How To Make A MineCraft Server : A Safer Game Experience for Kids

By Matt Kelley Owner of Chicago Gifted Services

In my last post I espoused the reasons MineCraft is great for gifted kids. I did however not mention the one drawback. It does have an unmonitored chat ability. Although the chat is text only, the possibility of seeing foul language, and the possibility of adults online chatting with your child are probably drawbacks.

However, a nice solution is to build your own server within your home, and it doesn't take much technical expertise.

What you'll need:

An old computer with an OS : ubuntu, linux, windows, or mac
An internet connection with router for port forwarding.

So, to start you'll need to go to get a server setup file. You can do a "vanilla" server without the ability of plugins, and all the bells and whistles and have a pretty basic setup quickly by downloading this file and ensuring you have the most updated Java version. You then find the ip of your computer (instructions here) and then the ip of your internet connection by typing "what is my ip" into google.

You then go to your router and set up port forwarding to open port 25565 on the ip of the computer you found earlier. You can find how to port forward on different routeres by googling your router model and how to access virtual servers or port forwarding. You then start the server file you downloaded, go to the Minecraft game on another computer, type the ip of the internet address you found on Google and voila, you're done with the simple setup.

So, now onto the better and more complex setup. You need to first find a plugin-capable server file. I use Craft-Bukkit myself. You then download and follow the instructions listedhere. Once done, you follow all the ip instructions above and run the server.

With a setup like CraftBukkit you then can go to a site like PlanetMinecraft.com and download worlds, and plugins at CraftBukkit and many other things that wil make your server top-notch.

So why are plugins worth it?

Well here's an example of my top ten and what they do:

Essentials: Adds too many feature to list, but modified chat, nicknames, and many other things that are listed on the site.
DisguiseCraft: Allows players to disguise themselves as other players or characters in the game.
CleanChat : Allows user to program certain words that are not allowed in chat (good way to kill swearing)
WorldEdit: Allows players to modify regions, paste whole buildings and worlds onto the server and generally makes building much, much faster.
WorldGuard: Allows players to lock their buildings and ensure they are not damaged by other players. Ensures no dramatic crying moments when your child has spent 10 hrs building something only to have someone destroy it.
DynMap: An awesome plugin that creates GoogleMap type maps of worlds so kids can find their creations when they lose them.

But you may be wondering, "Aren't plugins really hard to use?" Absolutely not. You drag the plugin files into the plugins folder created in earlier steps, restart the server, and Voila, you're done.

There are many other add-ons one can do with a setup like this, but for starters this gives you a pretty good server.

Good luck and enjoy,

To check out an example server with these plugins please use minesafe.net in the server ip address.
This will soon be a paid-membership server with locked members-only access where all users will need to provide proof of age and all server chats will have inappropritate language blocked.

If you are interested in becoming a member of that server, which goes to membership-only access on 4/1/13, use the following form here.https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1k-j2BJsiwYZheXGsGcFVpp3S8YfPm8VUc9QnFS5oKtc/viewform


Matt
www.cpsmagnet.com 

Help Me With My Gifted Child : The Gifted Parent Help Blog: Twice Exceptional Schools and Programs:

Family Fun with Web 2.0

Family Fun with Web 2.0:

Social networking, photo sharing, and other Web 2.0 innovations have lots of applications for family fun. Web 2.0 is about individual expression and interaction with your personal network and beyond. Explore the new Web to find ways to add more creativity and fun to your family computer experience. Start with these ideas by signing up and giving them a try. They will stimulate your own creative uses for the new tools of Web 2.0.

