Week Four

I found another Minecraft and education article on line: http://national.deseretnews.com/article/1498/Could-Minecraft-help-kids-get-smarter.html
I thought this was an interesting article because it really looked at the game from all sides, pros, cons, at school, at home, as a game, as an educational tool and others. In the end though it is like most other technology, it is what you make of it. I can see some of the down side with children wanting to spend excessive amounts of time with the game, I have fallen victim to that as well. But whenever we stumble upon a tool that will give students creative educational opportunities as well as motivate them to spend the time on task it is worth exploring. One of the links this article shares is to the site MinecraftEdu.com. This is a site that has been created for helping people use Minecraft with students for educational purposes. This site not only gets educators in contact with Minecraft resources but helps them get up and running with hands-on tutorials and real classroom projects. There is also a forum where educators have shared projects done by students. This is also the site where you can purchase Minecraft for schools at a substantial discount. I have designed my final project for the iPad class around Minecraft and think that I have come up with an interesting way for students to use this game to learn about Egypt and the pyramids. After looking at some of the projects on the website I could see where this could be used to create things for many different types of units. I have seen examples of both student created and teacher created environments. The on-line elements of this software make sharing projects and exploring what others have done very easy. Unlike other projects where we can only look with Minecraft others can actually come inside the world we have created and wander around.