Making Learning Stick with BrainPOP

When I was in elementary school and middle school I can remember asking my teachers, “Why do I need to learn this?”?I am sure that my teachers did not enjoy hearing this type of comment coming from me or any other student; but I wasn’t being flippant.?While my teachers, in many cases, just wanted us to comply and do our worksheets and our assignments, I?really?wanted to know “when” and “how” what my teacher was teaching me would come in to play in my life.?

When I was in college and taking my introduction to education classes, I remember learning about Jean Piaget’s and John Dewey’s theory of Constructivism; “which states that learners construct meaning only through active engagement with the world (such as experiments or real-world problem solving)…Information may be passively received, but?understanding?cannot be, for it must come from making meaningful connections between prior knowledge, new knowledge, and the processes involved in learning.”?(Constructivism as a theory for teaching and learning?By?Saul McLeod, 2019).

Eureka!?I cannot agree more.?Students need to be actively engaged in their learning, not merely consumers of knowledge, but producers of knowledge if students are going to effectively?construct knowledge.?They need to see the connection and real-life application to their own lives. It just makes sense that if we provide our students with opportunities to be actively engaged in the process of learning, we are going help them to understand (and enjoy!) and learn at a significantly deeper level than having students simply memorize facts.

Jennifer Gonzalez, Education Writer at Cult of Pedagogy, wrote?in, "To Learn, Students Need to Do Something:"

“If we want our students to actually learn the facts and concepts and ideas we’re trying to teach them, they have to experience those things in some way that rises above abstract words on paper. They have to process them. Manipulate them. To really learn in a way that will stick, they have to DO something.

It has given me great pleasure to see more and more of these conditions taking place in schools.?It is common to hear terms like project-based learning, inquiry-based learning, hands-on learning, immersive learning, phenomena-based learning and other similar iterations that are helping students become more engaged, more passionate, and ultimately helping students learn at deeper levels.

As I have moved from the school site to the world of Edtech I am proud to work for a company, BrainPOP, that strives to engage students in learner-driven projects and activities that engage students, encourage higher order thinking skills, inspire creativity and collaboration; and make learning sticky.?

The following are some of the ways that BrainPOP makes learning sticky:

• Creative Coding - 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, building scenes with images from BrainPOP’s library or by creating their own drawings. Students can record narration, manipulate backgrounds, and add transitions between scenes.??Make-a-Movie cultivates planning, organizing, writing, collaborating, and analyzing skills. Students take ownership of their learning as they engage with curricular content on a deeper level and?demonstrate their comprehension of a particular topic.

• ?Make-a-Map - Make-a-Map invites students to make meaningful connections between concepts and reinforce knowledge using BrainPOP ELL 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 can also 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 four of the following eight task types: Concept Map, Diagram Label, Fill in the Sentence, Match, Multiple Response, Sequence, Text Highlight, Venn Diagram
• BrainPOP Science - BrainPOP Science has real-life application, investigations, simulations,?data manipulatives and 3D Worlds?that enable students to explore real-world phenomena. One of the most dynamic elements of BrainPOP science is how it is designed to fully support Claim, Evidence and Reasoning practices (CER). Students learn to?think?like scientists as they gather, edit, & organize evidence throughout investigations in a way that real scientists do!

As we help educate students and prepare them to be able to solve real-world problems for successful and fulfilling careers, we need to continue to focus on providing “sticky” learning opportunities for our students and, as Will Richardson, Co-Founder of the Big Questions Institute and excellent Ted Talk, The Surprising Truth About Schools, says, ensure that “learning ceases to focus on consuming information…instead, it’s about asking questions, working with others to find the answers, doing real work for real audiences, and adding to, not simply taking from the storehouse of knowledge.” Let’s empower kids to shape the world around them and within them.