Teachercraft: How Teachers Learn to Use Minecraft in their Classrooms

This book is built around a set of teacher interviews that describe the practices and perceptions of educators as they are adopting, modifying, and building learning environments that integrate Minecraft. They see Minecraft as an essential learning tool in both formal and informal learning environments. So this book is an effort to provide context, description, evaluation, and common threads across the interviews of teachers using Minecraft. More than a list of ideas, I am attempting to provide a rich description of how these teachers think about practice, the kinds of things they see when they look at an active classroom, and what matters to their crafting of lessons, their ‘Teachercraft’.

Teachercraft is unique to the use of Minecraft in this book, but is not isolated. It has implications for the use of any digitally mediated learning space, the adoption of technology for learning, and more broadly a picture of how teachers learn. Using a tool like Minecraft for learning is clearly innovative teaching. I wonder how these teachers go about learning new ideas? Where did they find out about Minecraft? How do they gain knowledge of new software and validate its use for learning? How did teachers test new ideas? Appropriate Minecraft? What did they actually do with Minecraft in class? And how did they evaluate the effectiveness of Minecraft, as a digital experience within actual classroom expectations? These questions are at the core of this book and assume that teachers have relevant insights to share about how teachers go about innovative thinking, learning, and practical application.
[2015]

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