App of the Week: Anchor.FM

Anchor is a new social media platform where the discussion happens completely in audio recordings. Users get 2 minutes to introduce their topic and then anyone listening can respond with a 1 minute recording.  It's sort of a mix between blogging, twitter, and podcasting.  Here's my first go, I'd love to hear what you think.  Let's make some waves!
 

Minecraft for Reading Comprehension Research Study Results

I've finally completed my research paper and case study of using Minecraft to develop reading comprehension.  I had a great time conducting the study and was quite pleased with the impact the activity had on the students.  Although the p value did not determine that the intervention was statistically significant, most likely due to the small sample size, the students in the class that used Minecraft on average scored 10% higher on a 15 point comprehension test than the students from the class that used a traditional sequence of events graphic organizer to retell the story.

The most important factor that I saw when observing the students using Minecraft was their engagement level.  The entire class was immediately engrossed in the task from the word go.  They intuitively organized themselves divying up tasks, communicating progress, and researching actual building in Johannesburg.  No one asked them to do this.  They did it because they were interested and wanted to make it the best that they could.

Here is a part of a group's retelling of the Journey to Jo'Burg short novel that they read using Minecraft.

If you would like to read the whole report here is the link.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwl5ppTDoTVWNVVsRlR1S0I4X00/view?usp=sharing

App of the Week: Minecraft, It's Uses in Education Part 3

In PYP 7 (Grade 4) the students have been studying Materials and their varying properties.  They have been testing different materials and categorizing them in many ways.  They also had the opportunity to test the "digital" materials that are found in Minecraft.  They tested and recorded their findings on different objects and types of materials translucence, opaqueness, flammability,  hardness, and whether it was a liquid or a solid.

For hardness the students created a measure of how many times the avatar needed to hit an item before it broke.  The students tested Grass, Stone, Nether Black, TNT, Emerald, Bedrock, Obsidian, and a pig.  From the chart we can see that, in the game, Bedrock is unbreakable and that Obsidian is the next hardest substance they came across.  

Let's keep looking for more educational applications for Minecraft!   

App of the Week: Minecraft, It's Uses in Education Part 2

I've recently been conducting the study for my master's research project, I will be posting the findings of that soon, but I thought I'd share a bit now.

The students have been using Minecraft to recreate the settings from the book Journey to Jo'Burg, that they have recently read as a class, and then use those settings to retell the story.  The project aims to develop the students' reading comprehension.  The book tells the story of a brother and sister who travel from their village to the city of Johannesburg during the time of Apartheid.  Their baby sister had become very ill and they needed to go tell their mother who lived and worked in the city. 

It was very impressive to see how quickly the students organized themselves, doling out building responsibilities and then speaking roles.  As the teacher I did not have to motivate them or pull them along in any way.  They were off and going.  Since we only had a limited time I had to stop them, do their displeasure, from completing every detail they found in the book.  

One of the boys immediately got on Google and searched for images of Johannesburg buildings in order to recreate the city accurately.

Here are some of the other scenes that they created from the story.

Barn on the orange farm they slept in on the first night

Overview of the entire journey

Johannesburg with 'pink house' where the mother worked 

Working train station where the police raid asking for everyone's passes

Hospital with a long line where they take the sick baby

Orange farm

Soweto

Soweto arial view

The students loved this project and developed a lot more than just their reading comprehension skills.

  

App of the Week: Minecraft, It's Uses in Education Part 1

Minecraft is one of the, if not the most popular Apps/Software on the market at the moment.  The game use simple graphic building blocks for players to use to create whole new worlds.  Minecraft is a "Sandbox" game, which means that players can interact with the environment to create their own experience.  

Utilizing the game's open, creative aspect and the amount of engagement that students pour into the activities when they are use Minecraft, there is huge educational potential to impact learning.  Here are a few examples of how we have been using Minecraft with our students.

In Art the students have been focussing on 'perspective' and in particular 'vanishing point perspective', like that in which Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper was painted in.  The students studied the painting and discussed how all the lines of perspective converge to a single point, in this case Jesus is centered at that point, and the windows in the background are smaller than the people in the foreground demonstrating depth. 

