the 8th Games+ Learning+ Society Conference (GLS 2012) (pp. 275-281).

Blog 2 Class Dojo

Training
Class Dojo is a classroom communication app used to share behavior and educational reports with parents and teachers. The app can be downloaded from any Android or IOS device. Users can also visit the website and directly sign up.

Using Class Dojo
Each student has a profile complete with their own avatar to which teachers can assign positive or negative points (or dojos) based on behavior or work assignments throughout the lesson. This information is then recorded on students profiles so that it can be reviewed throughout the year.

Reviews
Common Sense Education gives a review on the pros and cons of Class Dojo

Research

According to Class Dojo’s website, their management system is used in one in every two schools in the United States. Class Dojo also claims 35 million users across 180 countries around the world.A number of doctoral dissertations have investigated the actual and perceived efficacy of Class Dojo. Researchers from the Department of Educational Studies at St. Mary’s College of Maryland conducted a three-week study on a third grade class to determine the effectiveness of Class Dojo. The study compared behaviors before and after implementation of the Class Dojo. Researchers determined that there was an overall increase in positive and self-regulatory student behaviors and a marked decrease in negative behaviors. Researchers noted an increase in student engagement and personal ownership of classroom conduct. A doctoral candidate at St. Catherine University conducted a six-week study in a kindergarten and first grade class. The study showed a decrease in the number of office referrals and behavior plans to correct student behaviors. Student surveys showed subjective support for Class Dojo; participants expressed perceived value in the Class Dojo system. 

Professional Reflection
As a special education teacher, this app enhances pedagogy by providing a way to differentiate instruction for learners of all abilities. Teachers are able to set individual goals for students and monitor progress over time. This app helps keep students engaged through active participation and real-time feedback. It provides daily feedback to students for skills such as participation and creativity. Teachers can show students their dojo and discuss which skills need emphasis. When teachers are constantly redirecting negative behavior, it takes away from instructional time. The behavior management system for this app is awesome! Class Dojo helps teachers improve student behavior and build good learning habits. It provides a way to give positive reinforcement and build good learning habits. Student behavior is aligned with school goals. In addition, this app encourages parental involvement. Parents are able to be actively involved with their child's learning through automatic feedback and communication regarding school work and behavior. Teachers can send class moments, photos, and messages. Click here to review parent testimonials.

Socrative

Socrative is a cloud-based student response system developed in 2010 by Boston-based graduate school students. It allows teachers to create simple quizzes that students can take quickly on laptops, classroom tablets, or their own smartphones. This app offers an interactive environment for students and teacher to share their learning. Socrative is easy-to-use fun to implement. Teachers can ask questions, conduct polls, and conduct assessments with real-time data displaying during the session. With this app, collecting data on student understanding and ideas has never been so easy!

Users Feedback
Pros: Kids will like the instant feedback. It’s easy for teachers to see where students are missing a concept and adjust instruction accordingly. This app is a powerful and easy-to-use student-response system that has the potential to support responsive teaching. Students feel comfortable responding without peers knowing their answer. Activities can be done collaboratively. Teachers are informed of which students understand what is taught. Cons: Analyzing individual student data over time will take more time and effort than most teachers have. There is no way for peers to comment on other students work. If you lose internet connection during a test or quiz, your results will not be sent.

Using Socrative
Students access questions via a room code, and answers register immediately on the teacher's computer as the students submit their responses on almost any device. When everyone has responded, teachers can display the results using the "How did we do?" button. Teachers can create quizzes, quick questions, and exit slips that allow for multiple-choice, true/false, and one-sentence-response questions that can be graded with feedback for each student. In addition to those basic assessment strategies, students can team up to play Space Race, a collaborative activity that allows student teams to answer questions as quickly as they can; the teacher can access real-time results of this race as well as determine student teams. In addition, teachers can see quiz data and download it through an Excel sheet or email it for further planning. Check out the User Guide for more information.

Contribution to Educational Leadership
Leaders in education should train all stakeholders how to properly implement this assessment tool and allow teachers to create rich quiz-type content that engages all students through quick formative assessment questions or healthy team competitions. This tool has the capability to align each question to a Common Core standards. You can measure student learning with printable reports and view long term data of students over time. It's a great tool to assess learning in the moment or spark conversation because there's so much flexibility in how teachers structure questions, answers, and explanations.

Personal Analysis
This app is awesome! It can be used at any grade level with all subject matter. It produces high engagement through whole class participation and real-time formative assessment data. Socrative is simple and flexible, and most importantly, it works on almost any web or app-enabled device. There are countless resources for students and educators as well. Teachers can adjust settings so that students can see percentages on the screen instead of individual responses. This encourages students who may be reluctant to respond to participate digitally and anonymously. Students responses are collected and displayed on the classroom screen or they can be emailed to the teacher. There are also pre-designed activities to choose from along with exit tickets to check student understanding. Questions that are created can be accessed in the future. Using Socrative fosters effective communication skills by encouraging students to think critically and debate answers in a respectful and meaningful way.

Download Socrative Student App and check it out for yourself!

References
Socrative by MasteryConnect. (2015) Retrieved January 28, 2019, from http://www.socrative.com/index.php.

Maimon, L. (2016) Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation. What is the difference between formative and summative assessment? Retrieved January 28, 2019, from www.cmu.edu/teaching/assessment/basics/formative-summative.html.

Socrative App User Guide, Retrieved January 28, 2019, from http://socrative.com/materials/SocrativeUserGuide.pdf.