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. "Only having boys is telling everybody this is a boy game only," said Isabell, who knew girls in her class who had quit playing the game. It's a shortcoming that has long plagued the Minecraft franchise, which Microsoft bought last year for $2.5 billion after it sold more than 50 million copies and become a massively popular children's game and in-class teaching tool. [What is Minecraft and why did Microsoft just spend $2.5 billion on it?]
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. 2- Add notes and sketches to PDFs To add a note to a PDF document, click on the note icon as shown in the screenshot below and start typing in the displayed text box. The same with sketches, click on the pen icon to start sketching . 3- Add text to PDFs Similar to the notes feature mentioned above, you can add your own text to a PDF document by simply clicking on text icon.
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.
Mathematics and graphic organisers Doris Lessing once said, “Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.” My wife and I experienced what Lessing described through a process with our third-grade girls as they were struggling with a multiplication math standard (3.OA.4). The girls were getting stuck in a couple of areas regarding the standard, and were developing negative feelings about math and about themselves as mathematicians. We felt some urgency to try something new, and the new thing we tried had to be engaging and fun, and provide ways for the girls to again see themselves as mathematicians. Lesson 1: A Numberless Word Problem Although the girls weren’t interested in learning the standard, I knew that if I found the right problem, I could pique their interest. Molly the zookeeper has 24 bananas to feed the monkeys. Molly is a zookeeper. Once the girls had written their questions, I asked them to share with each other.
10 Mac Tips Every Teacher Should Know about July 9, 2015 Mac is an incredible piece of gadgetry and an ideal companion for teachers. It has tons of features and functionalities that can make your digital life way easier and more productive. To help you make the best of your Mac, we are sharing with you 10 essential and probably basic tips. Check out the resources at the end of this post for more advanced tips. 1- Take A Screenshot Skitch is an excellent app to use with your Mac for taking screenshots and annotating them. 2- Type special characters There are tons of special characters integrated in you Mac OS X and which you can easily insert in your documents and posts. 3- Annotate PDFs You don’t need to install any third party apps to annotate your PDFs, Mac’s PDF reader can do it all for you and here is how to do it. A tool bar will show up in your PDF to help you annotate, comment, draw, add lines and shapes on your PDF. 4- Sign documents You can also insert your signature into PDFs on your Mac. 8- Parental Control
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. I’m in Minecraft, of course—the phenomenally popular, open-ended game that places players in a world in which they can live and build things infinitely. There aren’t any express objectives or any real way to win in Minecraft. MinecraftEdu Minecraft’s worlds and possibilities are truly endless—and increasingly, so are its educational adaptations for school use. “Minecraft is like LEGOs on steroids,” says Eric Sheninger, a senior fellow at the International Center for Leadership in Education. These days, MinecraftEdu is the premiere source of educational resources for the game. Prebuilt worlds expose students to places like the Forbidden City of the Ming Dynasty and Virginia’s Jamestown Settlement. Costs Embedding the Common Core Five Outstanding Worlds Mods
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 Local resources in your language Coding lessons for beginners of all ages Scratch ode to code: Multilingual Scratch tutorial for Europe Code Week Codecademy: Learn to code interactively, for free, on the web. Coding for younger beginners Scratch: With Scratch, you can program your own interactive stories, games, and animations — and share your creations with others in the online community. Full online courses for advanced learners edX: EdX offers interactive online classes and MOOCs from the world’s best universities.
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”. The free Lucidpress plan offers only 25MB of storage space and few other features, basic and pro plans have more advanced features and a storage capacity that goes up to 5 GB. Watch the short video below to learn more about Lucidpmess.
marketing analytics Archives | Eduvantis | Higher Education Consulting FirmEduvantis | Higher Education Consulting Firm A 2011 McKinsey and Company Big Data report estimated that over the next decade there would be a shortage of between 140,000 – 190,000 analytics professionals in the United States. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says the demand for business analytics specialists is expected to reach 1.5 million by 2018. Not surprisingly, we’ve seen the growth of programs designed to exploit this demand. By our count, in the past three years there have been more than fifteen new master’s level degree programs centered on data analytics launched in North America. But what is actually going on? It’s too early to answer the deeper questions behind our inquiry: What model works best for recruiting students and why? We’ll be answering these questions as we continue our ongoing efforts to understand innovation and how market advantage is achieved in management education, but for now here are some interesting observations. Some of the data analytics programs offered at business schools include: MS in Analytics