Minecraft for Sustainability: Part 2

In my last post, I outlined how we set up to use Minecraft for learning in our inquiry into sustainability. Here's what came next..

After beginning the research and laying the foundations for understanding what sustainability is, what the systems for sustainable communities are, and how they work, the students began actually playing Minecraft.

Because he was the one with the Minecraft knowhow, Ben the Digital Integrator led the first setup lesson: leading the students in developing our Essential Agreement, allocating 'hosts' and talking the children through the process of setting up and joining Minecraft worlds.

Most children in the class already knew how to play Minecraft, which was brilliant - those who didn't have as much as much experience with the game soon caught up with expert tutelage from their peers. So much more effective than chalk and talk. I did my best to become a 'spy' - I snuck around the room, listened to their conversations, asked questions, recorded some 'thinking points' and gathered evidence.

We trapped chickens so we didn't have to kill them to get eggs. If you breed them you can kill the old ones to eat meat. #edtech #Minecraft
— fourlk (@fourlk) June 6, 2014

My small house doesn't use too much energy to heat or cool. Torches make light AND heat the house. #edtech #ipaded pic.twitter.com/gy89HPZA7Y
— fourlk (@fourlk) June 6, 2014

The hardest bits:

• coming to terms with the amount of playing time needed in order to make connections with the concept - sustainability. This actually makes sense - you need time for your community to develop in order to see if the decisions you've made are sustainable. It's pretty clear that this is part of the ongoing struggle with the shifting locus of control - it is always difficult to let go of the feeling that I must always be the 'director' of the learning that's happening in the classroom.
• related to the above - balancing screen time. The children needed enough time to be able to work on their worlds, but not so much that the amount of screen time was going to be detrimental. I cut back as much as possible on the use of iPads and laptops for other tasks during this time, keeping in mind that much of the students' Home Learning work was web- and app-based.

Things I learned/ was reminded of:

• children need time to work through and develop their understandings on their own. Give them plenty of thinking and working time before you start looking for evidence of their learning.
• I can learn so much from my students! Minecraft worlds are very similar AND have significant differences to the real world. Discussions we had about the similarities and differences between sustainability in the real and virtual worlds were fantastic. Despite some kids very honestly telling me that they 'were just playing Minecraft', there weren't any children who were unable to make connections between their Minecraft worlds and the research they'd already done.

The very best part:

• One of my students (a poster child for inquiry!) came to me one day and asked 'Miss Kemp, is it ok if we make our own sustainable worlds to work on at home?' When I asked her what she meant, the little girl explained 'Well, I really like what we're doing in our group, but I have some ideas that the others don't want to use. Is it ok if I try those ideas out in my own world at home?' She then came to chat to me every few days to talk about how her 'other world' was progressing, the things that had worked, and the things that hadn't. She explained her thinking, comparing her 'own' world to the one she was working on with her peers in class and made clear connections to the research we'd done at the beginning of the unit. She was so motivated and it was so exciting to see her actively researching her ideas and theories on her own, for herself.

I really enjoyed using Minecraft for this unit of inquiry. I think it has great potential as a learning tool. I am really glad that I kept a very close eye on what the children were doing at each stage - restricting playing time for the unit to 'in-class' kept a tight lid on misuse and disgreements between group members. More importantly, it made the whole process a lot more transparent - it was really easy for me to track developments in each of the groups' worlds and see the learning that was happening.

I discovered in my end of year survey that a couple of parents were concerned because their children had been creating new worlds to play Minecraft at home. I was a little bit worried about it, because I had really tried to ensure that parents had plenty of information about the use of technology in our class, and, more importantly, that they felt able to address these concerns with me directly. While I created a space on the Parent Information site for information about our iPad trial, and as a class we regularly sent out tweets and wrote blog posts about what we were doing, I'm not sure how many parents followed or found this information. Perhaps half of parents came to parent information sessions and it is impossible to tell how many read emails, website information, blog posts or tweets. One thing I would like to work more on is developing a 'team' approach to teaching children about Digital Citizenship - working with parents to ensure that children are using technology safely and sensibly. Developing partnerships with parents has been on my mind a lot this year - I think it is so incredibly important, given the rapid rate at which learning is changing: clearly fruit for a future post!

