BrainPop - Try it!

I have subscribed to the BrainPop service for Vance. Brain Pop is a website that contains hundreds of short, humorous animated clips on various school topics - Science, Social Studies, Health, Math, English, Technology, and Arts and Music. Each big topic is broken down into categories that contain multiple related subjects.

www.brainpop.com

Each clip is about 3-5 mins long, and comes with a 10 question quiz at the end. Each clip is narrated by a guy named Tim, and is accompanied by his friend, a robot named Moby. Most clips start and end with a joke that is related to the subject matter.



















Vance loves them, and in my opinion the information is presented in a much more interesting way than simply reading the same text out of a book. We've been alternating between me picking out the lessons for the day and Vance picking them - often, he'll ask me a question (ex: why is too much caffeine bad for you?), and we'll view the 'Caffeine' clip the next day for school.

The service works great on DSL, and I'm pretty sure if you are willing to wait a min or two for the clips to download, dialup would work also.

BrainPop offers a 14 day trial, you can sign up on the website. The also offer a few demo clips in the science section without having to sign up for the 14 day trial.

Here is the good part - my subscription allows for 3 concurrent users and 15 logins per day. If you demo the service and like it, you are more than welcome to use part of our subscription as long as you coordinate it with me (i.e. let me know you are doing it) so that we don't collectively exceed the login limits. If you try the free trial and like, contact me and i'll share our login/password. The level of service I signed up for (Homeschool level) is tailored for multiple children, so we would not be violating any service agreements by doing this.

I really like this website - give it a look!

- Mark Tyson