Prepare for the onslaught - Minecraft Mania!

Putting the kids to bed - virtually.

This blog is just one of five I maintain, excluding the various wikis I belong to. One of those wikis is http://gamingeducators.pbworks.com and it is the place where two of my colleagues and I have been collecting our thoughts, working together on proposals, and sharing our reflections as we play Minecraft together. I know I have talked about Minecraft before on my other blog. It focused mainly on my experiences being a supremely n00bish player and the things I learned. Ever since I began experimenting with and playing on Minecraft, my own children have been interested in it. My son offered to play for me and my daughter peeked over my shoulder to see what I was up to. Minecraft has educational accounts and as part of the Multi-School Minecraft Server Project, I bought five accounts for use with students, using my own money. (There was another post on the issue of using my own money for school things, but I don't want to overlink readers to death - this is supposed to focus on family gaming, after all!) To make sure they worked, I invited my own children to come play with me on the multi-player server the teachers were using to play amongst themselves. We have had a FANTASTIC time together. I admit, there's been tears and frustrating moments but they've enjoyed it so much that they've started to add to my Minecraft Journal that I keep on the Gaming Educators wiki. Some of the content is so engaging to read that for the next little while, I'm going to post excerpts from my Minecraft journal, complete with screen shot photos. (The photo in this post was taken with a regular camera - I branched out into taking videos of the three of us playing together and snapped a shot quickly.)