A huge thank you to Dave Talbot for his fantastic presentation about Minecraft in the classroom. You can check out his presentation here. He gave us advice on how to start up Minecraft in our classroom and how to design strategic student pairings for the activity. He had many great ideas of connecting with students and providing critical-thinking skills through Minecraft. Here is an article about the Minecraft and reading connection: http://www.wired.com/2014/10/video-game-literacy.[kaltura-widget uiconfid=”11958342″ entryid=”1_lmnmx52g” width=”400″ height=”333″ /]
An ongoing theme of the session was definitely that Minecraft is highly engaging. You can see that for yourself in this video Dave shared with us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOFj37hUIjk.
Minecraft is a terrific way to get students interested and creating something instead of just consuming something. Dave also discussed how motivated students were when they knew that others were going to see their travels through virtual worlds.
Thank you for a great session and for all the teachers that shared tips and ideas in the chat. Our next TLP-C will be on Chromebooks in the classroom on Thursday, 17 March, at 4PM EST. We hope you can join us then!
I am really sorry I missed this presentation, but I look forward to watching the recorded session. My ELL (newcomers) students are not really exposed to MineCraft, but I think they would enjoy it. I also think it would be a great tool to teach English vocabulary and have them explore and create their own world. Thanks for sharing.
When I see the Minecraft game in action, it makes me feel so old. I am thinking that before I allow the students to create worlds and solve problems, I might need to know a little more about how it works. I can see them trying to do things without my knowledge if I don’t learn how to operate the supervisor controls. It seems that they were very easily adapting to how to use the program, as if it may mimic a lot of video games that they play already. I have yet to try it but I have been told by a colleague in a higher grade that it has it pluses and minuses.
I thought the use of the minecraft game was quite interesting. I teach at the high school level. When I tried to introduce it to my students, they found that it was obsolete and were not very interested. Maybe with younger kids, the structure of the video gaming aspects of it would keep their interest.