It's been a long wonderful summer!!
I realize that stopped blogging suddenly last school year. My wife gave birth to our son 8 weeks early, and I had a very abrupt start to an early summer vacation! I will write a post summing up what I learned last year, at a later date...
Last year I had the first 12 week trimester to test everything out and work out any bugs before I started teaching with MinecraftEdu, this school year I am teaching MinecraftEdu starting from day one. Technology is rarely ready on day one, and this week was no exception. Tuesday was the first day of class, and we did fun get to know you activities and didn't even touch our computers. Tuesday evening I got an email telling me that Minecraft wasn't working in my lab yet, so in class on Wednesday I had the kids log into our computer system, then they went on youtube and watched Minecraft videos. They used search terms like crafting, building, and redstone, and completely enjoyed the hour. Finally, today we logged into MinecraftEdu for the first time!
I start every class with the tutorial world, but each of my classes have a handful of kids who had the Minecraft class last year and have gone through the tutorial world, so I teleported that group to the campground and let them loose. I use border blocks to control the flow of students, and make sure that each student is completing the activities, and not just following better players through. My memory of last year, is that, for me, the tutorial world can be very labor intensive and difficult to manage, but my experience this year is that I was on top of the student flow, and easily managed the multiple student levels.
I'm very excited for this new year, both revisiting fabulous units from last year, and creating some new ones!
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