1. Connect with your extended family. Use Family 2.0 Amiglia.com or Famster to create a family networking site. As in all social networking sites, you can share photos, keep up with birthdays, plan events, form groups, play games, and connect with others.
2. Let your kids play with online social networks. The family favorite in this group is Imbeebecause it resembles teen and adult social networking sites, but is designed with safety features for kids ages 8-14. Imbee's safety features include user authentication, parental controls, and a privacy wall so that content is not visible on the Internet. Kids and parents can join groups, share pictures, write blogs, listen to music, send messages, and earn points.
3. Customize your home page. This isn't a new idea, but today's technology makes it easier and even more useful. I tried both Netvibes and iGoogle and now use Netvibes for my personal reading and iGoogle for a colorful family-friendly start page. Make Tabs for homework help or travel planning, or anything that you want to access quickly. Also find these features with Pageflakes, and My Yahoo.
4. Read and share reviews. I always read the reviews when I am browsing at Amazon because they give me more insight on whether a book or product is right for me. The reviews at NetFlix have led me to several great movies that I would never have picked out at a video store. With Yelp, you can read and share reviews on businesses, restaurants, and much more in your local area. An even more family-friendly resource with local reviews and recommendations is GoCityKids. If you live in a major U.S. city or plan to travel to one, you'll love the deep information for local family fun from GoCityKids.
5. Play with your pictures. With Smilebox, use your digital photos to make a slideshow, photo album, greeting card or scrapbook; and then, email it or post it online. The basic service is free and includes lots of great designs. Also watch for the relaunch of Scrapblogwith new features and drag-n-drop functionality. Make cute family newsletters withLetterpop, also free. They have several great templates and it's as easy as drag and drop with photos from your hard drive or your flikr account. Speaking of flikr, it's an easy way to store your favorite photos, and you can keep them private, share with family and friends, or share with the world. More ideas to play with your photos are found at dumprand fd's Flikr Toys, where you can do lots of silly things with your flikr photos or the photos on your computer. Our favorite tool at dumpr is to make a sketch from a photo and print it out as a coloring page.
6. Make an online cookbook. Follow the instructions from Elise Bauer at Simply Recipes to create your own del.icio.us cookbook. As you tag your recipes, you can follow the tags on del.icio.us to find an incredible source of great new recipes. If you haven't played withdel.icio.us, read this How To from About Web Search to learn what you can do with social bookmarking.
7. Make a personal Google map. You can think of lots of uses for Google Maps orWayfaring, where you create your own labeled Google maps. Plan a trip, use it for a map-learning activity, share your favorite places with a friend or visitor to your town. If you're a Google map lover, which we definitely are, this will be a blast for your family.
8. Visit a virtual world. Second Life is not for kids, but new sites are opening for safe play in a virtual world. In virtual worlds, kids can play games and interact with other kids who are online. For little kids, check out Webkinz. Here's how it works: purchase a Ganz Webkinz or Lil'Kinz plush toy at your local retailer, or online; and then, use the code number that comes with the toy to enter the online world and play with your virtual pet. It looks like lots of fun. Other kid-friendly virtual worlds include Club Penguin andNicktropolis.

Web 2.0 Sites to Visit

• Family 2.0 Amiglia.com
• Famster
• Imbee
• Netvibes
• Google Home Page
• Pageflakes
• My Yahoo
• Yelp
• GoCityKids
• Smilebox
• Scrapblog
• Letterpop
• flikr
• dumpr
• fd's Flikr Toys
• del.icio.us
• Wayfaring
• Webkinz
• Club Penguin
• Nicktropolis

Related Articles

• Family History Month - 10 Ways to Celebrate Your Family History
• The Making of a Web Parent
• Babies in Your Family History - Get Ready for Baby
• Best Places to Publish Your Family History Online
• Social Networking for Genealogists - Family Social Networks & Online Family...

Sixty 25-Word Stories by Kevin Hodgson on Prezi

http://prezi.com/ej2kva5lhm_t/sixty-25-word-stories/

 

Part of a Twitter writing experiment to create a story in 25 words of less and then linking to #25wordstory

