Using Minecraft As An Educational Tool

What do you know about Minecraft? Is it more than just a game?

Two months ago I had never heard of this virtual world and now I see it talked more and more in education circles. In Minecraft students create their own 3D virtual worlds and learn lessons about communication, collaboration, and digital citizenship through the first-person sandbox-style game.  There are many more lessons to learn as well and the problem solving that takes place is huge.  I had the opportunity to visit a class at Lakewood Elementary School in our board and was blown away by the students who were totally engaged in a number of tasks.

To give you an idea of what I saw happening take a look at this similar classroom.  This is not an exaggeration of what I saw at Lakewood.

Learning How To Learn: Let’s talk about LEARNING, not technology! by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano

I recently found this very cool blog http://langwitches.org/blog/ which makes some really great connections to digital learning. On this blog are a number of slide decks which can allow you the opportunity to get fast reasonable PD online. I really enjoyed the embedded slide deck below and if you have 10 minutes take some time to flip through the many excellent ideas and thoughts presented by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano @langwitches

Video of Week: Rethinking Learning – The 21st Century Learner | MacArthur Foundation

I want to share great media clips that promote Educational technologies and School Based Leadership. Every Sunday I will post a video segment that truly moves me on these topics.

This week is from the MacArthur Foundation and it is on Rethinking Learning: The 21st Century Learner

Leadership 2.0

Eric Sheninger (@NMHS_Principal) is a principal in the United states who has a huge twitter presence and well worth following. In this 16 minute video below he talks about the value of using social media as a school leader to connect with your community, to establish a brand, and model new technologies for staff and students. He has amazing ideas and this video may change the way you look at social media and your school.

SLJ Summit 2011: Eric Sheninger from School Library Journal on Vimeo.

GEDSB Education Technology Year 4 Kicks Off

I am really excited to see the first training for our Secondary English Teachers and our grade 3 & 4 Elementary Teachers kick off yesterday at the JBLC. Lynda Kilpatrick (Teacher Consultant) and her team supported by members of our IT department distributed Dell Windows 8 Tablets, keyboards and stylus to all the teachers in attendance.

Moving from netbooks to Windows Tablets has opened up some possibilities for expanding the instructional repertoire of our teachers. While the first session is about getting the hardware to teachers the new year will involve netbooks, white boards, interactive projectors and other tools being deployed to the classrooms and an opportunity for further professional development.

Emotions of the teachers ranged from excitement to trepidation but the team did their best to allay fears. The word is out to schools and students as my daughter said to me at dinner how come the little kids get tablets. Grace has been in an infused grade every year since this started last year and now in grade 8 she will have to wait until she gets into her English class in high school.

My favourite glitch of the day was the “QWERTZ” keyboards. Yes. 5 of the keyboards were designed and shipped with Z & Y flipped. Anyone know if there are standard keyboards somewhere with that form or is that simply just a manufacturing oops. Love to hear if anyone know anything about that.

Ontario Ministry Connects Technology and Math Curriculum

Recently I received a copy of Ministry of Education Newsletter   Math in Motion   and I was really impressed with the connection that is being made to improve student Math skills at both elementary and secondary levels through the use of web based technologies.

Shared in the article for teachers use is Edugains.ca website that is designed for students who need additional support in math.  It uses diagnostics to uncover typical problems students have on a specific topic and then suggests instructional strategies to specifically target these deficits in learning.  Various modules can be accessed through this site.

Also highlighted is the Homework Help page for students Grade 7 to 12.  A free online math help resources for students of Ontario Grade 7 -10.  It provides live one-to-one from Ontario teachers Sunday to Thursday from 5:30 pm – 9:30 pm.  The program is funded by the Ontario government and administered by TVO’s Independent Learning Centre

Why do parents and teachers judge technology harshly?

The below article was taken from Learnegg:

The kids are immersed. They are learning skills which will be of huge value to them in the 21st century and they seem to be starting from an intuitive base. They seem to just get it. They are working collaboratively, navigating their way through the tasks set for them, making their own choices, with minimum supervision. What’s more, they search out more, finding new ways to be creative, to socialise, and multi-tasking all the way.

And it’s wrong and we should stop them from doing it.

Because its digital.

We’re in the process of the digital disruption of our world where we put value judgements on technologies – books are generally good, digital is generally bad. Physical creativity good, digital creativity less so.

It’s an oversimplification (it’s what I do), but in education, there’s a suspicion that digital is a distraction from core learning skills, not an addition to them. We associate digital with gaming, not with learning – and children react to games with more enthusiasm than they do to homework. But just as sport teaches teamwork, so online gaming teaches collaboration. Just as reading books encourages children to understand the world, so games can allow children to create their own world. Neither option is universally good or bad.

The difficulty comes with the associated value judgements, handed down from parents and teachers and ascribed to the hardware of delivery. If its paper, its good. If its a tablet or a mobile, it’s bad.

But it’s not about the tools, its about what they learn from them.

Source: http://learnegg.com/parents-teachers-judge-technology-harshly/

Evernote or Onenote For Portfolios

Formative assessment, descriptive feedback and portfolios are all effective strategies to improve student learning.  My experience to date is our elementary teachers are very good at using these methods to collect data and triangulate the learning taking place with there students.  I have also observed that as we move from the lower grades to higher grades in elementary and secondary school that the documentation process seems to fall off.  I think a big part of that is that the complexity of learning, rotary schedules and other structure make this such an onerous task it just doesn’t get done to the same degree as in our primary and kindergarten classes.

A few weeks ago I attended MISA conference in London and was lucky enough to hear a great speaker from YDSB, Royan Lee.  Royan who is an intermediate teacher and hosts the blog The Spicy Learning Blog shared how he uses Evernote to document learning and create digital portfolios for his classes.  I personally use Microsoft Onenote (a windows equivalent) but it really doesn’t matter the platform but more importantly is the matching of the technology with the teaching practice.  His creating of a digital portfolio using evernote was brilliant and definitely share worthy.

What Royan shared with us was how he takes pictures of student work with his mobile phone and stores them in evernote as he moves around the class.  He puts voice and/or text annotations beside the pictures so that he knows what he was looking  and why he documented it.  He then saves the item with a tag of students name as well as any other pertinent search criteria (for instance, math, writing, reading, project etc).  He then can pull up by simply searching student tags in Evernote all the work in math or other criteria.  At his fingertips he then has for use at parent meetings or later to document student growth and improvement tons of data on each and every child.  He indicated that it feels funny to do this at first but with time and practice it is amazing how effective you can get at it.  If you want more info on this teaching/assessment strategy I recommend you contact Royan directly.  His twitter acct is @royanlee .  Alternatively If you want to read more on using evernote as a tool for creating portfolios and documenting learning visit the blogsite below:

http://evernotefolios.wordpress.com 

Example taken from post in http://evernotefolios.wordpress.com above