Gaming in Education
BrainPop's Sortify Reflection by: Julia Williams
Playful Assessment: BrainPOP’s Sortify Game
I viewed a webinar that described a feature of the popular online educational supplement, BrainPOP. BrainPOP is a tool that I visit frequently in the school year to introduce standards, as formative assessments, and sometimes even summative assessments. BrainPOP offers short movies, quizzes, lesson and activity ideas, and recently BrainPop has implemented educational games in a feature called GameUp. There are several GameUp games, and more on the way, but this webinar focused on a game called "sortify." I have never heard of sortify prior to viewing this webinar. Sortify is a game where the students sort different elements of a specific topic for points. When I played sortify, I chose to sort a list of common nouns, proper nouns, abstract nouns, and words that were not nouns. I did not get feedback instantly, instead, after I completed sorting the cards, I was able to submit my bin of cards, and receive my score. The best part of sortify as an educator is that you can analyze your students' results. From the teacher's end you can find out what each student got right and wrong. The teacher can use that data to modify instruction. This game truly is a playful assessment.
My Webinar Experince
I viewed the webinar described above after it was recorded. The webinar was live in June 2014. The pace of the webinar was excellent. The instructors allowed the participants plenty of time to log on to BrainPOP, and play sortify for themselves. I was able to do the same in a new window as the webinar was still playing. The instructors encouraged the participants to provide feedback after they had the chance to play the game, and the chat included many comments or questions that I would have posted had I been in the live session. The webinar lasted about 45 minutes, and the instructors answered all questions the participants had, as well as questions I would have posted myself.
The Basics of BrainPop
This YouTube video explains the different features of the interactive, educational website BrainPOP. The main characters guide the viewers through the major features.
About BrainPOP - Overview Video
The Effectiveness of BrainPop
The link below directs you to a very thorough study of the effectiveness of BrainPOP in the classroom. The study was put together in 2009, and showed that students who used BrainPOP showed a significant increase. Since the study, BrainPOP has only added more and more interactive features.
Gaming in Education
Both of the links below provide different resources and links to education based games, Both websites also support and provide evidence to the fact that gaming in education is effective. BrainPOP is listed as a resource in the sites.