by Kevin Hodgson on 13 November 2010 4279 4

Prezi Transcript

25 Word Stories By Kevin Hodgson She began walking backwards in the assumption she could reverse time. Step by step, the world passed by like a comet's tail. For days, the guitar lay in tatters. He took time between treatments, yet still could not find the D string. She had it. The cat cried and cried for days. The dog was silent, as usual. Things had gone the dog's way again, and the cat knew it. The clay felt smooth in her hand. She mixed, remixed, & brought to life an entire world of soft people. Then, she crushed it. He stretched his legs, snapped his fingers, heaved himself up out of the square & wondered how long he had been in the comic. Hush now. The baby quieted in his arms. Outside in the moonlight, two deer wandered past -- a silent, beautiful work of art. I pursed my lips to blow dust off the old board games and looked at my son, whose attention was firmly fixed on his iphone. In the time it took her to answer the phone, fumbling through her purse, he had already hung up. It was wasted time anyway. She reminded me that memories were like origami, before quickly folding me up and tucking me away into her pocket. The crumpled note dated 15 years earlier fell out of the library book. He immediately recognized the handwriting: his mother's. ... bases loaded, bottom of the 9th, whiffle bat clenched tightly. Somewhere, a crowd roared. Out here, it was only crickets. The pencil tip broke. The computer crashed. The crayons melted. Still, she wrote, carving imaginary words in the clouds. He heard his father's words in his head, 'don't run - you'll fall.' He heard them on the run as he was falling. At night, when the world was asleep, he'd wander around, erasing all the chalk drawings in the 'hood and then act surprised. He stared at them: little bugs on his fingers. One flicked its wings; Another opened wide & bit down. He smiled, fiercely. He'd wake up at night to melodies he heard in his head. Softly, in a whisper, he's sing for her. By morning, she'd forgotten. How the wish for one drop of rain ended up in a deluge is a story for another time. We huddled beneath the umbrella together. She told me, 'If you can imagine the sound of elephants rushing for water, then you would know how I felt.' I couldn't. When no one was looking, Sadie took out her box of crayons. She sniffed each one, w/eyes closed, and colored outside the lines. Ten years from now, the decision to do so would make perfect sense. Ten years ago, the possibility was utterly unimaginable. His young eyes scanned the page, fingers running over symbols. There were words in there. He just knew it. There was only enough room for 25 words on the scrap of paper. He paused, wrote, and tossed the glass bottle back into the sea. The dawn arrived, early .. again ... and she was left wondering where her dreams had gone to. Somehow, the night erased it all. If only this mouse had an eraser. Then, he could scribble backwards w/no trace. Unfortunately, his footsteps were everywhere began it before collapse story her letting, backwards thoughts her bend to mirror the using, reverse in wrote she She wrote in reverse, using the mirror to bend her thoughts backwards, letting her story collapse before it began. The mouse ran. The cat sunk to the dirt, belly down. Overhead, the hawk floated, and suddenly, the hunter became the hunted. He smiled inward when he heard her ask how it was that the quietest boy around could be the most active text-er. He stared, his hands remembering the feel of the Atari controller, as his son zipped through virtual worlds w/a gun in hand. Harry Potter. Charlie Bone. Percy Jackson. Ralphie Samuel. Only one imaginary hero didn't belong on my list and it wasn't me. Was it Bono who noted that all you need is "three chords and the truth"? She now had the chords, but the truth? Elusive. As if saying her name over and over again would make her suddenly appear, he wandered, calling out "mom ... mom ... mom." Here's how she saw it: everything she said to them from now on would be in pictures, not words. Let the world figure it out. The darkness of the morning held only the sounds of frogs and far-off cars. It was here in silence that it dawned on him. As the leaf fell, it occurred to him that if brown was always beneath its green, what colors lay below the surface of him? He jammed the flag down and declared it all of his own. "Can you get that off my foot," she shouted. "I was here first." When she wanted to think differently, or change identities like avatars, she'd move the pencil from her right hand to her left. The handwritten notes on the margins of the novel the teacher handed me to read were something I needed to decipher, & quick. How one could go through life without shuffling their feet through fallen orange & red leaves was beyond her. But he hadn't. Somewhere, in that noisy saxophone of Ornette Colemen, a sliver of something special wormed it way into his head, and remained. All day, the dog sat, and stared out the window. Not a thing happened. Some days are like that. The dog just didn't know that. She heard him say, "National Day on Writing" but how to put images into words? She began with an empty canvas & painted. There's a moment while night-swimming when you are too far out to come back in. This was one of those moments, she mused. Eavesdropping on the conversation, he suddenly realized he knew the voiceless person on the other end of this person's line. Remembering her test-taking strategies from high school, she used the election ballot for a game of connect-the-dots. "Are you leaving us?" the boy asked. His father jammed another sock into the suitcase. "No," he lied, "I'm just making room." He wondered how it was that all the components - the ink, plastic, tube -- meant so little when words refused to flow. For every piece of candy handed out, the old woman furtively hid a second in her pocket. She would not miss out this year. The knife slipped. Blood dripped. As he instinctively sucked his finger, he noticed the pumpkin looking much, much scarier. His knotted fingers transformed the large flag into tight triangles. Memories, like the flag, were folded up for another year. He stared upward, counting dots on the ceiling tiles & calculating the distance they would cover if placed in one long line. Some scars are visible, like maps on skin. Others, not so. She ran fingers along a scar no one could see, & hoped for healing. In a box set way back behind sweaters & shirts & scarves, their letters live on. He; overseas. She; home. Words connected them. Remember how you used to hide behind corners, shooting imaginary enemies and celebrating death? It's never like that. Never. It seemed impossible for him, just back from Afghanistan, to sit next to him, a hero from WWII, but there they were, together. What she would always remember, as the nurse surrounded by trauma & chaos & war, was holding their hands: gently, softly The little boy looked up, seeing only Grandpa. He didn't see the man who stormed beaches, dug trenches & survived friends. His knotted fingers transformed the large flag into tight triangles. Memories, like the flag, were folded up for another year. White lights set against black sky made her wonder if every single star was a story, and if so, which one would fall.

