How to Get Started – Teaching With Minecraft Education

Okay everybody and welcome back to learn with  minecraft education today we are looking at how   to get started on minecraft as a teacher so  let’s assume you’ve downloaded the software   all your students know how to log in what do  we do first well i asked the entire learn with  

Minecraft education community over on our facebook  page and i’ve got lots of really great pieces of   advice for some real teachers to get started with  teaching with minecraft now the first thing we   need to understand is that minecraft is a very  broad educational tool it’s not purely a way  

To teach coding with linear development  from lesson one to lesson 100   is designed in a way that educators are able to  select from a wide range of topics and challenges   to teach however they like also teachers can  create their own resources and challenges  

Tailor-made for their students so we’re  going to begin by making the assumption   that you are a computing or ict teacher and  we’re going to move forward from there the   first thing we’re going to look at today  is the minecraft education official website  

So we’re going to click class resources we’re  going to click get trained and we’re going to go   down to learn to play over here now one of  the really good things that the website offers   is you can go down and you can do the teachers  academy which walks you through from the very  

Very basics of walking around in minecraft  planning a lesson exporting worlds getting   your students locked on and so on and they’re  super useful so play through these and   you’ll pick up all the skills you need now  the first kind of tutorials i would look at  

Is i’m going to view library click how to play and  click start here and here we’ve got a nice set of   introductory tutorials that will give you all the  and your students all the basic skills they need  

Moving around in minecraft and doing some of the  basic things that they need to do for the lessons   okay right the next thing we’re going to look  at is the make code and tinker tutorial so if  

You start a new world uh in creative mode with  code builder turned on you press c you can load   up a menu to select microsoft make code and here  you can see we’ve got a whole raft of tutorials   that are designed in a way to  really encourage the students  

To join in so we’ve got cool things like lava  towers and spleef games and sandstorms and so on   and you can walk through those tutorials and learn  a lot about coding and if we go back here you go  

To tinker i think it’s a similar thing it’s drag  and drop coding um but there’s some more really   cool tutorials here we’ve got path of petals and  another spleef game and tnt cannons and we’ve   also got some agent trials that are a little bit  longer and it’s all about moving your agent around  

And uh coding like so now next is the hour of code  so from the home screen here we click hour of code   now these are great because they are hour long  lessons of course that teach coding but there’s  

A little bit of an extra twist on there so  it might be bringing two villages together   or putting out brush fires and so on and  they’ve also got the lessons plans included   in the coding solutions which is nice now next  coding fundamentals so let’s go to our library  

Lessons let’s go to computer science and go to  block based coding and you can see we’ve got some   really nice coding fundamental slightly longer  lessons are a little bit more in depth as they go   deeper into that into the coding that we can  do now the next big thing really is explore the  

Library okay so for each of these lessons you’ll  find lesson plans educators guide but it really is   at this point when you’ve learned the basic skills  with your students it really is a case of using   your skills as a teacher and finding resources  that are right for your class and at the right  

Point to insert them into the curriculum there’s  so many good resources on here you just need to   go through them try them out and find ones  that you think are going to work really well  

And at what point in the year and at what stage of  their um learning is the right time to use these   so definitely try them all out and work with  your students working through them to try and  

Hit certain skills okay so the next big thing  is get online there’s a massive community around   minecraft education who are there to help you okay  so join a facebook group subscribe to some youtube   channels there’s loads of really good resources  out there that will teach you all about coming up  

With new lessons and ideas and implementing those  in the classroom and they’re all well worth a look   so do check those out all right so next we’re  going to look at creating your own lessons now   no one knows your students better than you  okay so after a while when you’re familiar with  

Minecraft education make some lessons it might  be on game design it might be doing an archery   range or a parkour level or you know making  a stopwatch or anything like that for games   but your students will enjoy going through that  process with you and will respond better to things  

That you’ve made and you’ll be able to teach them  better as well now the next thing is assessment in   minecraft education of the book and quill and the  camera so you can insert screenshots of your work  

You can put some notes underneath students can  write how they found it and they can export that   as a pdf and they can put in a shared drive  or email it to you or however you want to  

Submit assessment next thing is python okay  so once you’ve got a lot of the key skills   without block-based coding it’s time to move on  to python or javascript and there’s lots of really   good tutorials we’ve got python 101 which is a  linear series of 10 lessons that walk you through  

Coding with python and we’ve got the pirate  island as well also go back and do the hours of   code and the other fundamentally mental tutorials  using python as well next collaborate host worlds   get your students to join do building challenges  and get them working together to solve problems  

It’s a big selling point for minecraft education  and the students love joining each other’s worlds   and solving problems with each other right so as  you can see here there’s loads of stuff you can   be working on going through now the big big thing  that’s important to know about minecraft education  

Is you need to do some work when you come in  to find the resources go around the website go   online and plan out a curriculum for your students  it doesn’t completely hold their hand when they’re  

Going through a lot of the lessons you need  to have done the work first okay so you need   to go into minecraft education look at the lessons  play through the lessons make notes and decide how   you’re going to implement those okay now if you  enjoyed today’s video please do like and subscribe  

And i’ll be back later in the week with more  videos for you on minecraft education take care you