Monday 18 November 2013

TeachMeetNZ - Minecraft as a Teaching and Learning Tool

On Saturday I was honoured to present at the fourth virtual TeachMeetNZ.  TeachMeetNZ is run by Sonya @vanschaijik live on Google+ and is way for New Zealand educators to get together and share their learning.  TeachMeetNZ presentations are based on Pecha Kucha style of limited and timed slides.  I found it to be a great reflective experience having to sum up ones thoughts and still deliver an interesting message.  I started pondering the critical thinking skills involved and realised it would be amazing for my students too. 

I shared my experiences using Minecraft as a tool for teaching and learning, and have included the resource links below for easier access.  



Resources
Thanks to the Parkvale School Minecraft Club and their awesome teacher @moriarty_ok
Room 5 at Melville Intermediate 
8C Happenings - Girls playing Minecraft
MInecraft Wiki is the bible of MInecraft
Primary Minecraft for Minecraft Ideas
CORE Ten Trends 2013 - 6. Thinking 3DMinecraftEdu - the education version that runs on your school server


Saturday 9 November 2013

Twitter Follower Limit

I had just read a great blog post and decided I must follow the author, so I clicked on their Twitter follow button with confidence.  Only to be told I may not follow any more people; I had reached my limit! 

Why can't I Follow people?
Apparently Twitter imposes following limits on all accounts for your own protection of course.  Each Twitter account can have up to 2000 followers.  At this point it will only go up depending on your ratio of followers to following, and that ratio is not published.  My ratio at the time of limitation was 2000 Following :  1709 Followers.  Now that is obviously not a high enough ratio.  I wonder if their ratio is 1:1?

Twitter reasons are the limits improve site performance and your behaviour.

How to around the limit and should you?
Aside from un-following someone you can simply use a third party app like TweetDeck to follow someone; it will work.  However Twitter rules on their "Following rules and best practices" says this is against their rules.  So to all my wonderful Twitter PLN, someone has to go! 

So where to now for my Twitter PLN, have I reached the limits of it's usefulness?  Do I stop growing my own PLN?  What will you do?