Video Post from Chicago Tribune – Minecraft

Minecraft video game taps into students’ creative power: Chicago area teachers tap into the creative power of the video game “Minecraft” to help educate students in everything from history to engineering to biology. (Chuck Berman/John Keilman, Chicago Tribune)

Minecraft and Dragons

Beginning last spring, I introduced Minecraft into the community at my school, Quest Academy. After researching and learning about the possibilities from Joel Levin, father of MinecraftEdu, Lucas Gillespie, and Kevin Jarrett. It was at EduCon that Kevin convinced me that I had all of the tools I needed, both in terms of hardware and software, but my personal skills to implement this. I originally brought Minecraft into an After-School program two days a week. During one of our faculty in-services, where we ran a mini-EdCamp model, I had eight teachers spend 40 minutes learning about Minecraft through playing. They […]

A Year of Learning in Our Innovation Lab

For our school’s quarterly magazine, I was asked to write a reflection updating the school community on what we have learned and done as a result of our having Innovation Lab. Here is my first draft: Learning in the Innovation Lab by Sheryl Peterson, Arturo Garcia, and Vinnie Vrotny One year ago, we were actively working on the transformation of the Innovation Lab – choosing color schemes, ordering furniture, cabinets and lighting, ordering equipment, and developing the curricula that our middle school students would experience when they arrived this fall. Looking back at the year, we are excited about what […]