The Crafters - Amazing Minecraft Student Site

We have had some fantastic feedback on our student blogs recently - it might be the holidays for all our friends in the Northern Hemisphere; but its wonderful for our students to have great quality feedback because we are still blogging and working.

Caro is just about to overtake Bethany (we think) and have the most popular student blog at Auroa Primary School, and recently she started posting about some of her Minecraft work. 

When she did she received some feedback from some amazing students and friends of ours at Selwyn House in Christchurch - that led us to 'discover' (if a site that has had nearly 10,000 pageviews is a new site) the students collaborative Minecraft Site 'The Crafters' our students were thrilled to find the site and loved the contents and the details.

You have to check out this site if you are a fan of Minecraft and students work - its an incredible site and we're big fans - amazing Selwyn House. The amazing link is here.

Jade from Room Six Awahono School

We've received some great feedback from different schools so far this year - and two of our greatest supporters have been two of our Quadblogging Buddies.

We've got our dear friends at Selwyn House School who have been a source of huge compliments and inspiration.  Have a look at this amazing Claymation that explains Tidy Numbers.

We've also had plenty of comments from Awahono School from the South Island. Jade in particular has been a great commentator on our site. She's posted an example of her learning with her Educreations sharing her Maths Strategies. You can click on the link to see her great post here.

Auroa Primary School Robotics Starts!

We're currently in the school holidays in New Zealand, our first day of term two is going to be Monday 5th of May when our students will be back in class.   In the meantime we're currently in the second and final week of the term one holidays.  Not for some! Students last week and this have been meeting to plan their entries for Auroa Schools Robotics teams for 2014!   The competition starts with our regional competition, taking place at Wanganui Intermediate in June.   Auroa have set themselves a tough challenge - last year placing first, second and third in the Junior Theatre section of the competition,   This is followed by the Robocup Nationals taking place in September, in Dunedin.

While we are unable to reveal too many details before the competition we'd love to hear from you if you are attending your respective regional qualifying competitions and would really like to hear from anyone else whose intending to be in Dunedin for the finals.

Robotics2014 - Video Maker

Minecraft: 3D Modelling of Classrooms.

Stage Two: Minecraft Modelling in the Classroom.

We've contacted, or been contacted by schools in Christchurch, New Zealand, the West Coast of the South Island.   We had classes in the USA contact us and have a look at this fantastic post which is a collaboration with Mrs Essenburgs Class from Michigan, USA.    As a result of this Brylee and Heavenlee created this grid map of the classroom.  Tomorrow we're going to start investigating how accurate it is and which refinements need to be made.

We Skyped in two classes today with more to come.  Previously each of our groups had recorded information that we needed and details that would allow us to ultimately build a three dimensional model of another classroom around the world using Minecraft.

Were our questions and our preparation correct? We are going to be reflecting on this during Mathematics tomorrow.  What information didn't we receive from the classrooms? How accurate are the maps that we have created? What needs to be refined?

This is the map that Brylee and Heavenlee created as a result of the fantastic information that was provided from Mrs Essenburg and her students.  How accurate is this?

The other classrooms that we have spoken to are our #QuadbloggingAotearoa buddies: Selwyn House and Awahono School.  We spoke to Selwyn House first and we hadn't even thought about a point of orientation! When the students started to talking to us and mentioned the compass points its threw us a little, however our groups continued to gain information and two were produced that are possible grid maps of the Selwyn House Classroom, by Kaiah and Tahana.  There work is here - again we are going to be contacting these schools and classrooms and checking our information and details.

 We believe that this, on the information supplied is a two dimensional model  of 8c, Selwyn House from Christchurch - but we also believe that this is correct.  The problem is there is already some significant variation starting to appear and we've only just started the process.  Stay tuned.

Take Auroa Primary Schools: Selwyn House Quiz

As part of our work with our buddies from Quadblogging Aotearoa were looking at relating to others. Today in class we looked at putting together our Quiz Revoultion Quiz about our buddy schools.

Students spent time on the class pages or websites for the three other schools in our quad - Selwyn House from Christchurch, Awahono School from Grey Valley and Balmacewen Intermediate from Dunedin.    We were looking for information that we could use from these class pages about their own school, and looked on their websites for further information.

We then looked at created a series of questions based around this information with four multiple answers that could be or were nearly correct.  We then created the quiz in Quiz Revolution.