Minecraft Project Update-Fortresses and Castles

Where We Are
Our 7th grade students have been moving full speed ahead on their Minecraft projects. These projects involve teams of students, designing a fortress and castle, based on what they learned about such structures in 6th grade. They are using Minecraft to create the structures on the school server. We are one week away from testing them out in survival mode. Students are rushing to get supplies stocked up, ensure that their structures are well fortified, and are busy contriving and building traps for potential invaders. Needless to say there is a lot of strategic thinking going on!

What We Use We opted for Minecraft Edu which was a smart move as it allows the teacher control of a lot of what goes on in-world. Among the various options available are the abilities to freeze students, teleport them back and forth, mute their chat, bring them all in to the teacher, toggle between creative and survival mode and revoke student building as well as student creative mode. I am able to do all of this as well as work with them on our map.

Challenges
We came up against two major challenges when beginning this project. The first involved constant server crashes which occurred when the whole class was logged in. We solved that by initially partnering the students up and then bumping up the memory on the computer that hosts the server. This was a great solution and we have not crashed since!

The second challenge had to do with demonstrating respect for others. With over 100 students playing on one map, on the school server, it can tricky to monitor the goings on. For that reason Student building privileges are limited to class time and after school for one hour. That way i am able to pop in and visit while I monitor behaviour and chat. 

Respect for other people's work is vital in an online project,  just as it is in real life. Griefing and  "trolling", are not unheard of and some kids do partake in it when playing on different servers. I spoke with the students about this upon commencing the project and come back to it in each lesson. Unfortunately,  there have been a few cases of griefing and trolling during the project. You can imagine my surprise when I logged in yesterday only to find out that my own structure had also been greifed at one point! 

I have to admit that it was a bit disconcerting at first, but these incidents ended up providing the basis for teachable moments. The whole project is about learning to work together online. The issue having hit home provided us with the fodder for a relevant discussion about griefing and trolling . 

I have to say that the kids should be commended. They are are amazingly flexible and despite the setbacks many have experienced, they remain very positive and even come in to work after school. They are quick to fix any damage that occurs and and then they move on. Let's face it, many of them, especially the team leaders are experienced gamers and have dealt with these problems before. It is great to see how positive they are about it all.

Our team leaders are doing a fantastic job of running the builds. They organise their teams, direct construction, teach others how to create more advanced constructions, all while working on their own building jobs, designing defence contraptions and meeting with the teacher to discuss the progress and the parameters for testing day. 

I was able to capture some video footage in-world, while a few classes worked on their structures. Please have look at the video to see what they have done.

Screencast Tutorials

Our 6th and 8th grade students have created some exciting screencast tutorials in ICT lessons. In these tutorials the students teach many different technology skills that they have learned over the past few months and even years. We have begun publishing them on our LRCABC Youtube Channel for the world to enjoy and learn from and hope you will find a few minutes to browse through the collection. Who knows, you may even learn something new!

8th Grade Book Trailers

The 8th Grade created video book trailers on a book of their choices which they planned and produced in groups. This was a 6 week process involving 18 lessons of ICT. The 8th grade students are already quite skilled at video production, so this was an opportunity for them to branch out a bit and take on a video genre they were unfamiliar with. In preparing for the project, students learned about shots, angles and camera movement. They learned that trailers are generally fast paced,short in duration and involve a variety of shots and angles as well as scene changes. Through the project the 8th grade students were able to fine tune their video editing skills as well as try out a great many new techniques incorporating special effects and using the green screen. These trailers can be found on the LRC YouTube Channel as well as on this page. We hope you enjoy them!

Do you want to get their attention? SketchUp is one way.

Image via CrunchBaseThis is my first year teaching with Google SketchUp and I have to wonder why I haven't done this before.

It was the first 8th Grade lesson so  I played the introductory video for the kids. It is quite a long video, which can go either way really. In this case I stopped the video before the end as we were running short on time, despite the gasps and other exclamations from the kids. They wanted more. I put the movie back on and they continued to soak it all up. At that point we only had 10 more minutes in the lesson, for them to explore. They couldn't wait to get back onto the computers. The practically tore out of the room amongst various exclamations the loudest being, "I can't wait to try this out!"

Did I say there were only about 10 minutes left in the lesson? By the time those 10 minutes were up. Every student had created a building with windows, doors and in some cases special textures.  For the next lesson, they are bringing their English work on a Author's Mind as a Room. This is where it all comes together. They will be creating the room that they described in their English lessons, using SketchUp and uploading their work to that author's geographical location in Google Earth.

More on Speaking and 3D Avatars

We are now using Voki in full force on our LRC and ICT websites to send reminders, updates and homework assignments to kids. Just today one of my colleagues, Carmen is a History teacher. Today she  assigned her students the homework of creating a Voki whose job is to answers the question: What is History? Fantastic, what a way to motivate kids to do homework! I really enjoyed viewing these interactive assignments! Take a look!

Here is an example


Get a Voki now!

Just this evening when finishing our latest Voki for the LRC site(which I must say bears a strong resemblance to our Librarian), I clicked the play button and came across Trek Yourself and Svedka Bot Builder..Great fun. I have included some examples below. These two are very easy to use and no account is needed. They can be embedded, sent by email, downloaded, uploaded to facebook etc..Bot Builder doesn't appear to talk, but provides for movement, while Trek Yourself allows you to upload, or text in your message.

My Trek Self

My Bot

My Voki



Get a Voki now!