EducampMinecraft - It's just a game

When #educampminecraft arose, I instantly knew I would be attending, the format, attendees and topic would all make it an excellent day. I consider myself pretty literate with digital tools but my experience this weekend has left me feeling a little like the pixelated animals walking around Minecraft, I was an easy target for any gamer who needed fed. Having had 24 hours to reflect on my learning, I am very thankful for my colleagues and the students that were at Mokoia Intermediate, its possible that my Minecraft health rating may have increased which can only benefit my students. The best explanation lies in comparing my Minecraft status before and after this PD.

Pre #EducampMinecraft
I discovered that my 2014 class liked Minecraft at our first meet the teacher, so this year I made sure that we had the Pocket Edition installed on the iPads. I had the motivation to try to integrate but I lacked the skills, experiences and to put it bluntly, I didn't know what I didn't know!  I investigated MinecraftEdu but didn't want to invest the money blindly.

Early in the year, I had an opportunity to integrate Minecraft in a lesson, we had asked children to design their ideal garden for the school. Nearly all were engaged in either writing or drawing their ideas, but 1 particular boy didn't appear interested, until offered the opportunity to design his garden using Minecraft. His 'health rating' shot up and he was engaged for the duration of the task. My first integration successful, I was looking for genuine opportunities from then on but have stumbled around a little.

Since then learning opportunities have looked like this:

1st attempts

• Some writing about Minecraft - narratives, information reports and even some persuasive writing where several students outlined the benefits of Minecraft in the classroom. All good pieces of writing that demonstrated the value of an engaging topic for a student.
• Attempts to design explorations from the First Crossing TV series, I think the students were motivated but battled with some direction. In trying to give them direction, I was ruining the task enjoyment.
• More recently, 6-8 students have been recreating the NZ parliament buildings. The first attempts didn't impress me at all and spoke more of their willingness to play rather than engage in a genuine learning experience. I suggested that they weren't achieving the high standards of which they were capable (I'd seen what they'd created in their own time). I directed them to a virtual tour of the parliament buildings, and at the same time purchased 2 of the Minecraft books. All of a sudden the buildings really developed, they had valuable research and assistance with how to create the things they were seeing. A true learning experience had been created, but we still struggled with some digital citizenship problems, both within our own class and with others.
• I host several boys for half of Friday lunchtime, my job is to give them something to do so they don't find their way to trouble. We started out coding, but recently have just been playing Minecraft, their ability to relate to others, contribute and participate within this context is quite interesting. I need to explore how this can be translated to the real world. 



Post research & reading

• More writing has taken place, several children are working on M is for Minecraft - an A to Z format book. This shows real potential and we've attacked it as more of a project.

I hadn't really engaged in any PD surrounding Minecraft, I had several of my PLN who I knew could assist in several areas but that was the sum of it. I was still struggling with how to display the work going on, we've got some photos on the wall that came from screen shots but I really wanted to see some video work and wasn't completely positive on how to achieve this. I sat down with my class pre-educampminecraft to discuss issues I might be able to investigate, I was pleased with the types of isuses they wanted to explore and experiences they imagined

My prediction for EducampMinecraft proved very astute, the day has been blogged by Sonya van Schaijik and the EducampMinecraft wiki, is of course a great resource.

Witnessing the potential of minecraft being realised, having this potential explained by both educator & student and listening to all of these experts I have a long way to travel before I can consider myself more of an expert.

Post #EducampMinecraft
1. I need to implement a treaty/code of conduct/class rules.
Why? It was naive to not have one of these for our minecraft work. Even though my class talk about digital citizenship regularly, we never expressly outlined how this might look within Minecraft. Our school uses PB4L and I believe my kids could easily transfer this model into our 5B's (Be Safe, Friendly, Respectful, Responsible and a Learner). We've had some digital citizenship issues, but this would set up expectations rather than being reactive.

2. Forget trying to learn to play Minecraft.
Why? The students have this aspect covered and can teach me far more than I could ever hope to teach them. Student voice at Mokoia proved this beyond doubt. I would be far better exploring having our students at HNS teach the teachers what Minecraft is all about as @MrRuddtheTeachr and I had believed.

3. I need to look to extend literacy within and about Minecraft.
Why? I was aware that Minecraft could be used to further the children's literacy. Having them read & write about Minecraft was pretty awesome, researching what they're creating isn't too bad either but this can be so much more. @MrWoodnz and @Steve_katene were discussing reading and writing books within Minecraft. If that's not engaging!