Damn you, polish!

Over the summer break I planned, read books and articles for research, learned how to use Twitter and other tools, planned some more, researched some more, discussed it lots and then went back to work and got slam-diddly-ammed, culminating in last night's parent information evening. Nothing like the beginning of the school year to smack you right back into reality.
After all my excitement and the thought and planning I put into my presentation for parents last night, I really don't feel great about how it went. There is a combination of factors that contributed to it, not all of them within my control. 

But, focusing on what I CAN control, it really is all about the polish:
Next time I will get enough sleep in the week before, do a proper dress-rehearsal (running through what you will say in your head doesn't work, even if you do it several times over), spend more time trying to second-guess the kinds of questions parents might ask (brainstorming session, anyone?). This last one is a little bit like fortune-telling, of course, but the longer I'm the business the better I will get at it, I hope.

To be completely honest, I am just really glad it's over so I can focus on teaching and learning now. The preparation was exhausting and stressful and the hour of presentation and discussion was possibly the hardest work I've ever done. I am glad that I took the risk in trying a new format and I know that I achieved my aim to help parents get a better understanding of how learning happens in my classroom. I hope that they left feeling positive about the work I do with their kids.

Hopefully they're more interested in that than the polish.

Parent Information Prezi

At the beginning of the school year at my school, parents are invited into the classroom for an information evening with the class teacher. Generally, turnout is pretty high and (I hope like many other teachers) it can be a bit nerve-wracking. Ask me to speak in front of a group of children and I'm fine; put me in front of parents and I'm a knock-kneed, trembly-voiced wreck. So I like to be prepared.

This last week I've spent many of my spare moments (read: while my toddler is napping) recreating my parent presentation.

Last school year, my Prezi for parents included lots of specific details about school routines and procedures as well as more general information about curriculum and learning in Grade 4. So, for much of the time we were together, I talked about timetabling, who to contact when and how, procedures for discipline, absences etc etc etc - all those institutional necessities. I also talked about general goals for language and maths (spelling program, goals for writing and reading, consolidation and some extension of basic facts, problem-solving) and our Units of Inquiry. And of course, I talked a bit about my own background with a few lame attempts at humour here and there. All in all, it wasn't a terrible presentation. Except that parents left that night without really knowing what learning was going to look like in my classroom.

At the time, it made sense to structure it like this: I was just coming back to teaching after two years out of the classroom and quite a bit of professional development so I didn't feel ready to give specific details about what learning would look like in my class. I was working in a new grade level with a new team and I wasn't sure how all of this 'newness' would pan out. Too many variables.

However, this year I'm going out on a limb and making quite a change.

First up, all the time spent outlining routines and procedures will be significantly reduced. I am putting together a handout for parents with all that information in bullet points. I'm not going to go through each point on the handout, just say 'It's all there, if you want to talk about it, we can, but I'd much rather take the time to talk about learning.'. I feel a bit nervous about this; after all, if I hammer the point home that all children must be at school by 0830, then no child ever has an excuse to be late, right? Even so, I've decided I'm going to give these 4th grade parents a break - I'm guessing they know the drill by now.

Second, I'm going to use a bunch of photos from last year's class. See, parents? This is what Maths class looks like, and this and this and this. Here we are taking photos and video, this is us learning about how search engines work and here we are looking stuff up in books and writing stories longhand. And here's reading and writing and discussion and all the other great stuff that we do.

Third, and this is the one I'm feeling good about: we're going to have the laptops in class with us for the presentation. Parents are going to have a turn with the online homework, I'm going to run them through the Maths revision video (my class is not flipped, but that's for another post), the Google form for Maths problems and the games. If they want, they can even see how the Maths grading works, and I'd really like to give them a few minutes to write some comments on the class blog.

Anyway, here's a look at my Prezi so far. It's clearly a work in progress and you can't see my photos for privacy reasons, but you get the idea, I hope.

Next on the Back to School agenda: organising excellent activities to get to know my students, refamiliarising myself with my first Unit of Inquiry and beginning of year Maths. Oh, and continuing to LOVE my holidays :).