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"Since its release in 2009, Minecraft has sold millions of copies worldwide revolutionizing thus the gaming industry and providing game players with an endless world of possibilities. As a sandbox construction game, Minecraft has successfully and distinctively set itself from the crowd by incorporating the ethos of 21st century learning that include: creativity, challenge, problem solving, and strategic thinking all of which are adeptly adapted to the player's little gaming world. Minecraft provided players with the tools and resources to construct their own gaming reality and test their creative possibilities. In a relatively short time, Minecraft succeeded in marking a strong presence within the education sector  and became one of the leading educational learning platforms for students. As a culmination of its sweeping popularity among the educational community, Minecraft recently released  Minecraft for Education which is a website geared primarily towards providing teachers with a forum where they can share their ideas about how they use Minecraft in their teaching. Given this growing potential of Minecraft in education, we decided to compile the list  below featuring some of the best reads on Minecraft. These books will help you learn more about how educators are using Minecraft as a powerful instructional tool to engage students and teach different subjects."

"In my opinion, when starting something new, it's better to have more than less, and it's better to think more than less.  But I will say, now that I'm on the other side, I invite you to learn from my anxiety if you, in fact, decide to create a time for making in your classroom this year.  Try these four tips for preparing for your first maker class:"

"Several summers ago, I wrote 10 Ideas for Creating Literacy Centers in response to a request from a Summer Workshop participant. Over the past few weeks, this post has been re-circulated on Social Media, so I decided that it needed an update. My original post was inspired by Suzy Brooks' use of her SMART Board as a learning center. For this update, I would like to credit the fantastic work of Kristen Wideen and Meghan Zigmond. While many of the concepts from the original post are certainly still applicable, here are 10 new ideas for creating learning centers."

"MathGames provides 1200 different ways to practice math, ranging from Pre-K all the way to the 8th grade. Parents and Teachers get instant feedback on their students progress and can decide which method is best used to reach their students - interactive questions or fun games powered by the very same content. Whatever works best to keep students engaged and focused on practicing math."

"For the past couple of weeks, I have been preparing to teach a summer school/camp on maker education (see http://www.makereducation.com/summer-camp-schedule.html). As part of my preparation, I decided compose a list of promises to my learners as a maker educator."

"So, you've got an iPad and it's starting to get a little slow on you. Stop me if this sound familiar- first, you do your best to free up as much storage space as you can muster by deleting old, unused apps. Next, you decide to offload your photo library and data to iCloud, or whatever other preferred cloud service you choose. Still not enough? While these are very intuitive, and useful steps, there are still a few additional methods available to you to bring your iPad back to life and make it feel like it's a newer device once again. In no particular order…"

"After intense reflection, I have decided it is time to change the outlook of staff meetings. I want them to be positive, collaborative learning communities, where ideas are shared and staff walks away energized. I want my staff to look forward to coming together, not dreading the topic or the format. So, the staff meeting focus is now one of instruction, professional learning and sharing, and conversation, centered around topics to help move our school to the next level. As a lead learner in my building, it is important for me to facilitate the meeting, offering opportunities for discussion and idea-sharing."

"I've always found a sense of peace in the creative process. It's a time when I feel like I don't have to stick with the rules in place for all the different parts of my life. That freedom helps me come up with some of my most creative ideas and exciting projects. This has been true my entire life. When I entered the classroom, I wanted to give my students as many chances as possible to be creative. Over the years, I've seen amazing projects from students who dared to take creative chances. Until very recently, I thought these creative opportunities were the best way to engage kids in this process. It wasn't until I dove into the maker movement that I realized how much more is possible. I always come up with some big projects for my own students, but what about the rest of the building? I'd never been supported in larger school or district ideas, but this past year was different. With the support and challenge to do something for students outside of my classroom, I decided to go for it. After talking with some friends and our amazing media specialist, a makerspace in the library made the most sense. Here are some tips and tricks for putting together a makerspace in your school, and some thoughts on how it can be beneficial to your students."

