Minecraft and Explain Everything at Andrew Hunter

How can you build the perfect community in Minecraft? This was the question that the Grade 3s at Andrew Hunter were challenged with as they started their new social studies inquiry. Working in partners or small groups, the students could be heard asking each other questions and discussing what they would include in their build. At times they didn’t always agree but we saw this as an opportunity to pause and talk about digital citizenship. Our conversations about what makes a good digital citizen and the connects to what makes a good citizen in the real world fit naturally into our discussion about communities. 

As students were creating we often paused to remind them to take a screenshot. This was important because we had purposefully built time into the activity to have the students reflect on what they were doing and describe what they were learning about. At the end of the build time we had students import their photos into Explain Everything and describe what they were doing. Here is an example created by one of the students:

After the students created their screencast in the Explain Everything app we had them share their video with a classmate. Our aim was to give feedback to each other but looking back I would skip this step as we had not given them enough instruction on how to give descriptive peer to peer feedback. We were much more successful when we invited all the students to the carpet and shared a few of the videos as a group. We discussed the elements that would make a great community and added them to our anchor chart. The resulting discussion had students making the comments we wanted to hear as many wanted to go back and add to their Minecraft creation.