MinecraftEdu

Tonight I may have stumbled across a life changing blog when finishing up my assignments for the semester.  A classmate of mine wrote a blog post about MinecraftEdu.  Being the mother of a 9-year-old avid Minecraft player I was surprised I had never heard about this move by Minecraft producers to make Minecraft more accessible in educational institutions.  I did a quick search and was inundated with youtube videos, blog posts, and websites discussing this move by Minecraft producers.  I found teachers making Minecraft videos about cell structure, math functions, physics topics, etc. etc.  

Cut to my 9-year-old making Rainbow-Loom bracelets having already used up his one hour of game time today.  I yell to him to come into my office and question him about what he is currently learning about in school.  He replies, "multiplication, division, Thanksgiving, the different Native American tribes of Michigan." Bingo!  After a few more questions I learn that he is currently learning about the historical location of the tribes throughout the State.  I tell him he can play Minecraft if he somehow incorporates what he is learning about in Social Studies.  He was thrilled!  He raced downstairs and 30 min later produced the video above.  

This not only made me think about the ways I could incorporate more learning into Minecraft it forced Kal to talk to me about school.  School comes very easily to him and he is usually bored with the topic and replies with "good" every time I ask him about anything related to school.  I learned more in our five minute conversation about what he learning than I have learned questioning him every day!  He was motivated.  I am excited with the endless possibilities to come from this new discovery.

Below are some useful resources-

http://www.youtube.com/user/EduElfie/videos

http://minecraftedu.com/page/

Edublogger

I was a bit hesitant to respond to an Edublogger.  I was not quite sure what to say or what to ask or how to approach commenting.  I ended up telling the blogger how helpful I found his blog.  I thanked him for all of his great ideas about teaching anatomy and asked him how he introduces new vocabulary to his students.  The amount of vocabulary students in anatomy are faced with can be overwhelming so I was curious as to how he approached this with his students.  

I was pleasantly surprised when he responded within a few hours! He answered my question and thanked me for my comment.  There was however something about his response that I found a bit irritating.  He plugged his book and copied the link to purchase a textbook he had written.  It made me feel like he responded just to try to sell some more copies of his book.  I then thought maybe that was the point of his whole blog- just to try to make money off his books.  Either way I will continue to read his blog because it is a great resource with a lot of helpful links but I do not see myself commenting again. 

On a side note, the image above was generated by a free program called Wordle.  All you do is either type or copy and paste text into the text box and hit generate.  Wordle randomizes the words and makes the words that are used the most bigger than the others. You can format the shape and color of the font that Wordle generates.  The one above was created by copying and pasting a blog post from the Edublogger I have been following.  I thought it would be a fun activity to do with students for a get to know you activity at the beginning of the year.