Category Archives: features

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!

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!

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!

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!

How BrainNook keeps kids safe

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Worlds in BrainNook can get pretty crowded

We receive many questions from teachers and parents about whether their kids are safe playing BrainNook. As parents and educators, we take these questions seriously.

BrainNook offers an extensive set of features that help keep children safe as they play. Here are some of the ways in which BrainNook helps keep kids safe while providing a friendly and supportive social environment that helps kids learn:

  • Messaging between friends, reporting players: Children can only send messages to their friends. Children can un-friend any player who is not behaving appropriately, which will prevent that player from messaging them. They can report specific players to a moderator, which may result in that player being banned from BrainNook; and they can block any player entirely, which will make it impossible for that player to contact them again through friend requests or chat messages.
  • Safe Chat: All chat messages can only be typed using a set of “safe” words, which prevents children from revealing their real name, physical address or any other personal information to other players.
  • “Friending” outside the classroom: Teachers can control whether their students can communicate with players outside their class. If this setting is turned off, students cannot message anyone other than their classmates, eliminating the opportunity for unsafe interaction with strangers.
  • Disabling typed chat: Teachers can also entirely turn off typed chat for students who violate school rules of conduct. Students with typed chat turned off can only compose messages using a drop-down menu of phrases, which prevents them from combining words together to create an inappropriate message. Since students enjoy typing messages to one another, this alone may be sufficient motivation for disruptive students to behave better!
  • Chat Log Review by Teachers: Teachers can review a chat log of all messages sent and received by their students, allowing them to identify any inappropriate messages and to take the necessary action.
  • Friend List Review by Teachers: Teachers can even review each student’s list of friends, allowing them to remove friends they consider inappropriate.

For more detail on the safety features in BrainNook, check out this page.

Are there other safety features you’d like to see in BrainNook? Let us know!

Common Core-aligned performance reports for teachers!

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We’re happy to announce our new, Common Core-aligned performance reports! Teachers can now see detailed information about which topics from the Common Core their students have mastered, and which areas they need help in.

When used with BrainNook assignments, performance reports can be a powerful way for teachers to get students practicing the areas they need to work on. Here’s how:

1. Teachers use the performance reports to pinpoint the areas that each students need improvement in. Each area lists a number of games that map to that area.

2. From the Assignments section of the teacher’s BrainNook account, he or she can assign students a game which maps to their weak areas. Teachers can give assignments to individual students, groups of students, or their whole class.

3. The next time students play BrainNook, they’ll see the assignment as a brand new mission within BrainNook, with a cool badge and bonus points for completing it! Teachers can even print award certificates for students who have completed the assignment to create a little healthy competition between their students!

Teachers, give it a spin, and let us know what you think! Email us at support@brainnook.com to let us know your thoughts!

Weak Areas per student, based on the Common Core