Category: Weekly Reflections

What’s a screencast?

Is it a screen recording?

Or maybe a video screen capture?

They are all the same!!

These words referred to a digital recording of computer screen output. (Definitions from Oxford Languages)

In a classroom setting, this can be very helpful because we can record the learning materials, and provide the video to the students to learn at a later time.

During this class, we learned to use the program “Screencastify” which allows us to capture what we do!

Gaming VS Education

Can these two go together?

YES   OR   NO

Many people have different opinions regarding this topic to the point that we can have a long debate about this!  But this post is not about the debate, so I will just say right here that I personally believe that gaming and education can go together.

Because that’s called an educational game!

Today, we had the opportunity to experience the multiplayer educational game using Minecraft.  Originally, the game Minecraft is created for leisure purposes. The game has no required goals to accomplish and therefore players can design their own goals in the game to suit their needs. Because players have the freedom to control how they want to play this game, the game can be used for educational purposes. Minecraft became really popular and eventually the Minecraft: Education Edition was created to better support their users including the classroom teachers.

Minecraft VS Minecraft: Education Edition

According to Minecraft’s help page, the main differences between these two versions are:

• Camera and Portfolio
• Chalkboards
• Non-player characters (NPCs)

In the world of Minecraft Education Edition, the teachers can create fun and interactive lessons for their students through play. Some of the educational themes that we saw during class included Math,  The Human Body, and Bees. Our class decided to choose the “Bees” 

During the class, we played Minecraft as a multiple players mode, which was very interesting because it was the first time for many students to try out a Multiplayer game.  Our class had a great time interacting and communicating with each other in the Minecraft world…

If we can have fun with this game while we’re learning, the students can have fun while they’re learning as well!!

I learned so much today!! First of all, I appreciate the EdCamp as we were able to work collaboratively with the other cohort. While both of us are doing the PDP program, we didn’t have a lot of opportunities to work with one another. I think it’s a valuable experience to get to know more people who will eventually become our future colleagues.

At the very beginning, I was interested in the topic of the educational games. I think it’s very interesting that there were so many topics on the board, and how many of them are somehow related to one another. Unfortunately, the person who wanted to talk about educational games decided to join other group instead, so I ended up joining the nature classroom workshop. I learned so much about nature, plants, and fungi.

We talked about school gardens, wild plants, indigenous plants, and First Nations’ connection to land and nature, and most importantly, how we can cooperate with nature in the classroom! We discussed different non-profit organizations in Victoria. One of these is called “Vancouver Mycological Society” and they have great resources about mushrooms! (Yummm!) 🤤

Special thanks to Nisa and Elizabeth who lead the discussion smoothly!

Before proceeding with this first blog post, we expect you to consider your privacy preferences carefully and that you have considered the following options:

1. Do you want to be online vs. offline?
2. Do you want to use your name (or part thereof) vs. a pseudonym (e.g., West Coast Teacher)?
3. Do you want to have your blog public vs. private? (Note, you can set individual blog posts private or password protected or have an entire blog set to private)
4. Have you considered whether you are posting within or outside of Canada? This blog on opened.ca is hosted within Canada. That said, any public blog posts can have its content aggregated/curated onto social networks outside of Canada.

First tasks you might explore with your new blog:

• Go into its admin panel found by adding /wp-admin at the end of your blog’s URL
• Add new category or tags to organize your blog posts – found under “Posts” (but do not remove the pre-existing “EdTech” category or sub-categories, Free Inquiry and EdTech Inquiry). We have also pre-loaded the Teacher Education competencies as categories should you wish to use them to document your learning. If you would like to add more course categories, please do so (e.g., add EDCI 306A with no space for Music Ed, etc.)
• See if your blog posts are appearing on the course website (you must have the course categories assigned to a post first and have provided your instructor with your blog URL)
• Add pages
• Embed images or set featured images and embed video in blog posts and pages (can be your own media or that found on the internet, but consider free or creative commons licensed works)
• Under Appearance,
  • Select your preferred website theme and customize to your preferences (New title, etc.)
  • Customize menus & navigation
  • Use widgets to customize blog content and features
• Delete this starter post (or switch it to draft status if you want to keep for reference)

Do consider creating categories for each course that you take should you wish to document your learning (or from professional learning activities outside of formal courses). Keep note, however, that you may wish to use the course topic as the category as opposed to the course number as those outside of your program would not be familiar with the number (e.g., we use “EdTech” instead of “edci336).

Lastly, as always, be aware of the FIPPA as it relates to privacy and share only those names/images that you have consent to use or are otherwise public figures. When in doubt, ask us.

Please also review the resources from our course website for getting started with blogging:

• WordPress resources
• Using RSS feeds to read blog posts from your networks (e.g., Feedly)
• Privacy resources
• Copyright resources
• Finding images you can use