Brain POP - BrainPop ESL, BrainPop Educators and GameUp

BrainPop ESL, BrainPop Educators and GameUp

BrainPop ESL (English as a second language) is a website launched in 2009 that displays animated videos providing grammar and vocabulary instruction and interactive exercises for non-native English speakers of all ages. Each video contains an animated story, an introduction to new vocabulary, and an illustration of relevant grammar topics. The narrator is a boy named Ben, who is accompanied by Moby the robot. The videos provide a series of increasingly challenging contextualized language and content exercises for English learners, starting with beginner levels and progressing to advanced levels. The site allows students to select review activities, such as “Words, Words, Words”, a vocabulary exercise that uses flashcards and includes a pronunciation guide. The “Hear it, Say it” section also reinforces vocabulary and speaking. The “Read it” section strengthens reading comprehension. “Write it” offers writing practice: beginning writers practice tracing the alphabet, while more advanced students write a short paragraph based on a prompt. There are also games and quizzes to review ideas from the videos. Internet-based websites have been shown to be useful tools to supplement in-class instruction for ESL students. The site employs a proven technique called "Direct Teaching", which emphasizes explicit teaching of skills such as letter-sound associations, spelling patterns and vocabulary words. It also gives students positive reinforcement for completing each BrainPop ESL unit.

BrainPop Educators was introduced in 2008. It is an online community of 125,000 teachers, and parents who use BrainPop. This free site offers answer keys to activity pages, graphic organizers, professional development materials, posters, clipart and other resources for educators. It also allows educators to collaborate and share resources, such as lesson plans, organizers and activities for students. The site also offers video tutorials and webinars.

In 2011, BrainPop launched its educational games site, GameUp, which contains a collection of free online games from third-party game publishers that coordinate with the BrainPop, BrainPop Junior and BrainPop ESL curricula. The site aims to help teachers use educational games in the classroom to engage and motivate students. BrainPop partners with developer organizations and community developers to continually expand and improve the site's content and align the games with academic standards. The site, like BrainPop's other sites, is supported by BrainPop Educators. New Media Consortium wrote: "GameUp features top online educational gaming titles as well as support and supplementary materials to educators. GameUp titles come from an impressive collection of organizations such as Nobelprize.org®, iCivics, JASON Project, Mangahigh, and National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, to name a few.