Today in class we covered two topics, Minecraft and EdCamp. We started off with a few guests from Colquitz Middle School, Heidi James and her team of four students. They taught us about Minecraft and how it can be used in the classroom. They showed us the Edu version of the game, which I did not know existed. Minecraft is an interesting tool to help students learn and create in a safe environment. I am not sure if Minecraft is something that I would utilize in my class as a requirement for an assignment, but I would be very open to letting the student use this as a self-chosen medium for an assignment,

For the last part of the class, we discussed EdCamp. EdCamp is an event hosted where a variety of people can come and share their knowledge about different topics and learn about topics that interest them. There are topics posted and the participants vote on the topics that they would like to sit in on. Participants are allowed to go from topic to topic whenever they please and it is not seen as rude. In class today we did a mini-EdCamp. It was quite interesting to listen to my peer’s views on topics, so I can only imagine what it would be like to hear other people’s thoughts that are from all over and have an even wider variety of experiences and insights.

Competencies covered: distributed learning, learning design, gaming.

Photo by Nina PhotoLab on Unsplash