Category Archives: BrainNook @ School

More chat controls for teachers now live!

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We speak with teachers all over the country using BrainNook in their classrooms, and one of the top requests we hear is for ways to control how much time students can spend chatting. With the latest version of BrainNook on our website (try it here!), we’ve given teachers the control to do just that.

In your teacher account, you’ll notice two additional controls to help you fine-tune the way your students use chat.

First, you can limit how many chat messages each student can send per day. You set this limit from the “Account Settings” screen. Once your students have exhausted the limit of messages they’re allowed to send per day, they’ll have to wait till the next day before they can chat again!

You can also control the type of chat each student has access to. Go into the “Manage Your Class” screen, and you can control whether a student can type in their own words into chat (the Safe Words mode) or whether they can only select from a list of pre-created phrases (the Safe Phrases mode). You can even turn off chat entirely for a student, and they won’t be able to send messages to anyone else in the game at all.

We hope you find this useful in keeping your students on track in BrainNook! Let us know if you have any suggestions on how we can make this feature better!

New games in BrainNook for Grades 1, 2 and 5

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We’ve been hard at work adding new games to BrainNook! These games will give your students practice in additional areas from the Common Core State Standards. In future, we’ll be adding additional games to deepen our coverage of other standards.

Here’s a list of the new areas these games cover, with each game’s name in parentheses:

Grade 1:

  • Word problems involving addition and subtraction with numbers up to 20 (“Word Problem Plus Basic”, “Word Problem Minus Basic”)
  • Word problems involving addition of up to 3 numbers (“Thrice the Word Problem”)

Grade 2: 

  • Word problems involving addition and subtraction of numbers up to 100 (“Word Problem Plus Advanced”, “Word Problem Minus Advanced”)

Grade 5:

  • Solving equations with parentheses (“Parenthetical Equations”)
  • Converting an equation from numeric representation into words, and vice versa (“Words to Equations”)
  • Recognizing place values of each digit in a decimal number (“Decimal Place Values”)
  • Comparing decimal numbers (“Compare the Decimals”)

To assign any of these games to your students, or just try them out, log in to your teacher account in BrainNook, and go into Set an Assignment under the Assignments menu. Then search by topic (for example, “word problems”), or by game name (for example, “Parenthetical Equations”).

Try out these new games today! And let us know if there are other areas you’d like to see more coverage of in BrainNook!

Introducing Assignment Groups: Help your students refresh skills from last year!

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As your students come back to class for the new year, you’re probably finding that their math and language skills have — to put it mildly — deteriorated just a tiny bit over the summer break.

Good news! We’ve just added a new way to help your students refresh skills from last year: assignment groups!

What are assignment groups?

An assignment group is a set of related assignments around a specific Common Core topic — for example, second grade arithmetic, or third grade spelling and punctuation. Each assignment in the group tests a skill within the larger topic. For example, an assignment group on second grade arithmetic might contain one addition assignment, one subtraction assignment, and one mixed arithmetic assignment.

With a single click, you can assign all the assignments in an assignment group to your students, helping them practice a range of skills related to the topic. This gives your students a well-rounded workout across these topics while saving you time — win-win!

How can you set an assignment group?

In three simple steps:

Step 1: Log in to your teacher account, and click on Set An Assignment Group under the Assignments menu.

Step 2: You can view all assignment groups related to just Math, or just Language Arts. Click on the Assign button next to any assignment group to set it for your class.

Step 3: There is no step 3 — that’s all there is to it!

Your students will see all the assignments in this assignment group as a bunch of new missions to complete in BrainNook.

Tracking assignments and assignment groups

As always, you can track all the assignments in the assignment group from the Track Assignments screen. Each assignment is identified by which assignment group it belongs to.

Log in to your BrainNook account to try out this feature today! And let us know whether (and how much) you find assignment groups useful — we’d love to hear from you!

Introducing the BrainNook Book Library

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In time for the new school year, we’re excited to announce the launch of the BrainNook book library!

The BrainNook book library vastly expands the range of language content available to your students in BrainNook. The library is a set of classic novels we’ve hand selected for your (and your students’!) enjoyment. Simply select one or more books from the library, and BrainNook will automatically present your students with words and sentences from those books when they play language games in BrainNook.

This is a great way for you to make sure that what you’re reading in class this year is what your students are seeing when they play BrainNook as well!

The games span a wide range of skills — sentence construction, anagrams, synonyms and antonyms, homophones, and many others — so this will give your students quite a language workout, and all using books that you select for them!

To select books for your students, simply log into your teacher account, and click on the Choose Books button.

Select one or more books from the library by checking the box next to them. You can even play some games to see how words and sentences from those books will appear within the game.

That’s it! Your students will now see words and sentences from the books you select when they play language games in BrainNook.

Here are just some of the books currently available in the BrainNook book library:

    

Don’t see your favorite books in here? Let us know which other books you’d like to see!

And as a little bonus, along with books, we’re also rolling out another much-requested feature: word lists.

Word lists are probably a familiar concept — simply sets of words that you want your students to practice (and practice again!) till they master them. Now with BrainNook, you can insert just the words you want into all of the language games your students play.

Simply go into the Word Lists section of your teacher account, and click on the Add a Word List button to create a new word list.

Only students in the grades you specify will see words from the word list — so you can have different word lists for different sets of students!

As the new school year gets underway, hope you find these new features useful! Try it out now, and let us know what you think!

