Monday, November 17, 2014

Summary of Week

This was the week before Givercraft went live with students. We had 2 handshake meetings. There were questions about servers. We received a new password to allow students and teachers into the world. Some teachers dropped the project, due to not having time to read the book, not feeling ready for the project.

I created another survey and asked teachers for questions or concerns. The data was looked over and answered to teachers. One question was on how to take a screen shot and the other was on editing and inputting on a wiki page.

I have looked over the wiki pages and have seen students start to write on them. I went over all of the spreadsheets and made sure they were ready for teachers to input grades on. After this week, I will go to every spreadsheet and take the data and input it on our Givercraft spreadsheet for the project.

This will be a lot of work. There are over 30 spreadsheets on our file. I'm excited for this week. The times do not match with my work schedule, so I'm going to try to log in whenever I have a break to see how the students are doing. Thank you, to everyone for their extremely hard work. We now can watch our creation evolve and see how the students appreciate it.

Sunday, November 9, 2014

Week Summary

It's a week away until Givercraft begins. It's an exciting time. This week we had the first teacher test session. It went extremely well. During the session, I helped build a house, teach how to make a craft table, cook food, dig, get tools and supplies to build and how to fly. There were 3 different test sessions. Due to my work schedule, I was only able to make the evening session. Lee, mentioned to only have one session next time, not 6 hours worth. It was a lot.

I enjoyed seeing all of the fantastic buildings the teachers created during their session. I think everyone has a good idea and feeling with using MinecraftEdu. We had a few teachers that were having downloading issues, we gave them the new java to install. Hopefully this solves the problem.

To prepare for Givercraft, this week I uploaded spreadsheets to each teacher's page to keep data for grades, levels of each standard and badge levels for Scenario 1 and Scenario 2. Due to the amount of spreadsheets I was uploaded, I created a new email address, to only have this task on my new email address. I also created a survey that was sent on Thursday evening asking the teachers demographics about their classroom and why they signed up for Givercraft. I have started to receive the results. A lot of technology is being used in the classroom, which is wonderful to see. I gave the teachers the weekend to complete the 10 question survey. Monday, I will look at the data and process it for our article that will be published in an online journal.

My plan this week is to upload the rest of the sheets for scenario 1 and 2 and analyze the data from the survey. I will also help any teammates of mine that need some assistance. I also, think we have a Handshake meeting this week with teachers. I will try to attend one of the sessions. A lot of the times are during my work schedule, so it's difficult to attend all of them. My immediate plan, is to get over this sickness. After the antibiotics, this morning I'm feeling as it's coming back! Oh no!!

I don't need any help with my tasks. I think we are almost ready to launch Givercraft. It's so exciting to be a part of something that has never been done before. I look forward to hearing about the students opinions about the project and watching their journey. What an amazing way to make learning fun and keep students engaged.