Wednesday, 31 October 2018

Collaborative 'Live Tweeting'

I have had another post brewing for a while now, and I had to put that on hold, because these last 4 (or 5 depending on your timezone) days something has happened that is well and truly worth sharing, discussing and I think, promoting.

It started with this tweet from Simon Baddely:
Which of course he then replied to, stepping out each key point along the path of creating this resource. OK, so it took much longer than 12 hours, and more people than just Simon, but the end result got released just a couple of hours ago. If you don't want to read any more, at least head over to https://www.crosspond.net/projects and check out "Pumpkin Town" and then come back and see my interpretation of the Twitter feed, and how I think this may be one of the greatest ways of sharing the work we do when creating lessons, I don't just mean Minecraft lessons either, but lessons in general!

Now to the debrief, if you want to see the whole Twitter 'stream' you can do that by heading here: https://twitter.com/SimBadd64/status/1056111477818621953 and viewing the replies. I am going to pick out a few, and embed them in here and talk about the value of the tweet, in terms of the narrative being created around the lesson plan, but also about how this is a key step in supporting others to follow.
These two tweets are key to setting the whole scene for the lesson. Starting with an idea, and then straight away going directly to outcomes sets the right stage for learning to be the focus of the world and lesson, rather than something 'tacked' on at the end of a pretty build.
Now we get into the nitty gritty of bringing a 'theoretical build' to life, in the quickest, easiest way possible. Creating that world, block by block would take months of work, Simon achieved it within minutes. The fact that Simon has shared the tools required at each step is so important in building the grounding for others to be able to do the same. It also sets Simon up as someone willing to share his knowledge, and if someone comes across this thread in 6 months time, and wants to know how he went from Tinkercad to MCEdit, clearly Simon knows how to do that, there is visual evidence right there, and since he has begun sharing, chances are he is going to respond to a query just as willingly. There is nothing more maddening then teachers having to re-invent the wheel, over and over again because the process hasn't been shared, or people don't know who to ask for help.
I have skipped quite a few tweets from Simon, and come back to the thread here, because I think it important to highlight that everything before now has been done 'outside' of Minecraft itself, using external tools. Minecraft, up to this point has been a 'testing' tool in terms of sizing and proportions. Not only that, he has shared the direct link to the village he used as the basis of the world. Given the limited nature of tweets, in terms of characters, I am glad that Simon took the time and made the effort to credit the person who made the build available.
This is where I think things get awfully interesting. Simon has used his expertise to generate the base world, and hands it off to his colleague, Ben Spieldenner, to take up the next stage of creating this 'immersive experience'. Clearly in this partnership, each member knows their own expertise, is willing to share and support the other, but also knows when to back off and let someone else do the work in terms of expediting the end result. I think that is an important thing to reflect on, how often do we try to 'do everything for everyone' maybe not really recognising their own strengths, and allowing them to take ownership of their portion of a project. Thinking in terms of students here, how often do we as teachers, 'dictate' the lessons, disregarding student strengths and opinions in the effort to reach our 'assessment outcomes' rather than student 'learning outcomes.'
Ben, as Simon did, takes the very important step of sharing where to get the resources to follow along. He cannot possibly list 'every step' in a tweet, but there is enough there to get someone started, and exploring at least. Again, Ben has set himself up as someone willing to share the exact process, so if others want to follow, they can either try using the information in the tweets, or by contacting Ben directly for support.
Ben continues to share each step, the resources used, and even says in a 'sideways' thread that he will happily share his base template for others to use!
2 days later Ben comes back, and talks about how the narrative is built into the world, the sequence of events and the importance of the learning over the visuals. Both are important to an immersive experience, but immersion without learning is a waste of teachers, and more importantly students time.
I am not skipping many of Ben's tweets, and that is no criticism of what Simon did, it is just this is where I think the importance of learning has been really captured. The outline showed was collaboratively created by both Ben and Simon, and the narrative it creates has been carefully designed to ensure that students have access to just enough information to make their inferences.
Time, the ever present ruler of us all, prevented Ben from achieving all the the visual adjustments he wanted, but there are many other things that a supportive lesson for teachers of all ability levels needs. The world, and visuals are but a part of the package required for teachers to effectively run this in their own classrooms.
Now the madness truly ensues, the crazy guys gave me access to the world, to initiate the spawn location mechanics... Sound fancy? Well, in reality, if we want this map to be usable by teachers, we need to make it as supportive as possible, which means all the game settings dialed in automatically when a student joins the world.
First issue with any 'student loaded' pre-created map with NPCs is WorldBuilder. If you load a world, you have WorldBuilder rights automatically, which means you can destroy NPCs with an accidental left click, and there is no easy way to get them back other than deleting the world and starting again, a massive time waster. So, first task is to remove WorldBuilder from anyone joining the world. What I really valued here was the ability to share, in context, exactly the commands, their purpose and I think that makes it easier for others to see, and use it themselves in future if they need to.
Next was to make sure students have the items they need to engage with and collect evidence from the narrative, and then take information out of the game for their writing piece. The camera, portfolio and book are all given automatically, making a teachers, and students for that matter, job much easier.
I don't want to 'blow my own trumpet' here, but I had an inkling of an idea I wanted to try out, it would have been amazing, but upon reflection, it was just unsuited to the purpose here, and far too risky in terms of 'ruining' the experience for those coming in. So, back to the 'tried and true' rather than the innovative right now. I think highlighting the idea that 'shiny and new' isn't always the most appropriate aligns with the idea that we should be using the best tool for the job, not just the latest.
With my 'job' complete, I hand it back to Ben and Simon for their next steps. Again, using the expertise of those in the community is, I think, a key step to moving the whole community forward. I really appreciate Ben and Simon giving me the opportunity to not only help get the map ready, but engage in the 'live tweeting' of the progress along the way. It really made me think about what steps I was taking, and which are the key steps to share along the way to support others in their endeavours.
I went to bed, and while I slept, Simon and Ben had been working madly to ensure the map worked as intended, threw it to another mentor, Trish Cloud, for their feedback and ideas about how to make the map better. Again, involving members of the community, gathering feedback, ideas and a different perspectives is something that I think makes this whole process shine!
And then, they released it. With a lesson plan, student resources, world download and assessment support. From an idea, to a fully supported lesson in 4 (or 5) days. Just in time for Halloween.
After that, another mentor Ben Kelly picked it up, excitedly, after watching the whole thing unfold on twitter and recorded a short intro. This brings to light the idea that we are a big community, the fact that people were excited to see the process unfold on Twitter is great, amazing in fact. So, why do we not share our processes more often?

