Mobby

LET'S MEET WITH THE BRAINPOP ESL!

Hello Everyone!

Do you find boring to deal with old-fashioned grammar books while learning english? Especially for a young learner, is'nt it a big burden to carry all these information in a mental dictionary? If your response is "yes" let me introduce you an outstanding esl website: ESL BrainPOP Also, the website has a sub-section for teacher training you check it out from here: BrainPOP for Educators, but we will mainly focus on the actual section of it.

Naomi Kadar

Created in 2009, the founder of the website was Naomi Prawer Kadar, Ph.D. She was a inspiring educator, a devoted scholar, curriculum strategist and a teacher trainer. The Naomi Foundation is keeping on touching student's lives even after her death. She adopted the principle that every classroom is a second home for stundents and support this view with unfinished passion. Rest in Peace Naomi, we will miss you!

The content of the website includes activities for  developing four core skills, animations, grammar focus, vocabulary excercises, games, digital stories. The major focus is to demonstrate content based grammar and vocabulary through movies and visual activities. Contents are graded from simple to context ones by separating six units and each of them contains another sub five units to complete by the audiences. It has three levels. Also, units are supported by a quiz and you will see your level via a placement test. The major purpose is to teach how to use english language in every day contexts. Even the majority of the excercises is about grammar and vocabulary teaching, listening is the main technique to access all the purposes. Furthermore, for supporting teachers, there are various lesson plans, printing resources etc.
The target audience is for this website is young learners. Namely, it is suitable for beginners or elementary level of teaching.

Ben and Moby, our chracters in the website

Each movie has an interactive section in it like flash words, say it, read it, write it and play it.

Moreover, here is the advantages and disadvantages of BrainPOP:

-BrainPOP is free to use, download and it is available online www.esl.brainpop.com also in google play for androids, windows store and app store for apple.

-The interface of the website is well-developed and the image quality is quite attention-grabbing for young learners with various colors, figures, cartoons.

-As i observe, there are not any broken links or information errors.

- There is a current date in BrainPOP for Educators as posts are listed and in the training one, information about updating is given at the bottom of the page as 1999-2016.

-No advertisements

-Good for different learning styles.

-It is applicable to EFL teaching with various activities which reinforces four core skills, also it can be conducted both with small groups and crowded ones. In addition, it provides lerarners advancing in their own pace, so teachers move easily from one subject to antoher without any delay.

-This website may be more suitable for native english students for reinforcing the contents because of inadequancy of non-native students in listening.

Mobby and Ben

I strongly recommend this website because it implies the idea that learning is fun! Also, even for the sake of Naomi it must be explored. It is an invaluable source both for teachers and learnes thanks to various learner activities and teacher training sources. Enjoy!