Farewell land of morning calm #seoul with @pzaich such a great year! Off to Hong Kong, Bali, USA

Using DoInk for the iPad, create amazing animations for a variety of project, lessons, and more. It is a great app, well worth the money. Best way to learn it, is to simply play around with it, Google a few ways to do x or y and just have fun! It is a great way for visual learners and thinkers to create. Respond with ideas you might have on how to use DoInk. 

App link here. 

Finally, my Minecraft exploration begins...as well as an internal self-reflection

With the end of school having passed about a week ago, I’ve finally purchased my Minecraft account, wow can someone say that took forever! Oh wait, I just did. Alright, so now that I’ve got my account, watched some YouTube videos on Minecraft, and have memorize my control keys, I am ready to get down to business—surviving my first night.

For a first time gamer, playing Minecraft feels like tackling a University level course. So needless to say, I’ve been avoiding this impending doom I feel that is rooted in my fear of being seriously bad at playing this game.

But, since I’ve exhausted sleeping in, reading, napping and watching Parks and Rec, Minecraft is calling me like a foreign friend who I am so confused yet incredibly intrigued by and so, so very nervous to meet. 

My desire to learn how to game, is truly driven by wanting to create and to craft lessons/curriculum that revolve around gaming and creativity. Having met some incredible people who swear by the use of games in education, I am moving myself from baking and sewing in my spare time to gaming and blogging (well lets say we’ll start out with a 70/30 split in the two very opposite interests of mine). 

What is funny to me, is that playing Minecraft feels so strange and so new that I am feeling very old, very silly, and very incompetent at learning how to navigate this new pixilated world. Even though I have a strong motivation to understand the game and how to apply it to education, I am feeling like I’d rather just keep doing things I’m good at—basically I am fearful of failure. 

We all need to realize that difficult tasks are the most rewarding (well, usually we hope) and that a fear of failure is simply a door we need to knock down in order to realize our full potential. The time and effort we put into achieving goals is given back to us in our understanding and appreciation of that goal.

I feel that I’ve take on an instant gratification mindset rather than a growth mindset in the last few years. I want to be the type of person who appreciates the process not only the product. I’d rather appreciate what I learn along the way than the praise I receive at the end. I’d rather be the kid who would wait for 2 marshmallows rather than eat 1 really fast. And yet, what I feel has happened is that I’ve slipped into being dependent on feeling the best at something, on being good naturally, and on being better than other people. 

A competitive person at heart, I never have taken a step back to think about why I have seemed to have trouble lately in mastering new/difficult tasks or goals. I want to be good at things, I hate being bad. I like to win, I hate to loose. I like to work hard if I know I can achieve something, I hate working hard when what I am working on doesn’t make sense. I like to see a change quickly so I am motivated to work hard, I don’t like to feel helpless and frustrated for long periods of time. I hate it when things go wrong, I assume it is always my fault. I want to be successful, but I hate wondering if all the effort I put in will be worth it or not. I like to be better than people, I hate feeling judged. I always judge myself, I hate that I always judge myself. 

Rather than the above person I’ve described, I’d much rather be a person who appreciates the process and the struggle far more than the outcome and the reward. Yet, my desire for the reward is a huge asset in my achievement of my goals. There must be a way to meld these two opposing wants together.

I want to enjoy the time and space it takes to learn new things and to work towards goals. I want to be patient with myself, rather than demanding perfection. I want to be okay with failing so that I realize the learning that happens in that space is far more important than the feeling of satisfation that comes from a perfect outcome. I want the understanding that my own self is perfect and worthwhile. I want to feel that I am full of confidence and that I can pour that confidence into my passions while remembering that the process of pursuing a passion is the pasison, the result is simply the frosting, not the cake. Process is cake not frosting. I might need a better analogy since I don’t like cake. 

Well, this rant is really about me being okay with not feeling successful right away at things and not allowing that to deter me from pursuing my goal. My deep fear of failure is rooted in my lack of self-confidence and my depended on other’s judgements of me.

My unsuccessful start at new tasks, like Minecraft, should not cause me to throw up my hands and call myself a failure and a horrible person (gosh I am so mean to myself!). My ability to demand perfection is well placed once I know I can get to a point of perfection and success. What I need to do is figure out how I can demand myself to work hard at tasks that feel very big and very scary and very confusing. I tend to avoid things, as I’ve stated, that I am not good at. But there are things that I’d love to pursue that I am not good at.

I want to prefect my imperfections. I want to listen to what I tell my students: take risks, fail fast, learn often. 

Areas of my life I want to pursue and perfect  to enjoy the journey of:

• Minecraft


• Blogging


• Twitter


• Reading before bed


• Sleeping early


• Waking early


• Eating healthy


• Loving my husband everyday


• Loving myself everyday


• Letting things go, both big and small


• Perspetive


• Being okay with people not liking me


• Working on things that are hard


• Confidence

With that, here’s to an hour or so on Minecraft, lets hope I don’t fall in a massive crevice this time. 

School reform? It all boils down to this: “If, at the end of school, a student has not developed a desire and a responsibility to learn, then the entire experience has been miseducative, a waste and a detriment to all involved.” That was John Dewey almost 100 years ago.

Via Adam Fletcher and John Dewey (via adventuresinlearning)