Well, the 2 or so hours I spent 'live' tweeting, in terms of Minecraft work, would have probably been about half that time if I hadn't been tweeting it. So an hours worth of work in Minecraft, and an hours worth of thinking and sharing on Twitter. Was it worth it? For me, in this case, yes, not a doubt in my mind. Will it always be worth it? I honestly don't know, I think this whole thing has highlighted some really good tools, thoughts, ideas and resources, but is it sustainable? It is certainly not an 'every day' activity that is for sure.

Well, thanks, as always for reading, I needed to get that off my brain, and now that is done, I will go back to writing my other post. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to drop them in the comments below, or reach out to any of the mentors mentioned in this post on Twitter for their support if you want to access their expertise!
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Friday, 19 October 2018

A Week of Implementation

I started writing this post started a week ago, but the week has just keep rolling and I have so much to share, so be prepared for another long post!

I love it how kids can break a 'planned' map within minutes! Admittedly it was party due to my own stupidity, and it took less than 5 minutes to fix, but I love how 'exploratory' they are when they get into any new Minecraft world, and how hard it is to 'cater' for all of those explorations! It is a challenge I always relish when creating a map, and seeing it happen in a classroom, how much can I prevent students 'breaking' what I have created, not truly with the view to limiting their potential, but making it easier for the teachers to manage their classes in an environment where students are normally way more comfortable than the teacher.

So, that paragraph above is in relation to me having my first opportunity to go to a school here on Friday, and watch another teacher run one of my lessons in their classroom. I tried to stay as hands off, and 'observer' as possible, but it is really not very easy! I think that is something I really need to work on, I love team teaching and collaborating, but there are times where I need to step back and let things happen.

Not that there was anything terrible happening in the classroom, but since the students 'subverted' my map within the starting minutes, I did step in and 'fix' the map and get them back on track for the teacher I was working with. Other than that minor mishap, the lesson ran very smoothly and the teacher used the lesson plan effectively to get the students to reach the learning outcomes of activity 1 of the Contour Maps lesson. I am also sad to say that I really didn't stay hands off throughout the lesson, so that is really, really something I need to manage better, and now one of my personal goals is to be able to observe a lesson in Minecraft without stepping in!

Jump over the weekend to Monday, I am back at the same school as Friday, but this time working with a teacher who has never used Minecraft in the classroom before. We were running the same Contour Maps lesson as I was supposed to be 'hands of' and observing on the Friday, but this time I was facilitating.

The great thing, my map fix worked, and I found some other 'alterations' that I could make, these are not as 'game breaking' as the initial issues on Friday, but if I get a chance I will probably go and address these issues.

I left after class on Monday with the teacher willing to continue the activity herself, and seeing how valuable Minecraft was to not only teach that particular session, but how valuable it could be across other lessons, classes and ideas.