Guest Post: Using BrainNook with my summer school students

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By Nyida Deans, Title I Teacher at Messmer Catholic Schools, Milwaukee, Wisconsin:
Ms. Nyida Deans has been using BrainNook with her second and third grade students in summer school this year. She spoke with us over the phone about her experience.

The way that Ms. Deans typically uses BrainNook is to set assignments from her BrainNook teacher account for each student, and have students complete the assignments by playing in the BrainNook virtual world at the end of each day. Her students love earning badges by completing the assignments. She uses the BrainNook performance reports to monitor each student’s performance at the end of each week, and prints out award certificates for students who’ve scored the most points and got the most correct answers.

Ms. Deans says that her students love BrainNook. She sees definite benefits in terms of increased motivation and effort; her students enjoy BrainNook and are motivated by earning points and badges. She likes the fact that she can differentiate each student’s learning by giving them individual assignments, and move up or down a grade to match the games to each student’s level of ability; and she loves that her students are having fun while they learn.

Ms. Deans says that based on her positive experience with BrainNook in summer school, she intends to use Brainnook with struggling math and reading students in grades 1-3 in the fall.

Ms. Nyida Deans is a Title I teacher at Messmer Catholic Schools in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Other teachers can connect with Ms. Deans through her Edmodo account at http://www.edmodo.com/deans.

Updates to the BrainNook Edmodo app

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We’ve made some updates to the BrainNook app on Edmodo! These new features make it easier for teachers to integrate assignments into their students’ Edmodo experience.

Notifications for your students when you set an assignment:

When you create an assignment through the BrainNook Edmodo app, your students will see a new post in their Edmodo stream. Here’s what your students will see in their stream when you give them an assignment:

They can click on the link in the news item to go directly into BrainNook and complete the assignment.

Assignment reminders:

Worried that an assignment’s coming due and that some of your students haven’t gotten around to it yet? Go into the Track Assignments screen in your teacher account, and click on the Nudge button next to any open assignment.

This inserts a reminder into the news feed of those students who haven’t completed the assignment yet.

This is a great way to get more of your students attempting each assignment!

BrainNook badges viewable on Edmodo profiles:

Each time your students complete an assignment, their BrainNook badge gets pushed back to their Edmodo profile. So you can now see a single view of all the badges your students have earned, both directly on Edmodo and through BrainNook assignments!

Try the BrainNook app on Edmodo, and let us know what you think!

Classroom usage information at a glance

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We’ve just added in a cool new way to see how your students are using BrainNook: the Class Overview screen. It’s under the Performance Data screen in your teacher account.

This screen shows you at a glance what your students have been doing lately in BrainNook: when they last logged in, how many questions they answered, their accuracy, and so on. You can view data for the last week or the last month.

We think this screen is a great way to get a high level overview of your students’ use of BrainNook. You can click on any student’s name to view more detailed information for that student.

We hope you find this information useful! Let us know what other data you’d like to see here!

Students passwords now visible to teachers!

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Lots of teachers asked for this, and we listened! You can now view and edit student passwords directly from your teacher account. No more having to send student passwords to yourself by email (although you can still do that), or having to keep those old BrainNook emails around so you have all your student passwords handy (though you can still do that too!).

To view all your students’ passwords, go into the Manage Your Class screen in your teacher account. The password column now contains the password for each of your students! Click in the column to edit a password.

The password for some students might be blank — in that case, just set them (once!) and you’re all set.We hope you find this new feature useful! Let us know what you think!

Preventing summer learning loss with BrainNook

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Summer vacation is almost here, if it hasn’t started already! Summer learning loss refers to the knowledge and skills that your students lose over the summer break, and it makes it much harder for them to pick up where they left off when school reopens.

With BrainNook, it’s easy to reduce or eliminate summer learning loss. Help your students keep their math and language skills sharp over summer vacation with a few simple steps — here’s how!

Set assignments to be done over summer vacation:

  • Log in to your BrainNook @ School teacher account. If you’re using BrainNook from Edmodo, simply start BrainNook from the Apps menu in Edmodo.
  • Go to the Set Assignments screen, and search for a few topics that you want your students to practice over the summer — say “multiplication”:

Set assignments for your students to do over the summer

  • You can even search for a topic number from the Common Core State Standards, like 4.OA.
  • Click Assign to set these games as assignments for your students. Make sure to space out the due dates for the assignments throughout the summer, so that your students keep practicing till school starts again!

Space out the due dates so that your students keep practicing skills till school reopens!

Track Student Progress:

You now have powerful insight into how your students are working over the break:

  • You can see which assignments your students are tackling from the View Assignments screen.

You can see which assignments are seeing the highest completion rates

  • You can view each student’s performance in all the assignments you’ve given them from the Performance Data screen. This is a great way to find out which areas each student finds difficult! You’ll see how many times each assignment was attempted by a student, how many answers they got correct, and their accuracy.

See each student's performance across all the assignments you've given them

  • You can also view this data in a different way, to see all assignments based on a topic. This is a good way to get a broad sense of how your students have done in various topics over the past year.

See how many students completed each assignment, grouped by topic, subject or grade

  •  From the Performance Data screen, you can see how each student has been working over the last week or month:

See which students are working the hardest over summer break!

  • You can even track their progress in a specific game by clicking the Graph button, and you can assign them that game if their performance is below par:

Assign a game again to a student if you think they're having difficulty with it

Your students are now likely to come back from summer vacation not just well-rested, but also well-prepared for their new grade!

We hope you find these tips helpful! Have thoughts or ideas? Email us at support@brainnook.com, or find us on Twitter at @brainnook!