Monthly Archives: February 2019

Learning2gether with the Electronic Village Online 2019 closing ceremony

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Learning2gether Episode 402

On Sunday, February 17 Electronic Village Online coordinators, moderatators, and participants held their 2019 closing ceremony online in Zoom, hosted by Nellie Deutsch. Here is the video:

EVO Sessions is a series of 5-week online workshops on digital skills for language educators, organised by TESOL CALL-IS

At the Closing Ceremony Jane Chien and Vance Stevens spoke on behalf of EVO Minecraft MOOC, at the link starting here: https://youtu.be/oz4UgESP79Y?t=1903
from 31:42 in the video to 38:33

Here are the slides shared during the event
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1EIJAC5kW4xE7_4B_SBr5xEcQTXjRLBTJDr-7MFp4hw8/edit?usp=sharing

The Zoom Meeting was held here:
https://zoom.us/j/289002576

Who’s invited?

EVO, participants, coordinators, and moderators

From the EVO 2019 Coordination team

  • Christine Bauer-Ramazani – Presenting live on-site in Atlanta at the Best of EVO 2019 event
  • Vance Stevens – Presenting live on-site in Atlanta at the Best of EVO 2019 event
  • Jane Chien – Presenting live on-site in Atlanta at the Best of EVO 2019 event
  • Nellie Deutsch – Ed.D – organizer – Presenting from a distance at the Best of EVO 2019 event
  • Martha Ramirez- Presenting from a distance at the Best of EVO 2019 event
  • Sibel Taskin Simsek – Presenting from a distance at the Best of EVO 2019 event
  • Natasa Bozic Grojic- Presenting from a distance at the Best of EVO 2019 event if available (will know when her teaching schedule is set)
  • Also on the team: Mbarek Akaddar, Carolina R. Buitrago, Sanja Bozinovic, Jose Antonio Da Silva, John Graney, Ayat Tawel, and Sheryl McCoy

Basic Linguistics for English Language Teachers

  • Carmen Medina – Presenting live on-site in Atlanta at the Best of EVO 2019 event
  • Lana Hiasat – Presenting live on-site in Atlanta at the Best of EVO 2019 event
  • Roslyn Billy – Presenting live on-site in Atlanta at the Best of EVO 2019 event

CEFR vs assessment

  • Maha Hassan – Presenting from a distance at the Best of EVO 2019 event
  • Also on moderating team: Aya EL Wakil

Classroom-based research for professional development

  • Moderating team: Kenan Dikilitas, Asli Saglam, Babita Sharma Chapagain, Eraldemir Tuyan, Seden Evans, Michelle Ghazal, Sadeqa Mazzei, Ruben Serra, Mariana Loreto Aliaga, Lidia Casalini

Escape the (class) room

  • Heike Philp – Presenting from a distance at the Best of EVO 2019 event
  • Graham Stanley – Presenting from a distance at the Best of EVO 2019 event
  • Randall Sadler – Presenting from a distance at the Best of EVO 2019 event

EVO MInecraft MOOC

  • Jane Chien – Presenting live on-site in Atlanta at the Best of EVO 2019 event
  • Vance Stevens – Presenting live on-site in Atlanta at the Best of EVO 2019 event
  • Heike Philp – Presenting from a distance at the Best of EVO 2019 event
  • Also on moderating team: Maha Abdelmoneim, Rose Bard, Don Carroll, David Dodgson, Kim Harrison, Jeff Kuhn, Beth O’Connell, Mircea Patrascu, Dakota Redstone, Aaron Schwartz, Filip Smolčec, Mariana Smolčec, and Bobbi Stevens

Flipped Learning

  • Juliana Diaz for Flipped Learning – Presenting live on-site in Atlanta at the Best of EVO 2019 event
  • Martha Ramirez- Presenting from a distance at the Best of EVO 2019 event
  • Also on moderating team: John Graney, Jeff Magoto, Katja Auffret, Carolina R. Buitrago, Juliana Díaz, Gabriela Garibotto, Birgit Jensen, and Diana Salazar (who presented live on-site at TESOL Chicago 2018)

Getting online as a teacherpreneur

  • Harshita Kapoor – Presenting from a distance at the Best of EVO 2019 event
  • Nellie Deutsch – Presenting from a distance at the Best of EVO 2019 event

ICT4ELT

  • Moderating team: Ayat Tawel, Jose Antonio Da Silva, Mariana Smolčec, Sneza Filipovic, Efrossini Zoniou, Sanja Bozinovic, Angiolini Tiziana, and Svetlana Obenausova

