Microsoft Showcase and Minecraft Education Edition 6-8 Week Resource

As part of a Microsoft School Showcase on Minecraft, I thought I would compliment this visit, the hard work the Microsoft team put into producing the video with a resources share for teachers who wish to use my planning pack.

The pack is here. Inside you will find a 6-9 week pack containing:

  1. 3D Models of the items in the world. The musical notes especially.

  2. Student PowerPoints (Google Slides), PNG, PDF versions and the editable InDesign files too.

  3. Game Cards for each lesson outlining Learning Intentions and Success Criteria for students to be successful collaborators.

  4. All worlds and an all-in-one world based on Litcraft’s Treasure Island map from Lancashire University

  5. Teacher Guide for each lesson including all text for sign posts, blackboards and posters in Docx and PDF (below)

  6. Quest clues in picture format for student support as well as the walkthrough-type videos below.

  7. Image pack for further class resources.

This article is a free resource for teachers to use based on the story ‘The Princess Blankets’ by Carol Ann Duffy. Although, you could easily make this up yourself based on the information in the teacher pack. The story and outline is flexible enough to play without the book as there is a quest book in every Game with a score system that can be edited to suit the class/ school.

So what is the main thrust of this series? To enhance teamwork to a very high standard in Year 6 children and to get there through a series of collaborative challeneges and enventually produce a collaborative digital product. In this case, a musical rendition of a nurdery rhyme (or any familar tune) with the Noteblocks in Minecraft. See this example of lesson 1-2 the introduction game card.

Minecraft Princess Blankets Game Cards.png

The game worlds are a weird and deliberately creative place with many side missions along the way.

Before you begin, you need to get a key. 

The key is a number. Normally, you would follow all games in the right order, such as: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. But the order for the game order is very different and you need to use Google to get the data from a strange image.

How can you image search for this toy trainset? All the numerical data you need to open the order of the games in our world is in the search results.

What is the order? Is it 54321? or 43152?

Initial Lesson Game Key reverse image search of toy train.jpg

As a team, once you have the correct order, write them into your game pages or on your table to take a photograph of.

How can we find the numbers out of this toy train?

Reverse image search in Googles drag and drop or use tineye.com and the students find the key to the number/ game sequence.

Why do this? The chilldren need a team plan and to work together to find the key and creates the mindset of discovery, search and collaborating on a simple search technique few wil have encountered. It also creates a barrier to entry thayt says ‘ you need to play like this to succeed’.


Below is a sample of a lesson game card for Game 1, Lesson 5.

Minecraft Princess Blankets Game Cards6.png
 

Lesson 1 Overview

An Introduction To Photoshop In the Primary School

resource.png

This is an introduction to Photoshop in 6 parts. The way tend to teach these sessions to create video clips that guide the kids to using and creating a basic model then allow them to build whatever they feel like making. In this instance a kind of movie/ album cover that has very basic composition.

Photoshop, as an introduction, is basically three things:

Selecting, Moving, and Blending.

You'll hear me talk about these three things and use similar words that mean one of these three areas. I might be cutting (selecting), layering (moving) and composing (blending). 

The great thing about Photoshop is that the kids know about something being ‘shopped or Photoshopping something. The other aspect is that this is the first time the kids really use a full-scale, professional application as it is for a creative studio in the real world. The knock-on here too is that the first view can be overwhelming to many. All the tools are presented straight way to you in the opposite way that an iPad app is presented to you. iPad apps are designed in such a way that fewer buttons have deeper menus. Just look at the desktop and the iOS versions of Affinity Photo down here.

affinity-photo-vs-photoshop_fix.jpg

1. Introduction. Opening Photoshop, dragging in an image and making your first selection.

1.1 Open Photoshop from your Apps Menu.

1.2 Download the Astronaut image with black background to somewhere like 'Downloads' folder.

1.3 Drag the image from the 'Downloads' folder into the Photoshop window and see what happens inside Photoshop.

How much do you know about how the web is built and where it travels?

What is compartmentalism in terms of web use? It’s where the user, for example, may have a Facebook account and they are heavy users too. This would mean she would now only be allowed to use Facebook in one tab in a single browser and only use it for that purpose. Line in another browser in single tab and so on.

So far this is what she has settled on being helpful, as well as moving all personal correspondence to TutaNota.com and NextCloud for storage - she uses Google Pixel. On her Macbook she uses two logins for work and personal splitting the possibility of a cross divide. For future use we are talking about virtual machines because once they are set up they are very easy to manage.

Her browser use in personal mode is Firefox with these extensions added:

While Nord may be not the most progressive and ProtonVPN is a better alternative we know this is the one to watch for future improvements. Also search is now DuckDuckGo with Firefox Focus on the Pixel as a search-only browser.

The upshot to this is that, yes, the convenience factor has gone out of the window and it’s high time to slow the user application down and adopt a more measured approach towards any Internet-connected device ( this includes your assistants, Wi-Fi speakers, health trackers and Ring door bells). Are there more things to think about? Sure, there are things to think about, but these things are how you connect to the internet and how every move you make is being monetised and collated into a huge piece of retail data points from heating your home to monitoring your heart.

And, if you are a teacher of a class of students who are on their way to technological independence on the web, then you have a duty to get on board with this knowledge of how your connections to the internet are not only fraught with attack but are making a model of you. Not sure how this is happening to you, then look at your infinite scrolling and double-taps on Instagram. Look at your daily routines on the web where your behaviour has changed because I bet you give out/ receive star ratings on the food you receive or the holidays you book through Air BnB, Uber, Grab, Food Panda.

