Hooray - I have started a Writng for Life Connect group...

Guess what! Our church has started Connect groups (in addition to cell groups) so that we can get to know folk who have the same interests as we do. I have always wanted to start a writing group SO... I took the plunge! Eighteen folk joined my monthly writing group called ‘Writing for Life’. We had our first meeting on the first Saturday afternoon of May and it was a really enjoyable, interactive, writing afternoon. I used many of  my tips and tricks from teaching writing at school. I think many of us were surprised that we could write so well! The goal is to craft a short story by the end of the year amid lots of fun, laughter, writing and sharing.

So, let's tell the story in pictures and words. 

Here is the advert for the Writing for Life group which is placed with the other groups on the church notice board. 

My goals for the group
I attended  a five-day 'short story' writing course at UCT Summer School this year and I think that really motivated me to want to start a group. I also belong to the Fish Hoek Scribblers which meets once a month. Basically, what I want to achieve is to get everybody understanding the basics of a short story and also to discover that they actually can write.

Our May meeting
As mentioned, our first meeting took place on the first Saturday afternoon of May and I was thrilled at the turn out. We meet in the coffee shop. At this meeting we got to know each other in a fun, interactive way and we delved into characterisation in stories.

Here are some photos from the May meeting.

This collage is a collection from Facebook

I had some lovely comments from folk by sms and  Whatsapp after the group which encouraged me immensely.

- Thank u soo much for a fun afternoon Fiona. These sessions teach us so much in such a lovely non threatening enviroment. You are real good at what u do girl!!!🌹

- Hi, Fiona, You offered such a lovely course today.  Thank you.  And sure, I may be an encourager bu be assured that I only congratulate when congratulations are due.  Be assured that I only congratulate when congratulations are due. You should, my dear lady, hear me complain :).  Then you'd know EXACTLY what I'm talking about :). SO looking forward to your next session. Peace, love and blessings 

- Hi Fiona, I enjoyed the first writing group today, and then forgot to ask when the next one will be.

- Hi Fiona, I wanted to thank you for the wonderful class and interaction that we had today. Thank you for taking the initiative and bringing us together as a group. 

- Hi Fiona, had a great time. Thank you, I will definitely be back! 

- People really enjoyed writing and I think surprised themselves

Our June meetingIn our June meeting we went on to PLOT before we did SETTING. We also moved venue to the small hall which has a big TV screen so that I can run a PowerPoint etc. I just loved the meeting! The focus, as mentioned, was on PLOT in a story and we came up with great ideas. We looked at different ways of getting inspiration for a story and tried out a few of them.

Here is the advert followed by a collage I put on Facebook.

Once again I received many positive thank yous that really warmed my heart.

Our July meeting
I decided to continue with PLOT in July as I had a really good idea for writing a children's story. We looked at hooks for children's stories and how to write good openings and endings. It was a real fun session. As one person noted ina thank you 'it was my most significant yet'. At this point I haven't downloaded photos from the afternoon, but I will do so soon.  Here is the advert:

And so...next up will be our August session. 

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Using Minecraft: Education Edition as a tool to demonstrate the solution in a problem-based learning activity at the Microsoft E2 event

This is a cross post of a post I wrote for the SchoolNet blog recently. This was such an exciting experience for me that I have to keep a record of it!

Last month I had the privilege of attending at the amazing Microsoft Educator Exchange (E2) Africa Forum in Johannesburg as a #MIEExpert Educator. The E2 had the theme of #Makewhatsnext and it was held at Microsoft’s headquarters in Johannesburg.  I was excited about the emphasis that would be placed on using Minecraft: Education Edition as an educational tool in our classrooms. As it turned out, the #MIEExpert Educators and the other invited guests completed a problem-based learning activity in groups using Minecraft: Education Edition as a tool to demonstrate how we would solve the problem we had identified. This was a great learning experience which I often think back on, and, in this post, I want to write about it and explain how we went about using Minecraft: Education Edition in our group project.

Problem-based learning is a variation of project-based learning. It is  a great way for everybody in the group to learn together. It facilitates active learning, critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity. Dr Preetha Ram says “Problem-based learning enables students to embrace complexity and joy in their learning, and enhance their capacity to make creative contributions to real-world problems."