Job-oriented training for ESP teachers

  • Moderating team: Ozimova Halima, Tohir Sultanov, Mavjuda Shakhakimova, Gulnoza Egamova, Yokut Sharipova, Odil Quvvatov, Kalanov Ulugbek, Tohtasinov Dilshod, Sherzod Gulomov Siroj, Zumratkhon Shukurova, Guzal Zahidova, Mansurkhonov Kamoliddin, and Galina Suleymanova

Moodle 4 teachers

  • Nellie Deutsch – Presenting from a distance at the Best of EVO 2019 event

Mother tongue use in the ESL classroom

  • Moderating team: Georgios Neokleous and Anna Krulatz

PBL

  • Moderating team: Maria Laura Mas, Paula Penelas, and Fernanda Pascuet

QR Codes in Action

  • Sibel Taskin Simsek – Presenting from a distance at the Best of EVO 2019 event
  • Nellie Deutsch – Presenting from a distance at the Best of EVO 2019 event
  • Also on moderating team: Nezaket Köymen Özgirin

Teaching EFL to Young Learners

  • Nellie Deutsch – Presenting from a distance at the Best of EVO 2019 event
  • Also on moderating team: Judy Wong, Charles Goodger, Julie Pratten Kacmaz, Sheryl McCoy, and Nives Torresi

Teaching Pronunciation differently

  • Moderating team: Roslyn Young, Piers Messum, Carrie Terry, and Arizio Sweeting

Techno-CLIL

  • Daniela Cuccurullo – Presenting from a distance at the Best of EVO 2019 event
  • Letizia Cinganotto – Presenting from a distance at the Best of EVO 2019 event

 

 

Earlier events

 

Fri Feb 8 Learning2gether episode 401 – Michiyo joins EVO Minecraft MOOC participants in a deliberately executed tomb raid

https://learning2gether.net/2019/02/08/michiyo-joins-evo-minecraft-mooc-participants-in-a-deliberately-executed-tomb-raid/

 

While EVO Minecraft MOOC is in session through Mid February, earlier events are being archived here:

http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/130258521/2019_Live_Events#Week3archived

 

Sat Feb 9 Nives Torresi, Dena McCoy, and Sheryl McCoy present on materials for the low-resource classroom

 

Wed Feb 13 1030 ET – 1st of 3 TESOL Webinars free to TESOL members – Supporting Students With Interrupted Formal Education

 

Supporting Students With Interrupted Formal Education (SIFE)

 

Presenters: Judith O’Loughlin and Brenda Custodio

 

Date: Wednesday, 13 February 2019

Time: 10:30 am–12:00 pm ET

Registration Deadline: 11 February 2019

Register to attend or be notified of link to recording: https://sites.tesol.org/MemberPortal/Events/2019/PL19_VSF13/TESOL-Event-Detail?EventKey=PL19_VSF13

 

Register for FREE! (free for TESOL members; $50 for non-members)

 

 

Michiyo joins EVO Minecraft MOOC participants in a deliberately executed tomb raid

learning2gether 1 Comment

Learning2gether Episode 401

On Feb 8, 2019 the EVO Minecraft MOOC temple busting team of Abu Fletcher, Dakotah Redstone, Jane Chien, Mattie Tsai, Michiyo, and Teacher Vance applied logic and geometry (or at least Dak did) to the puzzle of getting into a desert temple by excavating around the side of it and under it, exposing and rendering harmless the TNT that booby-traps the bottom of every unexplored temple, and helping ourselves to what was in the zombie chests.

Dak got the diamond horse armor since he was most deserving and most instrumental in the excavation and had the greatest appreciation for horses in Minecraft as you can hear in the video, here:

The event was announced on Google+ at this link, good only through March 2019
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+VanceStevens/posts/Hp1FEvSXqbf

Michiyo wanted to make ‘her house’ much nicer, with the help of +Olivetree Lighthouse, so she posted, “I explored the desert area. I have collected cactuses in order to make green things. Then collected some sands to make glasses. If I have some time to continue “my house” building, I may be in the world at around 14:00 UTC on the Feb. 7th or 8th. It would depend on how early I could get back from work. If I were there, I would. If not, next day or time.”