A bit of sleep later and it is Tuesday, and I say a bit of sleep because I think I only slept for a total about 4 or so hours! Got up at 4:30am, and headed off to Melbourne to run a 'next steps' training day with 20 or so teachers from around the state that had already attended the day 1 training. This was so much fun, to take teachers from having heard about Minecraft: Education Edition, through the program I have designed, to by the end of day 2 being able to see, plan and have a clear vision of how Minecraft was relevant to one of their upcoming lessons or topics.

Each and every teacher left that day with a lesson plan underway that would support them and their students back in the classroom. One teacher has already shared their proposed plan with me, and I have provided feedback. The conversations in the room were absolutely fantastic, most of the afternoon was advising the teachers whether what they 'wanted' to do was actually possible in Minecraft;

Q:"Can I make the water poisonous?"
A:"Sure you can, here is how, but we will worry about the full mechanics later, keep planning along that path."

Q:"Can I give students a set amount of 'money'?"
A:"Yep, there are plenty of ways to do that, we'll figure out the best way once your plan is complete."

Q:"Can we swap from creative mode to survival mode half way through a project and make sure that kids don't 'carry' anything through that change?"
A: "For sure, we can do that! The /clear command will work for that."

It really got me reflecting on what it takes to support a teacher from knowing about Minecraft, dabbling either on their own or with students, and then implementing it into a classroom for learning. It is an iterative process, and one that takes time, and commitment of course. I really liked that teachers had the opportunity, even though not all had taken it, to explore and use Minecraft with their students between the day 1 training and this follow up one.

Wednesday was a bit of a quieter day, I was pretty wrecked from the 14 hours of high energy the day before, but had a few meetings about projects going on and generally caught up on my paperwork and emails from the previous days. Although I did spend the afternoon working on resources to take into a school the following day where I spent the entire day teaching primary students about fractions using Minecraft.

There were three different classes, a year 3-6 started me off, and we managed get everyone logged in for the first time, got them comfortable with the controls on PC, introduced the camera and portfolio, before getting into the fractions learning objectives.

Following that I went into a F-1 class, same deal, got them all logged in, 3 adults in the room supporting this whole process and it went remarkably well. I should note here that I am qualified 'secondary' teacher, which means I am 'trained' to teach from year 7-12, but being in a primary classroom with younger kids is definitely fun (for shorter periods, I don't know how these teachers make it through a 10 week term with the energy levels required day in and day out!) and a challenge for my teaching skills.

We started kids exploring whether they could halve all kinds of numbers, or only some. Investigative exploration by building in Minecraft, and the kids were showing different ways of 'working it out' which was absolutely everything I had hoped they would do.

After that I headed into a 1-3 class and boy was my 'target' for the learning well and truly off!! It was a massive challenge to try and get my own 'headspace' into the right location to support these students in their fraction learning. I learnt a lot, and I mean a LOT, about the 'actual' levels of students working knowledge and ability, throughout the whole day, having not taught these year levels before.

After all the classes were finished and the kids had gone home for the day, we had a staff debrief about what was seen throughout the day, and what the next steps were. I am very pleased to say, each of the teachers I worked with said it was awesome, and they could see how they could use it moving forward, and they also each felt comfortable enough to get students demonstrating their understanding of mathematical concepts in Minecraft.

So another huge day, but another massive success, since my 'task' from the principal was the following: "The purpose of your visit should be to make staff comfortable enough to go to Minecraft to complement their current maths programs when required and be given enough confidence to know how to control the Minecraft environment."

And that brings us to today, where I have spent the day going through the feedback from teachers at the training on Tuesday, about what their experiences were between day 1 and 2, and what they got out of the day 2 training, and what they would like next to support them. I am in the process of working towards their requests and figuring out how I can support teachers going from the day 2 training, into what I have planned for the day 3, advanced workshop.

Alongside all of this at some stage this week, I have arranged, what I hope to be, a collaborative livestream event with teachers from around the globe to share their skills and expertise at 'lesson design' with respect to moving students around their Minecraft worlds during lessons. I know there are so many different ways of actually doing it, and a few that I regularly use that might support other teachers to more effectively manage large distances between build locations and I am hoping a few others will come along and share their ways, and we will have a nice overview/tutorial type stream which will be edited for YouTube as well for teachers to access.

This event will be happening on the 24th of October at 9:30pm local time for me, that is GMT+11, if you want to get involved, join the Minecraft Mentor Discord for the full details, if you just want to watch, head over to http://www.twitch.tv/eduelfie at the appointed time!

OK, 'wall-o-text' done, I really need to get better at taking pictures of student work when in classrooms, or teachers work when in trainings, but I am just too darn busy to remember it seems. Oh well, yet another 'something' for me to work on in the future! Thanks for reading, if you have any comments, or something great to share from your recent past, feel free to drop it in the comments below.
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