Minecraft is finally fixing its huge gender problem
Children play Minecraft at a Microsoft store in Bellevue, Wash. (David Ryder/Bloomberg News) When Pauline Stanley's 6-year-old daughter, Isabell, started playing Minecraft, she was excited to join her fellow first-grade players, who'd become obsessed with adventuring around the game's vast digital universe and building with Lego-like blocks. But there was one problem: In the boundlessly creative world of one of the most popular video games, the only character she could play was Steve, a bulky man with short, dark hair and a 5 o'clock shadow.
Basic PDF Tips Every Teacher Using Mac Should Know about
July 29, 2015 In an earlier post entitled ‘10 Mac Tips Every Teacher Should Know about’ we fleetingly touched on a quick hack on how to annotate your PDFs. We subsequently received few questions from teachers inquiring about PDF tips for Mac users so we decided to feature some of the basic yet overlooked things you can do with your PDFs on Mac. For any of these tips to work, make sure you open your PDF then click on ‘View’ in Mac’s menu bar and select ’Show markup toolbar’. 1 Add signature to PDFs You can easily sign PDFs using the sign feature in the mark-up toolbar.
MinecraftEdu Takes Hold in Schools
Illustrations by Peter & Maria Hoey Walking through a vast network of medieval streets and houses, it’s easy to get lost. Luckily, I can fly. So I can see that up ahead, a team is building a castle with parapets and a wide moat.
A Wonderful Free Tool for Creating Interactive eBooks for Your Class
August 2, 2015Kindle Textbook Creator is a free software application that allows you to easily convert your educational content saved in PDF format into Kindle books.These include textbooks, course notes, study guides and many more. Using Kindle Textbook Creator, you will be able to enhance the readability of your content with features such as audio, video, and image pop-ups. Once your eBook is ready, you can publish it through Kindle direct publishing and make it available for readers on different devices including fire tablets, iPad, Android tables and Mac and PC computers. Kindle Textbook Creator also includes a preview mode that shows authors which interactive features are supported on different devices.
Minecraft in Education
Minecraft in Education: 30 ideas for using Minecraft in the classroom It is well documented how using games in a classroom context can facilitate collaborative learning, promote problem solving and stimulate an engaging learning environment. One methodology that demonstrates all these elements is Game Based Learning.
Europe Code Week 2015 - Resources and guides
EU Code Week is a grass-root movement run by volunteers who promote coding in their countries as Code Week Ambassadors. Anyone – schools, teachers, libraries, code clubs, businesses, public authorities – can organise a #CodeEU event and add it to the codeweek.eu map. To make organising and running coding events easier, we have prepared different toolkits and selected some of the best lesson plans, guides and other resources. Presentations and toolkits
GETTING STARTED WITH MINECRAFTEDU
ISTE NETS - Digital Age Skills 1. Creativity and Innovation Students demonstrate creative thinking, construct knowledge, and develop innovative products and processes using technology. Apply existing knowledge to generate new ideas, products, or processes Create original works as a means of personal or group expression Use models and simulations to explore complex systems and issues Identify trends and forecast possibilities
Create Professionally Looking Posters for Your Class Using Lucidpress
May 21, 2015 A few months ago we posted here a list of some powerful web tools to use for creating educational flyers and posters. Today, we were reminded by Briton that the popular Lucidpress does provide a very good poster maker that teachers can use to create professionally looking posters for their class. Lucidpress poster maker is an easy to use web tool with a simple drag-and-drop interface that allows teachers to design beautiful posters and flyers to use in classroom. Besides the premium templates, Lucidpress maker provides a wide variety of inspirational templates to use with your posters. You have the flexibility to customize the size of your poster the way you want it. All of the poster templates in Lucidpress are set to 18” x 24”.
For the Hesitant Teacher: Leveraging the Power of Minecraft
If there’s any video game that has successfully made its way into the classroom, it’s Minecraft. There’s a small subset of teachers using all kinds of digital games in interesting ways, but the blockbuster hit Minecraft and its educational counterpart MinecraftEDU have reached much wider audiences. But getting started with MinecraftEDU can be intimidating for teachers who don’t consider themselves “gamers” and aren’t sure how to harness the engagement and excitement of Minecraft. Luckily, there’s a robust and global Minecraft teacher community to supply tips, support and even lesson plans. Teachers who already use Minecraft in the classroom love it because of the flexibility it offers — almost any subject can be taught with a little creativity.
