Website Evaluation

CALL Website Evaluation

My next task after last week’s evaluation of a mobile language learning app is to examine a website or software CALL resource. I’m not going to lie – I’m a bit more confident about attempting this evaluation task. I feel much more comfortable working with a personal computer than I do with a mobile device for language learning, which I suppose is fortunate since the elementary school computer lab I currently teach in only has a SMART Board and desktop computers – no mobile devices in sight! I’m sure that might change some day, but for now I’m happy to have this chance to take a deeper look at a more stationary piece of technology for language learning and teaching.

In particular, for this task I wanted to evaluate a language learning website instead of a software program. I know there must be hundreds of amazing educational resources available on the internet, but I sadly have not taken enough time to investigate and evaluate all that’s out there. So, in this blog post, I present a review of the ESL language learning portion of the BrainPOP website – a resource I stumbled upon quite some time ago but never really stopped to consider as a teaching and learning resource.

To begin, let’s get a few of the basics out in the open:

Website title: BrainPOP ESL

Website URL: https://esl.brainpop.com

Grade/age/proficiency level: website describes itself as providing content for learners “of all ages”; lessons are organized by proficiency level (with an accompanying placement test to direct students towards the lesson that best fits their current level, as pictured below):

Language and content: English as a second language; content varies by lesson but seems relevant to school-age learners

1) What is the intended purpose of the software or website?

BrainPOP appears to be an all-around English language-learning program for young learners of varying proficiency levels, though it’s probably best suited for students in elementary and middle school. The overall intention is to educate as well as entertain the learners; each lesson (of which there are 90!) covers a different grammar pattern and set of vocabulary, and it accomplishes this with colorful, animated videos and interactive games. This therefore seems like the perfect program for young English language learners who want an engaging, fun CALL experience.

Of course, the full program can be purchased with a number of different subscriptions designed to suit a variety of different learning contexts (home, classroom, school, district), meaning that since much of the program’s content cannot be accessed without a subscription, part of the website’s intended purpose is to sell the full program to educators, administrators, and parents. However, this intention is to be expected; there are no ads to be found anywhere on the website, providing a distraction-free web environment for students to interact with, so the program logically needs some source of funding to provide such an extensive language-learning program. Purchasing a subscription also gives educators a way to not only track and monitor their students’ activity and progress, but it also allows them the opportunity to create their own interactive quizzes for students to use. Though I have not purchased a subscription to the program and have not experienced these features first-hand, BrainPOP offers video tutorials and tours of these features to inform educators of all they can do to interact with their students. Again, while this helps the website sell subscriptions, it nevertheless provides an outstanding, interactive learning program for educators and students alike.

2) What is the content of the software or website and how is it presented?

The website’s content is extensive and covers a multitude of language patterns and topics; thankfully, the “Teacher Resources” link on the bottom of the BrainPOP ESL homepage offers .pdf files outlining each lesson’s function (e.g. “discussing near future plans”) and form (e.g. “present progressive (future tense)”). Additionally, there are also files detailing the topics of the lessons’ content videos (e.g. recycling, music genres, ancient Egypt, etc.) as well as the relevant videos that can be found on other portions of the BrainPOP website (BrainPOP, BrainPOP Jr., and BrainPOP Español).

The website’s content covers an impressive number of topics, so in addition to providing an extensive amount of English grammar and vocabulary the website also lets learners apply the language being learned to a variety of cross-curricular subjects, like science, math, music, and art. Furthermore, there are files and even webinars detailing how the language and content presented in each lesson can be aligned with WIDA and Common Core standards.

3) What external documents (some guides) does the software or website include? Are they effective?

In addition to the video tutorials, teacher resources, and webinars I discussed in the previous questions, the accompanying BrainPOP Educators website offers an incredible amount of external documents to help teachers plan how to use BrainPOP ESL in their curricula and lesson plans. Each lesson has an accompanying lesson plan that educators can access by clicking the “Lesson Ideas” button found on each lesson’s webpage.

Links to additional external documents can be found within the lesson activities as well, such as in the “Write it!” portion of each lesson. One example is the level 2, unit 1, lesson 1 “Write it!” activity that provides not only a writing prompt, but a link to an external “Paragraph Graphic Organizer” .pdf file that teachers can print out to help students complete the task.

All of these external documents seem to provide both educators and students with a wealth of helpful guides and suggestions on how to make the most of all of the content this website offers.

4) In what ways is the software or website interesting to the target audience?

