My Best Work

My best piece of work for CEP 813 was my Minecraft assignment. Using Minecraft as an assessment tool was one of my biggest challenges, and also my biggest learning experience throughout  the class. I never saw how a game that my students play consistently could be turned into a classroom assignment that they can build worlds in and be assessed upon.

I began the week on the assignment having difficulty loading the software onto my computer. Though I have loaded many things onto my computer, the new windows program lead to learning how to reinstall the video option, microphone, and even speakers back onto my computer.Although that was not my only learning experience, it was one that happened that week.

When it came down to the assignment, I had never played Minecraft before. My students talk about it all the time and had even shown me books about how to play the game, but I never truly understood. In the assignment, we were required to build our own world and give assignments throughout the world. My biggest problem with this, is that I teach kindergarten and most of my students cannot read on their own and a lot of them do not always have the help at home that would be necessary for them to complete the assignments. I have to think out of the box about the basic things that they are able to do. When it comes to building, I know that my students are capable of doing so in Minecraft because they are the ones who showed me what to do. I wanted to make the signs with simple instructions, so that if the student had a sibling to help, they would be able to do so.

I liked that for our part in the assignment, we were able to create a screen cast. I was able to explain why I chose certain aspects, and show areas of my project on my own terms. I felt confident in being able to show what I was doing and explain it at the same time. I believe that some students would really enjoy being able to give a screen cast because they are always wanting to show what they are working on and what they are doing. I have never knew that using a screen cast software would be so easy.

The lessons I could take from this assignment is that there are times that you can meet your students in activities and pull out ways to assess them. For students, I can really see the passion in them with working on something that they love and being allowed to do so because it is for school. I also learned that technology is not always a friend, and although things should be easy to install, that is not always the case. Lastly, I learned that while I always thought that screen casts were complicated and a lot of work, I found out that they are actually quite simple to do, and very beneficial for students to show what they are working on.