netTrekker To Deliver Animated Educational Videos from BrainPOP

• By Scott Aronowitz
• 11/09/09

Subscription-based education search engine netTrekker has announced it has added animated educational content from BrainPOP to its vast collection of offerings.

BrainPOP offers entertaining, standards-aligned, curriculum-based animated movies on hundreds of topics covering all major subjects. And to augment the video content, the site offers quizzes, games, vocabulary pages, and a variety of activities. Extensive research has shown that a combination of multimedia entertainment and study aids serves to engage students and reinforce complex subject matter to a far greater degree than when they simply listen to lectures and read supplementary text.

Because netTrekker classifies content according to educational needs and age groups, the search engine can save teachers a great deal of time in their efforts to find engaging content that meets their specific educational goals. "I have so little time to search for resources, and there's so much content out there," said Lee Kolbert, a fourth-grade teacher of gifted students at Water's Edge Elementary School in Boca Raton, FL. "BrainPOP and netTrekker work together to make searching more streamlined."

For example, explained Kolbert, "As I was teaching 'matter,' I found three resources in netTrekker already vetted for me in our school district portfolio. As I searched further, I found BrainPOP's 'States of Matter' lesson. It did a good job of explaining matter in a brief and visually appealing way, and [it] was a great way for me to introduce my unit on matter and changes of state."

As a bonus, if students who use BrainPOP content in class via netTrekker find the material particularly helpful and/or appealing, they can also access the same or additional content from their home computers.

Schools and educators interested in sampling the partnership's offerings can register for a 14-day free trial here.