It’s time as a teacher of young and inexperienced users of the web, to demonstrate to them that we all should take this a lot more seriously and be somewhat knowledgeable on what the web is actually made of. Moreover, the knowledge that our chemically made up behaviours have changed through likes, emoji, infinite scrolling and the hourly governance of notifications.

Just think, if your Apple watch buzzes and tells you to stand up and you do stand up, then what else can series of apps and connected devices make you do?

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Julian Opie 2020 remake - Adobe Illustrator →

Year 5 had recently begun using Photoshop on one of their projects (a remix of Paint.Net) and the next logical step would be to add a little bit of creativity to a ‘Cultures and Migration’ topic. So I set about looking at ways Adobe CC can be injected into the project. Julian Opie was on my mind and Illustrator too as this is his medium - as too the people who are in the images he creates (above) which fits the theme of ‘migration’. The other idea who uses an Illustrator-style of imagery is Patrick Caulfield who had his work displayed in the Tate during the late 1960s. Both, with a little bit a lateral thought applied, would lend themselves to cultures and migration.

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How Much Do Your Students Know About Search Manipulation?

Convenience is killing impartiality.

Search engines are your second gatekeepers to the internet right after your Internet service providers. This is specially true for Google, which enjoys 70-90% market share across the globe. If Google tweaks what and how results appear on the first page they change how a lot of people think about a lot of topics we continuously see in our news feeds. Google notoriously develops more and more of its own tools it then puts in front of organic search results. That obfuscate and mask what you could or should see natively.

Take an example from Google's automated response machine that tries to find a single answer to an increasingly wider scope of questions. One particular search for example:

“Is Google spying on me?”

There are multiple things wrong with this approach. One is factual the other, as mentioned, is masked. If you know anything about Google's privacy invasion you know this is a total fabrication and to the uninitiated it paints a delusion that there is no issue with privacy on Google because Google said they don't listen into people's conversations. The factual side of this is that on my Android phone the microphone picks up snippets of audio and retains them. Well, it did until I turned this ‘feature’ off in myaccount.google.com. The strange thing about this is that none of us know whether this snippet is the remains of a longer piece, the whole piece or a wiped recording and this is the piece of audio to over-write the data making us think that it’s Assistant is there trying to help us in some way. This includes the Chrome browser.

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Oculus Quest - Room-Scale VR For Schools - A Full Review

The pared down version of roomscale VR comes at a cost to the user, I feel. Namely the appliance-like nature of the device so that the mass-produced all-in-one case can provide a three-click platform: turn on, choose game, hit go. The appliance also pares down what the ‘user’ should be able to do. I find that this channels the user into what the appliance’s designers want you to use and how you should use it. Think of it like an IKEA type VR. You shop at IKEA and all you can do is trundle through the alleyways following the arrows pointing you to checkout and exiting with items you never came in for. The format and style of current titles is also of a low poly nature, that to be frank, surely cannot keep going where every title has the same blocky nature.

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Coding Music with Sonic Pi - A 6-8 Part Scheme →

Sonic Pi

A lot of children may never have known that you can code anything other than Scratch, in a paid for platform or the ‘stuff’ websites and apps are made of. So to say we are going to code music is quite a unique concept and experience.

To introduce this I like to use Xavier Riley’s presentation at the Bath Ruby conference. I like to use the end portion because he has experience of using Sonic Pi in schools with children and draws directly from their initial experiences.

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3D Printing in Year 4 - Pinewood Derby Style Racecars

Leading the technology curriculum has afforded me a lot of leeway and creatve space to build bigger and bigger projects. In our team we have two fantastic teachers who offer a lovely balance between video, photography and, what I term as 'Manufacturing'. The old D+T curriculum of old is now given over to STEM (or STEAM) and this includes technologies such as Makey Makeys, Arduino, Raspberry Pis etc. to inlcude an element of coding to automate projects. We try to incorportate this as much as we can, however scale at my school is always an obstacle, that, sometimes too imperious to navigate. However, when it comes together, as seen in this video below (put together by David and lead by Veena), an idea you have as subject leader (Pinewood Derby and F1 in schools) comes to fruition, it truly is a spectacle to behold. 

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Photoshop projects in the Junior School

Photoshop in the junior school is something that was taken on with a lot of excitment, a lot of ferver from the students and, of course the class teachers whose classes I was taking that day after our inital photoshoot.

The prelude to this is that the students are part of a topic called 'Blast from the Past' in which the students learn about the recent past (within about 10-50 years) and the events within here. The focus is on art, technological milestones and of course people. The students all learn about a single person in history as part of a huge presentation in which they dress up and present in a open morning at school.

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Digital Citizenship - Status Anxiety and Keeping up with the Joneses.

The point to all this is that this episode, the first 15-20 mins at least amplifies the sheer nonsensical aspect to online social streams where they take over every facet of life. When you ask the children: what’s the point to all these streams and posts? They say to talk, to share to let your friends see what you're doing. And this is fine - however when you ask: are your friends there too? Teens tend to get somewhat defensive over this line of questioning. However, this is aimed at years 5 and 6. They half agree thet there isn't any use to this over sharing. And this is key. It's key because it shows us that not only does this open a dialogue as to how to protect young kids I would argue that this type of conversation could go a hell of a lot younger. Maybe not with this kind of material, but with the very concept of understanding consequences of  beig suceptible in this way. I mean, we used to talk in the phone when we were younger. Albeit, for hours sometimes. But this wasn’t to everyone all the time with a giant hailer in public. I think you get my drift.

The video I’ve clipped and heavily edited has taken all the errant language out and the ending where it gets very sweary. The assembly also has no reference to the actual programme in case it’s shown at home or parent’s Netflix streams show the thumbnails - hence the name: Status Anxiety.

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