BrainPop

I have been checking out the educational websites Dr. Luongo listed for us and I have to say I fell in love with BrainPop! This website absolutely has it all, and is the best educational website I have seen yet. First of all is is visually exciting, colorful and well-organized. Secondly, the characters are interesting, but it does not waste too much time on meaningless animation sequences like some of the websites I have seen. Third, and most important, it has a ton of interesting topics, and is very engaging and informative. I watched the segments on Halloween and penguins, and both were short and to the point. They kept my attention, were filled with interesting information, gave good visuals to help illustrate the concepts, and were just fun to watch. I am hoping to teach fifth grade, and I think BrainPop would be perfect for use in a fifth grade classroom because it is right on their level. I could definitely see myself showing the class BrainPop segments to introduce topics and stir their interest. It would also be a good resource to help students choose topics for papers since they can check out many different subjects and learn about them in a short amount of time to see what they are most interested in researching.