4. Understanding/Implementing the correct platform - Minecraft Servers, MinecraftEdu or Minecraft PE
Why? Steve and others shared so much knowledge about what can be done, while I would love to have a class server I don't have the technical know-how to do this. I currently don't have the ability to get MinecraftEdu either, but I don't believe this is now an issue. @Teachernz and Steve were accomplishing so much through just the pocket edition. Given my level of integration, this is certainly enough for now. I've plenty of potential to explore without worrying about servers.

5. Class displays & presentation need to be more innovative.
Why? As outlined earlier I wasn't feeling satisfied by how my class was displaying its Minecraft work. Steve was using Aurasma, an Augmented Reality tool, to display both static and video images. I've wanted to extend what I was doing in terms of displaying the children's work and video was a large part of this plan, I just hadn't settled on a workflow that worked. My indecision was partly due to lack of of inspiration - well now that's solved...

I was seriously blown away by the potential that Minecraft offers and still have plenty of questions, one I'm particularly keen on investigating is the use of Minecraft within science. Someone over the weekend was talking about removing the laws of physics within the game, but I wonder where else you could go in this game.

Reflecting on my own practice in such a way is refreshing, I've plenty to learn but its vital that this I recognise this. Most importantly, I know who to ask to help me learn!

Thanks Michael for creating and sharing this.

Why the board games?

I'm in charge of @kidsedchatnz for week 6 T3. My class had been wanting to talk about gaming, minecraft and other "fun" activities for a while, so as a class we co-constructed a list of questions and a few tasks for more of a flipped lesson. The #Edchatnz conference had really motivated me to pursue gaming as I blogged about here, so this was an opportunity to investigate, get student voice and put some energy into the "What, How and Why" of gaming.

Late last week we got out the post-its and shared what learning we thought we could get from playing games (for our task this was defined as board, dice and electronic games but did not include PE/Fitness games). There were lots of ideas, but generally they were broad ideas of Maths, Reading, Writing, Science or ideas around the theme of cooperation/teamwork, some children did recognise that survival, strategic thinking, cyber safety and taking risks could all be learned through gaming of different formats, the latter ideas were rather enlightening for a teacher about to embark on a week of gaming in the classroom.

This week I took Risk, Monopoly and Yahtzee into the class, we already had Scrabble, Once Upon A Time and ipads with Minecraft on them. I must admit that the Why is rather tenuous. They are embarking in authentic language experience that they can then use within a Kidsedchatnz topic where their literacy skills will be engaged. They've supplemented this with a small piece of writing before yesterday's game session on what they expected to learn from the games.

It was hardly a surprise that the kids engaged in the games, Risk, Monopoly and Minecraft being the favourites. There was plenty of amazing communication, teamwork and the odd dispute!

Today, in our second session, I asked them to self-monitor the Key Competencies using a simple tally chart. As they engaged in the games there was a notable shift in the discussion and atmosphere. While the competition was still evident, there was more assistance with rules as children tried to help each other out, take more care of their role in the game and generally try to be better participants. As I tweeted a couple of quick reflections/photos I was prompted by a colleague to look deeper.


Mark is right, we'd discussed with @Gingamusings and many others at her gaming session that the "Why" needs to be uppermost in a teachers mind or I'm just providing the kids with an excuse to muck around.

We're studying the geography of NZ at present and that is shifting this week to Election 2014.

Monopoly contains obvious links to maths and oral language. Here are some possible ways to build on this in other areas of the curriculum in different year levels:

• Social Studies: Game scenarios that might include rich vs poor; who is in charge of the money; equity & fairness; financial literacy; investigating the significance of featured places to NZers; locating the places on maps; identifying how these places may be chosen or even what a future edition might include. The selection of the NZ edition featured a lengthy voting period before the eventual choice of Pukekura Park in the "Mayfair" position. I did locate two websites that used monopoly in a rigged format to explore social inequities in the US, the second is certainly quite well thought out.
• Literacy: as hotels/houses built investigating the roles of people involved and their respective feelings. 

Risk also has its own unique set of maths links but probably can be adopted further to assist in the teaching of probability, ratios & proportions as well as the key competency & oral language links that any game necessitates. With its obvious 'conquer the world' theme there are many links to politics and power also. Extra ideas could include:

• Social Studies: Risk could be manipulated to investigate/replicate/stimulate ideas on many AO's from the social studies curriculum,  and when combined with The Arts or Literacy many differing viewpoints could be explored. This could be about about cultural change, how the past is recorded/remembered, leadership, access to resources, or the cause and effect for different events.