Simply by looking at the pictures I’ve posted above, one can probably tell that the overall website is visually very appealing to young learners with all of the bright colors, interactive features, and animated characters. Each lesson focuses on an animated movie featuring the website’s recurring characters Ben and Moby, and the topics they discuss in each lesson seem very relevant to young learners. For example, one lesson has the characters getting ready for a 4th of July party, others have them describing their hobbies and favorite musical artists, and another has them camping and telling scary stories. Though the program doesn’t necessarily allow the students much freedom to choose which topic they will explore with each lesson, the overall variety of topics across the three units would likely prevent the learner from getting bored with the content.

In addition to presenting each lesson’s content in the form of an animated video, the lessons also provide learners with interactive, animated games they can play to review the grammar patterns and vocabulary. These games can be found by clicking the “Practice” button on each lesson’s webpage, and the games for each lesson are different; one lesson might have students clicking pictures in response to an audio prompt, while the next might have students answering written questions presented in a board game format. This variety in the way games are presented is also likely to prevent learners from getting bored, as the content is not very repetitive.

5) For what language goal(s) is this software or website useful/effective? 

The website’s contents appear to cover all of the language skills: listening, reading, writing, speaking, vocabulary, grammar, and to some extent, culture. The animated videos that accompany each lesson present the learners with a way to see and hear the target grammar and vocabulary in use, and learners can even turn on the captions to read along with what’s being said. Various aspects of English-speaking culture are also introduced through many of these videos; one video has the characters discussing presidential elections, another had them reading “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” (which some ELLs might not be familiar with, depending on their cultural background), and another video I mentioned earlier has the characters preparing for a 4th of July party.

Each lesson also allows the learners a chance to view videos that further describe the target grammar and vocabulary. These grammar and vocabulary videos provide additional examples of how to use the new structures in different sentences and contexts.

Additionally, at the bottom of each lesson’s page there are “Read It!”, “Write It!”, and “Hear It, Say It!” buttons that have students practice reading, writing, listening, and speaking the new grammar structures and vocabulary. The only skill that feels a bit neglected to me is pronunciation; while the “Hear It, Say It!” portion of the website allows the students to record their voice so they can listen and compare it to the native speaker in the program, there is no feature that evaluates their pronunciation. However, CALL technologies that evaluate pronunciation are overall still somewhat unreliable since it’s hard for a digital device to accurately evaluate a speaker’s performance, so I really don’t think a lack of pronunciation-evaluating technology is a real negative to this website. If anything this only means that the teacher needs to be aware that some in-class pronunciation practice may be necessary to supplement the use of this program.

6) How can teacher use this program or website to offer practice to students? Assessment? Feedback? Of what kinds? (give examples)

As mentioned in question 3 regarding the website’s abundant external documents, BrainPOP ESL can be easily used in the classroom alongside the contents of corresponding teacher-oriented BrainPOP Educators website. The lesson plans outline objectives, materials, and procedures for each lesson on the website, and links to visual aids and worksheets are also provided in many cases. Additionally, some lessons even include more than one lesson plan. For example, for the very first lesson in the program, “Hi, I’m Ben!” there are three different lesson plans provided:

If we look at the lesson plan 1.1.1 The Verb to Be (Affirmative), we find three activity ideas, printable visual aids, and links to other relevant videos found on the parent BrainPOP website. The suggested activities in this particular lesson all take place in the classroom and have the students using the target language in collaborative speaking activities away from the computer. The lesson plan therefore appears to be a way to provide additional conversational practice for the students after viewing the website’s contents, but perhaps before they are expected to use the other features of the website (such as the “Write It!”, “Practice”, or “Quiz” sections). If I were to use this program with these external documents, I believe this format (view the video – work through collaborative in-class activities – allow students to independently work through the lesson materials on their computer) to gradually move the students from whole-class to individual activities.

While in-class activities proposed in the lesson plans give the teacher a way to directly see how students are progressing with the target language, another interesting feature of this website is that with a subscription teachers can not only make their own student quizzes, but can provide their own feedback to their students’ responses as well. I initially wasn’t very impressed with BrainPOP ESL’s feedback, which mostly either showed the student the right answer or let a student choose again if a wrong answer was selected; no additional feedback as to why one answer was better than the other is provided. However, I think the option for teachers to make their own quizzes with their own feedback is a great feature, so I feel that the otherwise weak feedback from the BrainPOP ESL activities is merely a minor setback.

7) Is this software or website easy to use? (i.e., navigation, layout, etc.) 

The website is colorful, visually appealing, and the layout is logically organized and easy to understand. Each level’s units and lessons are clearly displayed on the left side of the website, are easy to move between, and utilize a simple, easy-to-read font. Lessons in each unit are also displayed on pages with different color schemes to set them apart, which is a subtle yet nice touch to the website’s organization.