She wasn’t able to make it on Feb 7, but she kept her Feb 8 appointment.  Meanwhile, here’s what we did on Feb 7:

Thu Feb 7 EVO Minecraft MOOC moderators Teacher Vance and Dakotah Redstone follow Abufletcher to newly-discovered temple

Michiyo was not able to make it back from work in time, so Dakotah Redstone and Teacher Vance followed Abufletcher to a temple he found buried in a village just north of the one we had all visited last week on our adventure trek. We looked it over but didn’t crack it. We hoped to find others in our community who would want to explore it with us. We posted to our Google+ Community that they could find it on the map just north up the river from our recent trek destination and inside the big grey wall Dak erected around it while we chatting in Discord. I attached this picture:

So when Michiyo appeared next day, apparently Abufletcher, Michiyo’s teacher in Japan, encouraged her to visit the new temple, which is where I met the group when I arrived, having just emerged from a cab at my apartment which had brought me from the bus station in Penang where I had just left a bus that had left Kuala Lumpur 6 hours earlier. I  joined Michiyo, Abu Fletcher, Dak, Jane, and Mattie in Minecraft just as they were all about to head down the polished stone road that Dak had created leading over to the Temple Under Town that Abu Fletcher had found the previous day, where we would see if we could unlock its secrets in a systematic manner.

The event was on the 2019 EVO Minecraft MOOC Live Events schedule, which is linked from the sidebar at the #evomc19 landing page at http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/. That link should be working far into the foreseeable future.

The event was organized on the EVOMC Google+ Community, which we’ll hate to loose after March 2019. The event evolved in these two posts, the first from Michiyo,
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+VanceStevens/posts/Hp1FEvSXqbf where I had replied the day before, “+Michiyo Toshima joined us today, but not for house building. We went on a temple tour and excavated around the Temple Under Town.”

Don Carroll then made a longer post here
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105443014753998852123/posts/VGCNd9N5Epn
which I reconstruct here since these links to Google+ will no longer work after March.

Don Carroll (Abufletcher)

A most unusual temple!!!  Come and help us explore (but not pillage) both the temple and the village on top of it!  Dak is busy building a protective wall around the village (immigrants welcome).

OliveTree Lighthouse

Great find 🙂  Sorry I couldn’t join. I was fighting with command blocks and was reading and watching things online trying to get them to work as I wanted.

Vance Stevens

The /warp is templeundervillage. I had to go there to test the /warp, and I found that someone, probably one of the villagers, agitated at the recent interest shown by bothersome explorers from another dimension, placed an iron door over the entrance to the most sacred part of the temple. I guess they make iron doors in the blacksmith shop adjacent to the temple precincts. To open the door, you have to know how to operate the ‘device’.  Once inside, the way is, hmmm not exactly clear, but the direction down is (whatever you do, don’t jump down there!)

In another post I invited participants to come help us “loot” this temple but I withdraw that poorly worded invitation and leave the disposal of this one to my esteemed colleague and co-moderator, Abu Fletcher.

If interested in looting a temple I can invite you to another one, if it hasn’t been looted already (I wouldn’t know for sure until I went there and tried to loot it). Sign up for the expedition in the reply area below.

Don Carroll

I’m more interested in how the temple and several village structures seem to have become intertwined.  I’d like to see if we can untangle the parts before damaging anything with a “smash and grab” approach.  Honestly, after looting a few temples, it all gets to be pretty routine.  Often I don’t even bother.

I’ll be in-game at about 14:00 UTC.

Vance Stevens

+Don Carroll Yes, exactly, by “looting” a temple I mean to approach what lays beneath the blue and red tiles in a calm and systematic manner, avoid setting off the TNT, which we know is down there. By working systematically and on arriving safely in the space below, I suggest that we open the lids on the chests that will also be there and peek inside.

I think this is one of those constructive activities that show Minecraft in its most collaborative mode, and reveal to participants how critical language is in the process (for example when Abu Fletcher told me once, in text, DON’T STEP THERE. Step is probably a useful word in English, as is its appearance in a negative imperative.) But more importantly, the instructions to one another as we work toward a common goal are the point of the exercise.

Hope to see you at 1400 UTC if the bus I’m on reaches Penang in time.

If anyone would like to join us in the exploration of this temple and / or others, please click REPLY below.

Don Carroll

Here’s an aerial view of the temple/village (from the dynamic map).

Actually, Vance I would suggest that we entirely leave the “loot” alone.  It’s really not interesting.  Instead, I’d like to see us work creatively and in unison to “map out” how the temple and village structures are intertwined.  For example, can we find minimally invasive ways to get into the main temple structure WITHOUT damaging ANY of the exteriors of any of the village structures?

In fact, anyone who just wants the loot is welcome to get it through a diagonal tunnel (as I have done before on many temples).

Or maybe I should just go in and grab the loot myself now so we can focus on the archeologically interesting aspects of the site. : )

Vance Stevens

+Don Carroll I liked +Dakotah Redstone’s spiral approach, as evident in the video.

