Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Category: games

  • Daily Dedication, Check-In Question, and Selfie-Bingo

    One of the things I love about teaching at an independent school is the opportunity to have “advisory time.” At my North Carolina school, I’m a seventh grade advisor again this year, and we have an hour after lunch for advisory every third school day. Today was our third advisory meeting of the year, and…

  • Minecraft, YouTube and Communication Skills

    Yesterday morning I spent some time finalizing my podcast migration to Anchor. My “Moving at the Speed of Creativity” podcast channel, which I launched in 2005, now has 481 episodes. The RSS feed I used previously, (before Anchor: Created with the Podlove Podcast Publisher) just included the most recent 50 episodes. Those 50 episodes uploaded…

  • Takeaways and Learning from the MSON Summer 2020 Annual Conference

    Last week I had the opportunity to attend the second edition of the MSON Summer 2020 Annual Conference, held virtually via Zoom. MSON is the “Malone Schools Online Network” (@MaloneSchools), and for the first time this year (I’m guessing because of COVID-19) their annual conference was open to educators everywhere. Our school (where my wife…

  • Quickly Convert Minecraft EE Portfolio PDFs into JPG Images

    The past two weeks I have led and taught “virtual Minecraft summer camps” for elementary and middle school students, with the help of a fantastic team of high school volunteers who have earned service hours as virtual camp counselors / moderators. I’m in the process of writing down many of my lessons learned from this…

  • Virtual Minecraft Camps for Elementary and Middle School Students: June 2020

    Update June 2, 2020: mdtech.casady.org/minecraft has updated information about both these upcoming virtual Minecraft camps for students. Five years ago, our youngest daughter (then age 11) participated in a virtual, summer Minecraft camp through “Connected Camps,” an outstanding organization based in California. She had a great experience, and we recorded a 20 minute podcast reflection…

  • Deep Work and the Race to Minecraft

    Last Thursday was the last day of our second trimester at school, and therefore the end of my second opportunity in 2019-20 to teach Digital and Media Literacy to 5th and 6th Graders. As classroom teachers, one of the things we quickly learn is how different the dynamics of separate classes can be based on…

  • Podcast460: UCO and OCCC Concurrent Classes, GitHub in CompSci, and Elementary Coding Lessons

    Welcome to episode 460 of Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer, from March 13, 2018. This podcast features a series of three recent interviews, and opens with a recommendation to try the newly updated Anchor.fm website and Anchor mobile app for podcast creation and publishing. The first interview is with high school…

  • Code as Poetry in 4th Grade Scratch Club

    The highlight of my Mondays now is getting to co-facilitate an after-school Scratch Coding Club with my wife. Today one of our fourth graders discovered a wonderful Scratch block that simplified a much more complex set of blocks I’d showed him a few weeks ago, and created a simple shooting cannon / animated cannon. I…

  • Podcast459: Highlights from OETC 2018

    This podcast features three different recordings from the 2018 Ohio Educational Technology Conference, which was held in Columbus, Ohio, February 12-14, 2018. The first is an interview with high school students who have learned how to create interactive games using Scratch software. They also have created DIY game controllers using the MakeyMakey and supplies like…

  • Developing Computational Thinking with Scratch Coding (webinar video)

    Last night I had an opportunity to present a free, evening webinar for the Oklahoma State Department of Education’s Educational Technology Division, as part of a series they hosted to prepare teachers for Computer Science Education Week. The title of my presentation was, “Developing Computational Thinking with Scratch Coding.” The webinar recording is 1 hour and 11…