As soon as we registered at the Forum we were given our seating arrangements and I was placed in Group 6 with four other members. This always works well at an event like this as you get to know and work with a new group of friends.  Quite a bit of the two day Forum was devoted to seeing how Minecraft: Education Edition can challenge and develop critical thinking in a classroom setting. Our problem-based learning sessions were facilitated by the awesome Minecraft: Education Edition Guru, Stephen Reid from Scotland who was an entertaining and knowledgeable presenter.  He was aided by Dominique Cave from South Africa, the only Minecraft: Education Edition Global Mentor in Africa.

Group 6 - I am taking the photo

The problem-based learning activity we were set was in the form of a competition - the winning group would win devices! Group 6 was determined to win…in other words our competitive edge was stirred! We were very fortunate in our group to have a Minecraft: Education Edition Expert as part of our group - Matthew Hains, a teacher from Crawford College. He’s a real techie kind of guy with the type of skills every group member longs to have. He was a great asset with helping us all work together to build our Minecraft model. We also had a project-based learning expert in Charmaine Roynon from Wynberg Girls’ Junior School.

So, how did we go about our project-based learning experience?

The task:
This was our task: "Come up with a problem you have observed in South Africa and demonstrate how you will solve this, using Minecraft: Education Edition. Present your solution on a Sway or as an Office Mix."

The tools
We decided to use:
a) A shared online OneNote notebook to work on. OneNote is very suited to problem-based learning as you can share content, images, videos etc very easily if you have a good Internet connection. 
b) Then there was Minecraft: Education Edition which we would use to demonstrate our solution. A Minecraft world had already been created for us by Stephen Reid.
c) The final product was to be presented on a Sway or an Office Mix. 

Step 1: Identify the issue
As a group we brainstormed problems in South Africa. Of course there were many! We then narrowed it down to three and eventually voted for one. Since we were all teachers it was probably natural to vote for the issue of many under-resourced schools in the country.

Step 2: Create the driving  question

The next step was to create the driving question related to our inquiry. A driving question is one that captures the heart of the project by providing the purpose of the inquiry and by using clear and compelling language. The question should drives the participants to discuss, inquire, and investigate the topic. Here is a useful post from Edutopia on how to create driving questions. What do you think of ours? “How can we address the problem of under-resourced schools in our country in a sustainable way?'

 Step 3: Brainstorm  
This step involved brainstorming what we would include in our under-resourced school to provide the needed resources. Here are some of the ideas we came up with.  We discussed these at length.

Step 4: Use Minecraft to demonstrate the solution

Now it came to the part of building using Minecraft; Education Edition to demonstrate our solution.

Stephen had taught us some of the basics so that we knew how to move around our Minecraft world.

We each appeared as little characters in the Minecraft world and we could see what each one in the group was doing at any stage.

We divided up the solutions we had thought of, and each one in the group built theirs (with loads of help from Matthew.) We had to take screenshots of the different objects that we built as proof of our solutions, and Matthew captured these for us and labelled them on the final PowerPoint.

Here is Matthew  capturing and labeling the screenshots for our group.

This is me getting Minecraft tips from Matthew!

We (actually Matthew again) then created a video of what we had done using Minecraft: Education Edition and we embedded this video into the PowerPoint. Here is our video.

Step 5: Present your solution

The important thing when you present solutions is to have some relevant role players present – the people who could make this solution happen as we present. These people could even be invited in via Skype.

Step 6: Give the project a title
We decided on the title of ‘A self-sustaining school.’

When it came to presenting our solutions using Sway or Office Mix, we decided on Office Mix. But, alas,  ours just wouldn’t upload. I am sure it had something to do with our embedded video. So we had to make a snap decision with only two minutes to go to hand in our PowerPoint as it was. There was no time to make a Sway instead. 

In the classroom setting there would be a rubric involved for assessment purposes, but for our session the judges were going to choose the best one. (Charmaine in our group provided us with a great rubric to take back to our classes for assessing problem-based learning activities.)

Winners
No! It wasn’t our group, sadly!  Here is the winning team below – they will each get sent a device as a gift from Microsoft.  There wasn’t time for us to see their presentation, unfortunately,  but it had something to do with outer space.  Below this image is another image of the winning team on the stage (captured by Tim Attwell) along with Sonja Delafosse from Microsoft USA and Stephen Reid from Immersive Minds in Scotland.

The winning group!

This problem-based learning activity was a great learning experience. I really felt like I was starting to understand Minecraft: Education Edition and its many possibilities in the context of education.

The final presentation
Here is our final presentation. I have embedded our PowerPoint from OneDrive.

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Challenge at the end
This screenshot of Sonja’s final challenge really got me thinking.  Coding and computational thinking has to become part of our thinking as teachers in South Africa.