The event took place on the EVO Minecraft MOOC 1.12.2 server with voice in Discord

 

Earlier events

Tue Feb 5 Learning2gether episode 400 – EVO Minecraft MOOC visits East Coast Miners for VSTE Minecraft Monday

https://learning2gether.net/2019/02/05/learning2gether-episode-400-evo-minecraft-mooc-visits-east-coast-miners-for-vste-minecraft-monday/

While EVO Minecraft MOOC is in session through Mid February, earlier events are being archived here:

http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/130258521/2019_Live_Events

Learning2gether episode 400 – EVO Minecraft MOOC visits East Coast Miners for VSTE Minecraft Monday

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Learning2gether Episode 400

https://youtu.be/DQzH8iaWMW4

On Tuesday, February 5 in Europe and points east of there, but still February 4 in the USA, Kim Harrison a.k.a. K4sons invited EVO (Electronic Village Online) Minecraft MOOC  participants to visit VSTE’s Minecraft Monday, a regular monthly event hosted by the Virginia Society for Technology in Education. Dakotah_Redstone and Beth O’Connell helped plan it with her. The VSTE events are held on the first Monday of each month from 8 to 9 PM EST (New York time).

Today they were visiting East Coast Miners, a building guild for under-16s patterned on the work of Jo Kay’s Jokaydia, http://www.jokaydia.com/. East Coast Miners provided a tour of what that the teachers are doing with kids after hours.

After settling into the environment, we started recording at a turtle farm where one of the kids was raising turtles. The new release of Minecraft 1.13.2 contains an underwater environment that spawns corals and a variety of sea creatures, so after swimming with the turtles, we moved to a coral reef where we swam with dolphins and other creatures, and visited an underwater shipwreck. There DarkKnight tossed some treasure maps into the water and you can see on the video where your map shows your location and allows you to use your F3 coordinates to navigate to X-marks-the-spot, where there was buried treasure. We all went there and eventually uncovered a treasure chest full of goodies.

We then lapsed into a reflection of how this might work for learners of a variety of topics, including learning languages. Jane in Taipei related how her son Mattie was interacting with the East Coast Miners and developing his English and problem solving skills.

Here is Jane’s reflection

Thank you, +Kim Harrison for inviting us on the East Coast Miners server. Treasure hunting was a lot of fun! The coral reef and tropical fish are so beautiful! I think that kids can learn far more by collaborating and communicating with players in Minecraft than they can by taking online synchronous language lessons (Online language tutoring/learning has been a trend lately). I see a lot of creativity, problem-solving, and peer-teaching with patience in Minecraft. I was taught by Cats, a teenage east coast miner, how to fly. She gave me lots of tips and feedback to my repeated failing attempts, and with her help, I re-learned how to fly in survival mode in Minecraft!

===Info on East Coast Miners from the website: http://www.eastcoastminers.org/====
The East Coast Miners Minecraft Community is operated by two educators and one geek (engineer) in the hopes to enrich STEAM skills science, technology, engineering, art and math as well as communication and collaboration skills.

 

How to join the VSTE server?

You need the latest release 1.13.2
connect to server.eastcoastminers.org

VSTE is the Virginia Society for Technology in Education, https://vste.org/about-vste/. VSTE Minecraft Mondays occur the first Monday of every month and lead into the annual VEPLN summer of survival (for last year’s event see https://vste.org/vepln-summer-of-survival/ and https://sites.google.com/view/vstesofs17/. There is also a Google+ Community until early April,
https://plus.google.com/communities/106561495889390694090 )

We’ll all be sad to see this and so many other fruitful communities disappear from Google+, a real blow to educational collaboration when that happens.

 

Earlier events

 

Sun Jan 27 Rose Bard, Dakota Redstone, and Jane Chien host a Building Challenge on the EVO Minecraft 1.12.2 server

https://learning2gether.net/2019/01/27/rose-bard-dakota-redstone-and-jane-chien-host-building-challenge-on-evo-minecraft-1-12-2-server/

 

Fri Feb 1 Teacher Vance and Bobbi Bear lead sandbox adventure trekking on EVO Minecraft 1.12.2 server

Teacher Vance and Bobbi Bear led an adventure trek to some desert temples in the 21k area.

The challenge

Anyone can join us. If you need gear we’ll equip you before we set out.

We meet in the 24k area and trek north to a river. We’ll have to trailblaze to the right river system.

From there we take boats to a village full of husks and villagers who will trade emeralds for rotten flesh and coal.

The temples are near there.

On this first meeting we embarked on the journey to see what would happen. In a little over an hour we had reached the temples.

Here are two YouTube recordings

Vance’s version, sound problems

Dak’s version below, with Discord chatter

If you wanted to join us, here’s how
http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/130258521/2019_Live_Events#Howtojoinus