From M. Wesch - "presented at the Library of Congress, June 23rd 2008. This was tons of fun to present. I decided to forgo the PowerPoint and instead worked with students to prepare over 40 minutes of video for the 55 minute presentation. This is the result." more info: http://mediatedcultures.net

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"Many obstacles that iPad cynics attempt to put in place when discussing a roll-out are based on untruths, poorly research and/or out-of-date information. I was delighted when my Canadian Twitter friend and fellow iPad blogger, Steve Lai decided to join forces, as we've done before, to combat this dis-information that floats around the education profession worldwide."

"Earlier today Shannon Miller Tweeted about a free drawing tool called Sketch Toy. Students do not have to register to use Sketch Toy and they can download all of their drawings to use in other projects. After trying Sketch Toy I decided to revisit some other drawing tools that do not require students to register in order to create and download drawings. "

"Growing up in the 80's meant reading loads of "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. They were fun, and a little scary, and you died pretty much every time, but they got lots of kids into books. Recently I decided to bring this idea off the page and into the 21st century by using Google Slides to create an online, interactive story. Often we think of Google Slides in terms of linear presentations, with one slide after another in order. However, Google Slides allows you to add hyperlinks to your presentation which can link to other slides within the presentation when clicked. This allows you to create a nonlinear slideshow, where the user can branch off to multiple different slides from any one slide. Linking to other slides can be used to create quizzes where each answer choice leads to a different slide to let you know if you got the correct answer. It can also be used to build an interactive "Choose Your Own Adventure" story where each slide offers choices that lead to different parts of the story. And so was born "Dragon Quest"!"

"Both the actively applied Camera filters and the later added Photos apps based color filtering in iOS can add some nice stylizing effects to pictures, helping to give them a unique look, but if you decide you're no longer wanting an image to be filtered through a crazy color lens, you can actually easily remove the filter from the picture and restore it to the original untouched version. "

"Yesterday was my last class with my 2nd grade GT students. I like them to do some sort of reflection at the end of the year, and we usually spend a lot of time reviewing the events of the past 9 months. (Otherwise, their favorite memory tends to be the very last thing we did.) This year, I decided to try something different. I showed the students how to access the categories of our class blog so they could view all of the posts for 2nd grade for this year. Then they went through the posts, and chose pictures that were meaningful to them. As they were on iPads, I taught them how to hold their finger on an image to save it to the Camera Roll (fair warning - this is a tricky skill for 2nd graders). After about 30 minutes, I showed them the Pic Collage app. They were allowed to add any pictures that they wanted to their collages. Many added text (and stickers, of course!) They loved the activity. When they were finished, each student had a personal poster to remind him or her of the year in GT. If we had more time, we would have made ThingLinks with reflections, similar to last year."

"When asked, "What is the most challenging part of writing an essay?" Most of my students agree, "It's just getting started that's hard." I remember feeling this same way as a student. The blank page was daunting. So, I decided to try a new strategy. The first stage of our formal essay on Shakespeare's play, Othello, was a prewriting activity designed to tap into the collective potential of the class. I wanted students working together to generate ideas and collect textual evidence."

"Wikipedia is one of the most famous sites on the Internet. The world's favorite encyclopedia made a humble beginning in 2001. Today, it's informative, as well as controversial, and having a page there is highly sought after. It's quite simply the Encyclopedia Britannica on steroids, covering every conceivable subject. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia in which anybody can start a page, or edit one, on any subject. The page is then examined by an editor who decides whether or not the page stays. The site is currently available in many languages, so you don't have to speak English to use the site. It is one of the most frequently accessed sites - normally when you search for something on Google, the Wikipedia page is quite often the first page in the search results. With that, let's dive into the crowdsourced wonder of Wikipedia and start exploring many of its wondrous facets…"

"Blended learning uses both in-person and online methods to teach students, and there are several different models for implementing it in the classroom. These resources explain the basics of blended learning, but they also dig deeper and can help you decide which approach may be best for your students."

"Last weekend I published a chart comparing 9 popular student response systems. That chart seems to be popular so I decided to create a similar one about tools for creating mind maps. That chart is embedded below as a PDF"