Minecraft Journey With Year 7/8's
I was someone who had know idea about what Minecraft was before this year and I never thought that I would be encouraging my students to be playing a game - but here we are!!
The students in my class have been using minecraft as part of our measurement unit of designing a house. The students have taken their 2D floorplans that they have drawn and had the option to build these using minecraft. Of course their was a huge response to this and there has been some great learning out of it! Here are some links to some of the 'virutal tour' videos the students have made for their house.
A group of students have been collaborating during lunchtimes to make number knowledge games for the rest of the class to use. We are currently looking at our number knowledge ladder (maths progressions) and how we can make a server where students can go on to learn/practice thier basic facts from stage 6 and stage 7. This is in the very early stages so I look forward to seeing how this all unfolds and what the students can create!!
I am also looking at getting some of my expert minecrafters to run workshops for those students who want to learn minecraft. There are many girls in my class who are keen but don't know how to play. This could be another opportunity for students to play the role of an 'expert' within our class.
At the moment some of the students have set up a server for our class as we do not have Minecraft EDu - although I would be very interested in what this could provide however I don't know enough about it. Is their anything that you can not do on Minecraft Edu that you can on regular Minecraft? (Any limitations) What are the benefits of using minecraftedu? What other features does it have that you are using in your classrooms?
Would love to hear any suggestions...
Comments
Hi Natalie - it sounds like you're made an awesome start to your Minecraft journey and have some great ideas of how to get this going in your classroom and school.
I can barely play the game myself, and I have never used regular Minecraft. I purchased MinecraftEDU for our school with a 15 seat licence last year. So I can't compare with the regular version. This enables me to run a server within the school, and gives me the ability to login as a teacher and set up the server in the mode I wish, save and load maps created by other teachers from the MinecraftEDU world server available to members. I have the ability to give resources to students, freeze them if necessary, and teleport students to me, or myself to them. I can control weather and other features and various mods (still getting to grips with the latter). We can only have one map/world played by everyone at the same time, so everyone plays on that. If I want a different map, then that is played at a different time. I appreciate the awesome support from the other MinecraftEDU teachers on the Minecraft Teachers Group. World of Humanities is an awesome world that is available for download through MinecraftEDU.
Hi Natalie — My colleague who teaches the Year 9 programme at Lytton has tried using Minecraft with them this year and found they are learning by collaborating in ways she hadn't imagined. Your willingness to explore and try such things is going to make you a huge asset to the education community! Keep up the good work!