I'm sure there are many more ways that these two games could be adapted or integrated into different aspects of the NZC and there are always going to be the skills and values that come out of participating in games within the classroom. Although the curriculum links are not as strong in this instance, I've been impressed by the children's engagement and believe that the use of both games for a more deliberate curriculum choice would be advantageous. Mark's respectful questioning was justified and prompted some useful reflection and it does make me wonder what other resources or uses teachers have for these or other games.

#Edchatnz - so what?

The night before the #Edchatnz conference I was a ball of energy, with a hint of nerves! I was presenting for Kidsedchatnz and my brain was racing as I wondered what the next two days would bring. Last night was a complete contrast, the realisation that Friday would be 1 week on from was quite a comedown, there would be no F2F with my PLN no, no passionate learners sharing their knowledge, no hanging out with some of the most amazing teachers.

We all knew that taking this conference home , continuing the revolution, was a large task. After 4 days, I know I've achieved a lot.

I've purchased "Once Upon A Time". This is a storytelling game recommended by @gingamusings. We were investigating narrative storywriting, its been a tad silo but I'd been using context to make it engaging with lots of minecraft, Call of Duty, visual prompts from Write About This on Pinterest and plenty of free choice. But this week, we've added "Once Upon A Time" to the mix, as well as StoryCubes (Verbs) and Scrabble.

• Why? Oral Language is the foundation of story telling, some of my kids need help just getting their story out, others need to work on the flow/structure and for some just thinking about vocab and spelling is a big step. Its been full of "buzz" this week.

Collaborative writing: Having played "Once Upon A Time", 3 of my girls wrote a collaborative recount of their experience on GoogleDocs. We also took part in a small collaborative task started by @PascalDresse a round robin story using GoogleDocs, 10 classes writing 1 sentence each. I've posted more about this elsewhere.

• Why? The girls wanted to share something about Once Upon A Time and they asked - I knew they would be writing, in terms of Key Competencies alone I was happy with this. 10 Sentence story children were all chosen as they have problems with stories flowing.

Choice: We had the computers for two sessions, 1 each for Maths & literacy. During Maths I took a risk with the blank canvas & conveyed that to the children. I asked each of them to write their learning outcome for the lesson, they shared this with me through Socrative where I was able to download the spreadsheet of responses. Each child then attempted to learn using their own methods with the computer, I had kids visiting lots of sites for strong math games (with their goals in mind), kids on Khan Academy and other YouTube videos. All were engaged and most confessed they had actually made progress towards their learning goal. The literacy session was much the same, children spent their time blogging, publishing, commenting, creating & sharing.

• Why? This was a great chance to try the blank canvas for me but for the kids I know that everyone of them has different learning needs in maths, this was a chance to personalise the learning. I viewed it as a success.

Sharing HookEd.com: @CaroBush laughed at my gobsmacked look as Pam Hook shared with us during Edchatnz. I've shown several people the Rubric Generators on Pam's site HookEd.com they've given me the same look.

• Why? Because some of our mapping meetings have tedious merry-go-round conversations about what skill or verb should be included because some are too hard for different levels. SOLO and the rubric generators makes this argument go away!

Our principal was talking about digital learning, professional development and shifting your thinking. A great discussion and was supplemented with a model outlining reluctance through to innovators. I was asked to add my thoughts. I talked about three things: What, How, & Why. It's easy to find a new toy/gadget/app to play with but that it is understanding Why you have included it in your learning experience that is the real question.

• Why? It should be central to your thinking in all planning. Why does the student need this tool, this experience, what will be the outcome for their learning.

I've purchased the book Key Competencies the first book recommended by @Edubookchatnz which was launched at #Edchatnz, I didn't go to the session but I am definitely keen to take part in this awesome journey. They're recommending professional reading and providing a chat to share the learning, consider it an online book club for teacher twitter geeks like me.

• Why? Because professional reading is an important method to improve my teaching & professional practice.

Friday afternoon, @MrRuddtheTeachr and I are providing some PD on collaboration, connection & constant learning (aka TWITTER). I am a huge advocate of Twitter as a teacher & in the class and we also have 5-6 who are on Twitter but not very active, some are eggs because they don't have profiles & some chicks as they're not very active tweeters. But most are real eggs, they're not even on twitter. Its time for some to change that.

• Why? Connection, collaboration, constant learning, PLN, need I go on?

1 week on, I'm feeling pretty relaxed about continuing the revolution and most importantly that I've truly engaged with the Professional Development I got at #Edchatnz