Virtual Learning Network

Hi Tracey,

I'd love to see examples of collaborative planning too please!

Thanks,

Craig McDonald

Tahatai Coast School

Great to see all these responses, learning lots! Looking forward to hearing more about how Minecraft can work in the classroom, rather than being a source of frustration!

Hi everyone, new to the group! Is anyone using minecraft Edu at school? I'm interested in the costs and what this allows. My biggest frustration is having students' work griefed by anonymous users... Maybe the Edu set up enables us to avoid this?? Love to hear your thoughts.

Hi Sean, no it's not yet. I'm working on getting some journal articles published from it in the near future (hopefully!). I would be happy to email it you if you'd like to have a look. Cheers.

This is a great question! Last year I did my masters research looking at the way children aged 9-12 are using the internet, and one thing I found was that what frightened children most online was experiencing a loss of control. This occurred when they were hacked (even/usually by a friend), when they had shared their password and now regret it, when a website was deceptively designed so as to take them to another page they hadn't chosen to go to. Even when their parents posted photos of them on Facebook that they didn't want public. In almost every case it came back to this fear of losing control: of their identity, personal information, hardware (in the case of viruses) and friendships. One of the best things we can do for our learners is give them the skills/competencies to maintain control online as much as possible, and deal with it appropriately when control is lost. Food for thought.