Minecraft in the Classroom

I tried to avoid showing any interest in Minecraft despite the fact my daughter and students seemed to be obsessed with it.  In the end I decided that rather than try to avoid it I would endeavor to harness it's 'educational' benefits (if indeed it had any).  Suffice to say that I am a convert,  and now regularly use it in my classroom.  The above is an example of how we used Minecraft to model the human digestive system.  Students worked in groups inside Minecraft, where they worked on creating the different parts of the digestive system.  There were very interesting conversations going on such as 'Can you please get out of my pancreas and work on the liver?'
In the above example, once they had finished their digestive system, they took a screen shot of it and imported into PicCollage where they then labelled it.  One of the great things about Minecraft is the 3D aspect, which you can't appreciate from these examples. Students could navigate through their digestive systems in a walk through of their creations.  Highly engaging and I can attest to the fact that they all had a thorough understanding of the different parts of the digestive system at the end of it!

Genius Hour

My Introductory Haiku deck...

Thanks to Chris Kesler  for the inspiration for the Haiku deck that I intend to use as an introduction to our Genius Hour this year.


You will be surprised.. - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Augmented Reality

   

Over the school holidays I intend to look into the use of Augmented Reality and the app Aurasma as an educational tool to enhance learning.

Here is a YouTube clip about its use in Education and another can be found here.

Here is a blogspot about Augmented Reality use.

Terms you should know:

Augmented reality: making something come to life

Aura: the magic thing that pops up when you hold your device over something. How to make an aura instructions.

Trigger image: the picture you want to make cooler that is just normal (probably something from your camera roll or in your photos)

Overlay: the thing you will apply on top of the trigger image (usually a video from your camera roll)

Aurasma: a free app to make augmented reality

(thanks to: Tomorrow Toolkit)

To incorporate a YouTube clip into your Aura as an 'Overlay' you need to first save it to your camera roll and to do this (after much investigation) download the app VDownload which quickly and easily converts clips that can then be saved into your camera roll. From here it is very easy to then choose the desired video as your 'overlay'. If stuck, watch this YouTube clip that explains how to do it. There may well be another way of doing this, please let me know!

Some ideas for using Auras are: 

• The front cover of books becoming the 'trigger' for a video of the movie trailer, book review, author interview etc.
• I'm working on making the picture on a t-shirt someone puts on, the trigger for a video about the digestive system (our Science topic this term)

Great ideas here for using AR and an excellent Pinterest Board with heaps of ideas.    

Posters made with PicCollage

PicCollage is one of my favourite apps to use in the classroom. It can be used in so many ways. Essentially it is a poster creating app. You can use your own photos or pictures from the web ( you can turn the web function off too which is handy). Text can be added and manipulated. Here are some of the ways I've used this app with 6year olds.

• Poster about school holidays that included photos of holiday and text recounting their holiday experiences
• Follow up reading activity, one group created a poster about Mount Everest with facts and pictures.
• As a maths homework task students had to photograph 3D shapes around their house and label them
• For science students created a healthy eating poster that had to include a healthy eating message and these were displayed around the school

I have found that students will create their own posters at home and email them to me. I recently had this Christmas themed one sent to me.

My latest app find is ThingLink. It is an app but also web based. You can sign up free as an educator and input your students without them needing their own email addresses. The app is easy to use and has so many possibilities. Links are created around a base image and these links may be images, text, video, audio. Here is an example one of my year 6 students created about Grace Kelly.

QR codes to support and differentiate reading activities

 Using this site to create QR codes www.visualead.com I was able individualise a simple comprehension activity to support a book one of my reading groups was reading. The QR code links to a website about Mount Everest, and asks the students to answer simple questions about the topic. The QR code is printed and taped to the back of the book so that students can scan it once they have read the book. 

QR codes in Science

We recorded our ideas about erosion using Croak.it! and then embedded them into QR codes and displayed them as part of our Science Fair display.  There are a number of QR code generators online that are free to use. I use:qrstuff.com or Kaywa.com