Minecraft is beloved by students and even adults! When you are looking for ways to increase student engagement and bring relevant contexts into student learning look no further than Minecraft Education Edition. No matter your devices, including Chromebooks, you can probably utilize Minecraft Education Edition on them with your students. You can start teaching with Minecraft.
Minecraft Education Edition is engaging for grades Pre-K to 12th grade
Free Webinar
Join me Thursday, June 9th at 3pm EST for a free webinar on how to get started with Minecraft Education Edition. This webinar is with OTIS. You will need to first create a free account. Sign up for this getting started webinar as well as the other Minecraft webinars in the series. Can’t make the live session? Registering will gain you access to the recording afterward. Note: the recording takes about a week to become available.
Student Engagement
Students actively engaged in their learning is more effective. Minecraft Education Edition allows students to interact with a virtual world to explore concepts and demonstrate their learning in a meaningful way.
The 4 C’s
Minecraft Education Edition hits all four of the C’s of 21st century learning.
Collaboration
Have students explore and learn in a world by themselves or allow students to join worlds together to create a collaborative interactive learning experience.
Creativity
If you are looking to add more student creativity to your lessons Minecraft Education Edition is the answer. Students build and create in creative ways that is sure to impress you!
Communicate Ideas
Students can screen record to explain their learning in Minecraft or use the built-in portfolio builder to communicate what they have learned. Flipgrid is also a powerful tool for communicating what students have learned in Minecraft and also allows for feedback and discussion around it.
Critical Thinking
Solving challenges and figuring out how to demonstrate learning in Minecraft allows students to engage in higher critical thinking tasks.
Start Teaching with Minecraft
Your school will need free Microsoft accounts for the students to access Minecraft Education Edition. While not free, Minecraft Education Edition is an inexpensive way to increase student engagement and learning.
Install Minecraft on Student Devices
Minecraft is NOT web based. It will need to be installed on student devices, including Chromebooks.
Explore the Minecraft for Education Website
The best place to start is to check out the free resources and community forum on the website.
Allow Students to Create
Your students probably already know how to use Minecraft. You may not be familiar with how to use Minecraft. That is okay!! You can easily get started by allowing your students to create things in Minecraft and submit their work via a screen recording.
Create a Basic Lesson
You can create activities in Minecraft and export the Minecraft world. Students will download the file and open it up on their device. You do not need to be fancy with your activity. Simply place down some chalkboards and/or NPC’s (Non player characters) with directions and allow students to create and build within Minecraft.
Alice Keeler Minecraft Videos on YouTube
Coding with Minecraft
Another benefit to using Minecraft Education Edition is the built in coding editor. This is a great way to introduce students to block coding and the principles of computer science.
