Emma's UVIC Blog

Category: Personal Learning Networks (page 1 of 1)

November 4, 2019 / 0 Comments

MINECRAFT

Today in class we learned about immersive gaming for education through Minecraft EDU.  Minecraft is a sandbox video game that focuses on creativity and communication. Microsoft bought Minecraft and created Minecraft EDU, a Minecraft platform that creates a server for a class, with settings that can be set by the teacher for the whole class. Minecraft has two main modes; creative mode and survival mode. Creative mode usually has few limitations, no risk of your character dying, and the main focus is building and creating things in your world. Survival mode has more limitations, and your character needs to eat, can be killed (either by other players, zombies, creepers, monsters, or things like starvation or suffocation), can drown etc., and the main focus is building and collecting things that will increase your chances of survival. There is also a tutorial mode, which is very structured and limited, but teaches you the essential basics, as well as lesson mode, which has worlds with a that teach students lessons, such as the digestive system, the roman empire, rainforest climate etc.

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Today an elementary school teacher, Heidi James, and four students, all in grade 7 or 8, from Spectrum Community School and Colquitz Middle School came to educate us about how Minecraft can be used in the classroom. Heidi lead us through joining a multiplayer Minecraft EDU server, where we were able to play Minecraft with everyone in our class! Heidi showed us how, as the teacher, she has a multitude of settings she can apply to the server her students are in… everything from including animals or not, to the students being able to kill each other (usually frowned upon by the school district), to allowing students to use the text-chat feature of the game.

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The students that were there shared with us their opinions on how Minecraft has influenced their school careers. One of the students shared that building houses and worlds in Minecraft has directed him towards an architecture career,  another student shared that Minecraft has directed her towards an art based career, as she loves to create 2D pixel art in Minecraft.  Heidi also described how students build community and communication skills when they build together in Minecraft. Overall, this class definitely provided me with much more of an insight into the benefits of using Minecraft in the classroom.

October 24, 2019 / 0 Comments

Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry

This week we went to an Inquiry based private high school called Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry (PSII). PSII is a grade 9-12 personalized learning school where students learn at their own pace, learn things they’re interested in, and decide their own curriculum, while also meeting or exceeding BC graduation requirements. Lately in our courses we’ve been discussing the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). The ZPD, a term coined by a psychologist named Vygotsky, is the place where there is a perfect balance between challenge and ability for students. The ZPD for every student is different, which PSII acknowledges, and uses to allow students to reach their full potential. Unlike typical BC high schools, at PSII, students are able to work as much, and as hard as they want on material that is engaging and challenging for them, without becoming overwhelmed by too much foreign material. PSII’s educational platform allows students to be in the ZPD for the majority of their school career.

 

For grading and report cards, PSII uses anecdotal report cards, which are report cards that omit grades for the first two terms of the school year, in favour of more in-depth comments/progress reports, and leave letter grades and percentages until the end of the school year. This helps relieve the stress of grades and percentages that many students feel, as well as promotes the idea that learning is on a continuum, and can be done at individual paces without risk of failure. In fact, parents can opt-in to anecdotal report cards for their children in all elementary schools!  Further, although PSII’s students have this type of report card and they learn at their own pace/curriculum, they all meet BC’s graduation requirements, and very frequently graduate early and with very high GPAs.

The founder of PSII, Jeff Hopkins, has been advocating for all schools to become more Inquiry based, thus, he has created a website full of documents and resources that PSII uses that anyone is able to view, copy, modify, and/or use in any way that is conducive to better education. These include a values poster, curriculum organizer, valued human attributes poster, a competency assessment framework/grading template, an inquiry guide template and sample, and an inquiry process flowchart.

 

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