We had a teeny tiny class this week of only about 6-7 students as quite a few were at one of the conferences. A cool topic we were able to explore was MinecraftEDU! I personally really enjoy playing Minecraft casually. When I was growing up, I did not play many video games outside of a few computer games and at friends’ houses. My boyfriend Graydon introduced me to Minecraft as a fun game we could play together where we build elaborate tree forts and raise multicoloured sheep. The creativity is truly endless. I had never thought of Minecraft in an educational way however until Graydon and his friend used it in a school project (link to youtube video) for their Nursing degree. They made an interactive world where the user goes into a giant person and works their way through the human body with different information posted along the way. It was meant to help educate a young person who needed to get an ileostomy or ostomy bag. When you got to the small and large intestine of the giant person, you learned about the process and what was changing in your body. At the end, you then have the code to make your avatar for future Minecraft games have an ostomy bag. It was a creative and interactive way to teach someone about ostomies and ileostomies that was relevant to a younger person. This really piqued my interest in using Minecraft for education. It was awesome to learn from Luke that there are pre made lesson plans already set up and designed for educational use! I had a good look through all of the premade science classes, and while a lot of them were targeted for younger ages, there is a great one for exploration of eukaryotic cells. I will definitely be striving to use this resource in my future classroom (if my students think it is “cool enough”).
example of a minecraft world
In the Communication Competency, I am feeling quite adept with Zoom and Mattermost at this stage of the semester. Putting a personal background on my Zoom account really improved my Zoom experience. I was feeling quite stressed about the ability of people to be staring into my apartment, and if I had cleaned up my laundry or put away mess that was visible. By putting a picture I took in the summer as my background, it accomplished quite a few things. I no longer feel stressed about however clean or messy my apartment looks, and I have no stress about my partner visibly walking into the room behind me. Every time I look at that picture, it reminds me of a really happy memory, and makes me feel like I am in a calm, coastal forest. I have also set up multiple personal Zoom calls with my classmates to practice for projects and for my pod meetings for EDCI 336. Through presenting projects for other classes, I now have a lot of practice screen sharing, sending people into breakout rooms, and engaging with others over Zoom visually, audibly and through the chat.
Mattermost has been a great new method of communication learned through this class. I typically use Facebook Messenger for group projects, but Mattermost makes it much easier to read and scroll through long message chains common in group projects. One of my classmates Aaron made a socials type channel for our cohort and a few others, which has been great for setting up hangouts and a general place to chat! The organization between public, private and direct messaging makes it very easier to keep track of multiple conversations. It works well for the Teaching Program as we all downloaded it due to EDCI 336. I hope to encourage others to use it later in my career as an easy method of communication between staff members or other TOCs.
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