See the full transcript

More presentations by Kevin Hodgson

• When Bullying Goes Digital: What We Can ...

  

  for NCTE Annual Meeting Session

• Some Memorable Made-up Words

  

  created by sixth graders

• Close Reading of Texts

  

  An overview of what we mean by "close reading" -- as part of the shifts in the Common Core

More prezis by author

Popular presentations

• What is Prezi? Press the play button!

  

  Visit www.prezitraining.co.uk for more info!

• Case study: BuyAKilt.com A/B tests produ...

  

  BuyAKilt.com includes a product filter, UKToolCentre removes it; both see an increase in conversion rate.

• Copy of (FINAL) Superhuman AI: Promise a...

  

  Luke Muehlhauser

More popular prezis in Explore

Sixty 25-Word Stories by Kevin Hodgson on Prezi:

Making as Writing/Writing as Making: Six-Word Memoirs | NWP Digital Is

BLOG POST

Making as Writing/Writing as Making: Six-Word Memoirs

Late to the game, I've recently become intrigued by the six-word memoir form.

Started by Smith Magazine in 2006 with the question, "Can you tell your life story in six words," the idea has gained a lot of traction. Organizations like National Public Radio have picked up on it and Smith Magazine has published Six-Word Memoir anthologies to great popularity.

For those of us on Twitter, compacting an idea - especially one as huge as a life's story - into smaller and smaller spaces is a familiar challenge. Because of the limited number to work with, each thing - character or word - becomes precious. As a former journalist, I've always appreciated brevity and - probably like any one of you - know from hard experience the difficulty of revising down to an essence of an idea.

As a reader, I find six-word memoirs to be an exercise in analyzing and interpreting not only what was included, but what had to have been left out. And I love that.

I've also become fascinated with the idea of the visual component to a six-word memoir. Almost always, it seems, as in this series posted at the NPR website, a six-word memoir will be accompanied by a powerful image that may add depth of meaning to the six words or challenge an original interpretation. Interestingly, the words seem small and almost an afterthought in the NPR example, except for the profoundness of the meaning they represent.

The video below of teen submissions similarly provides a visual narrative to the words, sometimes including movies, sometimes still images. There's a mashed up quality to the entire string of 30-plus memoirs; there is no lingering on any one piece (unless you use the pause controller). It's as though speed and brevity are a living breathing part of the experience.

In this case, the words for each teen memoir are themselves designed differently. Different fonts, different colors, different positioning. The words become part of the visual message in a way that seem to signal a critical importance, unlike the NPR example.

When I think about the creation of the six-word memoir, the "make" if you will, I find it interesting that the artful combining of image and text leads to the creation of a composition - making as writing, in other words. While at the same time the act of conceiving, revising and creating the text itself, published to a particular online form, could be described as a "make" - writing as making.

I'm still puzzling through the idea of making as writing/writing as making:

• Is the distinction important?
• If so, what are the implications for teaching and learning?
• How do we help youth understand the interplay between visual rhetoric and textual rhetoric in online spaces so that they themselves can construct effective narratives and compositions?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

• LOGIN or REGISTER to post comments

Making as Writing/Writing as Making: Six-Word Memoirs | NWP Digital Is: