Author: sarahbjelde Page 3 of 5

Today in class we were joined by an educator from Colquitz Middle School and some of her learners. They discussed Minecraft in schools and how it can be used to engage even the most disruptive/distracted classes.

There are different modes used in Minecraft: creative and survival. In creative mode you can fly, travel over obstacles such as mountains and water and create whatever you want.

In Minecraft EDU, creative mode and survival mode are blended. The teacher can put limitations on the world and can allow the limitations to lesson over time. Students have to decide what goes with what to produce what. They do phenomenal things by creating and memorizing codes. Kids can get timeouts and their characters can be frozen if you need to talk/address the entire class.

Here is a link to the MinecraftEDU website.

It is also a way for students to learn math concepts such as X and Y axes, area, perimeter, and ratios.

Minecraft may become addictive to students and may cause them to lose interest in other school subjects. That is why it must be used in a positive and purposeful way.

Last week we went to Rebecca Bathurst-Hunt’s Kindergarten classroom to learn more about her Inquiry approach to teaching Kindergarten.

Photo by Mark Spitse on Unsplash.

Here are some of the key points I jotted down during our visit.

• We must support students in the things they are passionate about – be flexible and find ties to the curriculum with what your students are interested in. Rebecca really emphasized getting to know your students and making strong relationships with each of them so that this personalized learning can occur. This in turn will make each year of teaching unique, keep you on your toes and also makes sure each unit is tailored to your unique group of learners. For example, her class is doing an inquiry unit on Dinosaurs right now because a lot of her students showed great interest in that topic.
• Your classroom layout is important. Rebecca’s classroom layout was beautifully Reggio Emilia style and created an environment that was very much conducive to learning featuring pictures of the kids everywhere, wooden/natural material toys, natural material decorations, natural lighting, a class pet (a fish named Elsa Bubbilies), and many other things that created systems and structures that allow Rebecca to teach in a calm, organized fashion.
• The three questions for inquiry-based learning are what do you see? What do you know? And what are you curious about? These questions are really effective for inquiry in Kindergarten all the way up to high school too. I can’t wait to find ways to incorporate these questions into my practicum teaching middle school in Sweden.

Photo by Gautam Arora on Unsplash

• They have a great emphasis on outdoor experiential learning with their weekly trips to the garden. They also go on regular field trips and Rebecca teaches in a flexible way that promotes inquiry “when it snows go outside – don’t shut the blinds!”
• Provocations can be a video, a picture, a book, a display of toys, an “artifact” — anything that students can touch, feel, smell, taste, or see. Provocations can help students begin to wonder and answer the three questions for inquiry based learning outlined above.
• Have many books in the classroom that promote inquiry and curiosity such as the Ada Twist Scientist series.
• Rebecca promotes the use of the Padlet app and the FreshGrade program which both allow the uploading of videos, voice recordings, images, and text. It is a useful tool for student work to be documented in a way that both the teacher and parents can see.
• The toys in her classroom were beautiful and she got them at thrift stores, garage sales, Tidal Toys, and Dilly Dally Toys (Grapat, Grimms). She said she bought them all with her own money over the course of teaching for nine years. One thing that may not be realistic for us when we are new teachers is to have a stunning set up with beautiful toys and chairs and tables like this if we are not willing to spend a lot of money in one go.
  

  Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

• Finally, Rebecca emphasized that you must instill a love of reading in your students while they are at school because they may not always be read to at home, they may get lots of screen time instead. She went on to maintain that technology/screen time at school can be supplementary to effective learning but it needs to be purposeful.

Hello everyone! Today in EDCI 336, we discussed many educational theories surrounding memory such as multimedia learning theory, dual coding theory, and sketchnoting.

Multimedia Learning Theory discusses how when you teach with text and images together, that enhances a student’s learning a lot more than just with text or images alone.

Dual Coding Theory is where you “anchor” an image and talk about what is related to it: this technique moves ideas from short term memory to long term memory more effectively.

Sketchnoting is using the technique that uses the idea that text and visual representations help anchor things in memory with drawing rich visual representations of notes.

Photo by Jerry Wang on Unsplash

There are many educational videos we may wish to use as teachers such as TeacherTube, Khan Academy, and YouTube. The following are pros and cons of using these kind of videos in the classroom:

• Pros = visual representation of a subject, if you’re not strong at teaching a particular subject you can use it to supplement it, different way of teaching, something the students can come back to if they need more help another day, option to slow down and speed up the lesson
• Cons = sometimes students don’t watch them or tune them out, can’t regulate what advertisements may pop up before the videos, videos aren’t always completely on topic

Flipping The Classroom

• putting key ideas of the lesson in a video before class for students to watch so they are prepared
• pros:  extra knowledge and students have a background in the subject when you teach it for the first time
• cons: some people won’t do it and won’t be prepared

Educational Resources:

When should I make a new one myself?

• if you know your students and know there is a certain way they learn best (make it for them)
• local and unique things without resources – make it yourself!! indigenous localized learning vs math concepts

How should I evaluate a resource?

• try it out a couple of times, experiment that it will work with that age group
• need to have time to make them though!
• check if its a trustworthy source

Today we also used Screencastify, a helpful app for screen recording. I like how this app allows you to mark up the screen and also be in a video in the corner of the screen recording. One setback of this google chrome extension was that it lagged, thus making my screen recording video choppy. All in all, today’s lesson provided me with a lot of insight into teaching materials and teaching styles that best promote memory and attention of students.