The students then were asked to draw a room using 'vanishing point perspective'

Student 1

Student 2

Student 3

Minecraft also happens to be built wholly around 'vanishing point perspective'.  The center of the screen is always the point where all lines of perspective converge, making some things seem far away (smaller) and others closer (larger).  For the activity using Minecraft the students were asked to recreate The Last Supper with certain specifications.

Finally the students were given the task to draw the corridor.  Here are those same three students from the initial room drawings, corridor drawings.

Student 1

Student 2

Student 3

Get Out of Their Way and Let Them Be Awesome

I had the opportunity to see Scott McLeod and the Innovate Conference at the Graded School last May. In his presentation there he talks about the Trudacot system that he and some colleagues have come up with that helps teachers analyze lesson plans, basically, to see if they are using technology for technology's sake or if the use of technology is enriching the learning and deepening thought. After the conference I was checking out what else Scott has done/is doing and came across his TEDx talk.
To me, he hits the nail on the head.  "We do everything we can to get tech into the hands of our kids and then we do everything we can to prevent them from using it."  The filters we put on are the equivalent of all of the over protective playground rules we now have.  No climbing the trees, they might fall.  No wood chips under equipment they might throw them.  Everything must be sterilized. This deprives them of be self motivated risk-takers.
The fear is what we need to block.  When we blanketly block students from access, flashing "ACCESS DENIED" signs, we are telling them that they cannot be trusted.

We need to EMPOWER them to find out how they can use the internet to express themselves and their ideas.

"In the future we won't need teachers because Tech will replace them"

I've been thinking about how to respond to this statement for sometime now.  I hear it often, sometimes jokingly, but more than not a real fear that teachers will become obsolete is a hidden wall in progressive educational thought and if we're not careful it will lead to denying children access to technology.

To those who make this statement, I came across my counter argument in a quote by Sir Ken Robinson.

"They saw in me something I did not see in myself."
An algorithm can not do that.  An algorithm can not interpret the look on a child's face when a teacher recognizes their talent.  A personalized curriculum, like Kahn Academy, knows where you should go next in your learning progression, but it can not tell when to push you or when to back off and lend a consoling word.  It is personalized not personal.

We need to recognize that technology provides the tools to give us as teachers more time and information to provide the "personal" to the students.

Blogging for Learning

Some of our teachers at St. Francis have begun to use Blogs to enrich learning.  Their students are creating blogs as if they were a character from the book, The Outsiders, that they have been reading. The first thing I noticed as I was helping out with the set up of the blogs, was how engaged the students were with the technology and even more so with the content of the book.  They(most of them) were immediately taken into the mindset of the character that they were writing as, whether that be by beginning to write posts, looking for pictures to accompany their posts, or choosing layout and themes for their site that best create the mood of their character.

I hope that the students continue to demonstrate the benefits of blogging to their learning throughout this unit.


http://langwitches.org/blog/2014/11/23/blogging-for-learning-mulling-it-over/

This is from a blog that I subscribe to called Langwitches, written by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano.  The diagram she has created does a nice job of showing what keys to learning are happening and when within the cycle of blog writing.

Article Response "Start a Reading Revolution: Flip Your Class With Blogs"

Start a Reading Revolution: Flip Your Class With Blogs



I was just reading this article and felt a strong connection to the kids comments about having books chosen for us and having to come up with these "feelings" that the text was supposed to draw out of us.  I never read the books that were assigned, or at least not in their entirety.  I was a slow reader and thought that books were not for me.  Then a friend lent me The Celestine Prophecy when I was in high school and it changed my viewpoint about reading.  It was my choice and that made all the difference.  I had the opportunity to connect to the text.  


I think the author hits the nail on the head about the power of blogs to transform learning in these two ways:


"The blogs add a maker mentality, stirring the imagination to create, design, and tinker." 


This makes the student the owner of their learning.  They are not just responding to someone else's work, they are creating their own and this is something that they can feel a sense of pride from.


"Once students publish a post, their writing passes the four walls of the classroom and exists to the world. This puts their work "out there," and that changes how they approach their writing." 


When we know other people are going to see or there is a possibility of a whole lot of people seeing our work, an internal drive turns on and says "I better make this good".  Not only does this promote better writing but it helps students find and develop their own voice.


Let's start a conversation in our school about students being able to publish their work.