The Minecraft Teacher

MinecraftEdu 1.5.1 is now available!

After a long winter of bug fixing, polishing, and cramming in new features, we are delighted to announce that MinecraftEdu has been updated.  As always, MinecraftEdu customers can grab the latest version on our Members’ site.

You can see a detailed changelog on our wiki, but here are some of the biggest additions and improvements:

• Based on Minecraft 1.5.1 (we caught up, woo!)
• Support for most Forge mods (this is a big deal!)
• Improved in-game world controls
• Improved teacher’s ‘Give Menu’ to allow any item to be given, including those from mods
• More informative server displays
• Improved Mac support
• Updated WorldEdit functionality
• Ability to automatically upgrade or downgrade (we also changed our version number system to make things more clear)
• Lots of polish including tool-tips, new icons, and more!
• Support for Online World Templates (still experimental)

We’d like to talk about that last item for a moment.  One of our dreams for MinecraftEdu has always been to allow the seamless sharing of educational Minecraft worlds.  That dream is one step closer to reality with Online World Templates.  

The idea is that anyone can make a world/lesson/activity, augment the content with custom MinecraftEdu features, and then share it with teachers everywhere.  Teachers can browse what’s available, download a world, and get a server running with that content in just a few clicks.  This basic functionality is now working!

We still have a long way to go, and we haven’t made much content available yet… but we didn’t want to keep this feature to ourselves.  We think Online World Templates will be an indispensable feature of MinecraftEdu and we can’t wait to hear your feedback!

~Joel

Off to Paris… and some “thanks”.

My blog has been sorely neglected for far too long.  I do apologize.  But I thought I’d dash out a quick note to reflect on a few things.  And perhaps give thanks as us Americans are prone to do on certain Thursdays in November.

I’ve just come from my parents’ house where I enjoyed a delicious Thanksgiving dinner with my family.  I’m now sitting at Liberty International Airport in Newark, New Jersey waiting for a flight to Paris, France…  my first trip to Europe!

I am, of course, headed to Minecon, the second annual convention for the Minecraft community.  I’m going to be participating in two panels.  For the first, I’ll be moderating a discussion with other educators about using Minecraft with children.  And for the second, the entire MinecraftEdu team will be joining me on stage to talk about the creation of our mod and the ways it is being used worldwide.

If you’re going to be at Minecon, make sure to find me and say hi!

It still makes my head spin to think about all the changes in my life and opportunities that have come my way over the past two years.  All because I decided to try this crazy new game that was still in Alpha with my students.

I am thankful for the many supporters who have sent me words of encouragement or helped to promote my work.  I’m thankful for the dozens of other teachers that have shared their classroom experiences with me, offered inspiration, discussed intricacies, and shared pedagogical ideas.  I am thankful for Mojang’s continued support and guidance, and for the awesome MinecraftEdu team who have been on this roller coaster with me.  And I am thankful for my students and their crazy, passionate, innocent energy that reminds me every day why it’s so important to advocate for new ways to teach and to make school relevant, engaging, and meaningful to today’s children.

And, of course, I am overwhelmingly thankful to my family, friends, and colleagues whose support means everything to me.

Watch my panel

UPDATE: You can now watch my entire panel discussion (and the rest of the conference) right here: http://events.theatlantic.com/technologies-education/2012/

 (direct video link)

ORIGINAL:

I’ll be appearing at the Atlantic Technologies in Education Forum in Washington D.C. on Tuesday.  I’m taking part in what looks to be a really interesting panel on the roll teachers play in game-based learning.  My panel starts at 10:25.

It looks like you’ll be able to watch it live here.

Some other nice things recently.  MineShift/KQED recently did an article on MinecraftEdu that was great.  Lots of really nice quotes, like this:

Though Coia’s school was willing to pay for the game, he says he would have gone for it anyway. “Looking back, I would have paid it out of pocket if I needed to,” he said. “It’s that good.”

• MindShift - Teachers Transform Commercial Game for Classroom Use

Also fun… my work was recently talked about on the CBC, Canadian Public Radio.

This has a special personal meaning for me…  Although I’m from New York City, I spent a lot of time in Nova Scotia, Canada growing up.  The CBC was always on and it’s really my idea of a perfect radio station.  So I’m delighted to have reached those particular Canadia airwaves!

• CBC Airplay - Exploring the World of Minecraft

Gaming teacher case studies

Recently, I had the privilege of being interviewed by Jessica Millstone a filmmaker and researcher working with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center.  She, along the good folks at BrainPOP such as Allisyn Levy pioneered a groundbreaking study into teacher attitudes towards gaming.  They’ve just made public their survey results and it’s a fascinating read.  Lots of confirmation that we gaming teachers are really on to something!

Read this announcement to learn more and access the full results of the survey.

As a core part of the study, they are also presenting case studies of various teachers using games in their classrooms.  I am honored to be in the first round of case studies!

They edited together this fantastic video which I’m delighted to share:

There are two more inspiring videos that were released along with mine, that you should also totally go watch.

MinecraftEdu collaborative server project for teachers

The talented and handsome @warrenbez has taken the initiative to start a great server project for teachers using MinecraftEdu.  I’ll let him explain:

I am setting up a MinecraftEDU server that can be accessed by any teacher. The hope is to have teachers collaborate and create a Minecraft unit that can then be made available for download. I think that having teachers collaborate on a particular unit will yield a better product than if any one teacher attempted this on their own. So, my initial idea is to create a Unit or Lesson based on the architecture and history of Ancient Rome. The idea came to me after finding this map available for download. The map has several identifiable Roman structures that could be used in a lesson about Roman architecture. My hope is that teachers will jump in and start adding assignments.

There’s more information and instructions for how to jump in and get started here on Warren’s blog.  Personally, I think this is a fantastic idea.  I’ve been hoping to do something like this, myself, for a while.  But kudos to Warren for getting the ball rolling.

Hmm. Maybe I’ll log in and build some columns…