Additionally, when a lesson is selected the lesson’s title, activities, and supplementary materials are then clearly displayed on the bottom half of the screen. Another feature I like about this program is that the words on each of the lesson’s content buttons are read out loud whenever the user hovers the mouse over them. While not all of the titles and words on the website do this, the majority of them do, which is a particularly user-friendly feature on a website intended for non-native speakers of English.

Games and activities are also very easy to work with; any instructions are presented both with both written and spoken instruction as well as visual cues, such as animated arrows and highlighted areas of the screen to indicate where to click. Again, in a program aimed at non-native speakers of English, presenting instructions this way allows as many chances as possible for students to understand what’s expected of them.

The ease with which this program is navigated also means that it appears to have a low program difficulty, which “has to do with the learning curve to operate the program (because of inherent complexity or technical design flaws) and, in the case of games, the deliberate level of challenge the user is faced with” (Hubbard, 2006, p. 15). I had a difficult time teaching with the Rosetta Stone software these past two years primarily because many of my young students in grades K-4 had trouble logging into, setting up, and syncing their hardware with the software. All of these challenges were merely time-wasting distractions that only had a negative effect on my students’ focus and motivation. Though it looks like purchasing a school subscription to BrainPOP would allow students to have their own accounts that the teacher can then manage and monitor for student progress, I doubt that logging into this website would have as high of a learning curve as the more adult-oriented Rosetta Stone language learning software.

The biggest criticism I have of the website’s presentation is the size of the content in comparison to the window size. Perhaps it’s just an issue on my browser, but whenever I have the window maximized the website’s content only fills about 50% of the screen. Thankfully the website offers a zoom feature that enlarges the video, but even with the video zoomed in it still seems odd to have so much unused space on the screen. Both the zoomed-in video and the navigation page could easily fit side-by-side in my browsing window, which makes me wonder why the website’s designers chose such a narrow layout. Since this is a website aimed at young, non-native speakers, it seems to me like it would make more sense to present the program with big, bold font and large buttons and images.

8) What are the strengths of this software or website? 

In an attempt to keep this short, I’ll highlight the website’s strongest points:

• Addresses all language skills (listening, reading, speaking, writing, grammar, vocabulary, culture, and to some extent pronunciation) 
• Fun, visually-appealing website to interest young learners 
• Massive amount of content for learners of varying proficiency levels 
• Includes a placement test to start students on the right lesson for their proficiency level 
• Abundant external documents to provide teachers with lesson planning assistance 
• Website titles and instructions are presented both visually and aurally with visual cues to help non-native speaker learners 
• Learners can turn on captions when watching videos if needed 
• Subscription allows educators the opportunity to monitor student activity and progress, and lets them create quizzes and feedback specifically for their students 

9) How can this software or website be improved? 

As I mentioned before, I had kind of been hoping that the program would provide slightly more in-depth feedback that what it currently offers. It’s certainly a nice feature to let teachers create their own quizzes and add their own feedback, but I think some of the later units and lessons especially would benefit from giving more feedback to students than simply telling they which questions they got right or wrong.

One minor issue I had with the video portions of the website was the inability to jump to a specific part of the video. This is merely a minor complaint, since the website allows users to fast forward and rewind videos; however, if I wanted to jump back to a specific part of a video to hear what a certain character had said, I had to keep pressing the rewind button until I landed close to where I wanted to go. I think this would have added even more convenience to the video content.

Also, I didn’t see a feature to change the speed of the audio on any of the website’s features, which would be a nice option particularly for beginning learners struggling to keep up with the spoken English.

Aside from these minor issues I was incredibly impressed with BrainPOP ESL, even after only interacting with the free features of the website. I am currently not in an ESL teaching context, but if I were I certainly would consider finding a way to use the program with my students to give them an engaging way to independently play and learn English on classroom computers. In fact, these past two years I have been working in an elementary school “language lab” where students use computers to work independently on Rosetta Stone to learn Spanish; a few times we’ve had ELLs move into the district, and these students were allowed to use Rosetta Stone to learn English instead of Spanish. However, since I taught kids in grades K-4 and Rosetta Stone isn’t a particularly child-oriented program, I feel BrainPOP ESL would have been a much better choice for these ELLs. If only I had known about this program sooner I could have requested a way to use it in the classroom with my students!

Overall Rating 

     1. Very Poor (Not recommended at all)
     2. Poor (not appropriate)
     3. Adequate (Acceptable with reservation)
     4. Good (Appropriate for use)
 X 5. Excellent (highly recommended) 

Resources 

Hubbard, P. (2006). Evaluating CALL software. In Ducate, L. & Arnold, N. (Eds.), Calling on CALL: From theory and research to new directions in foreign language teaching. San Marcos, TX: CALICO.