My driving question has been through a long journey these past eight weeks. It began as “How can we do PE online?” and for a while, I stubbornly thought it could remain that. When I finally admitted to myself that I sounded more like a caveman and less like a graduate student conducting research, my DQ then began a wild ride with the following considerations:
-Can PE teachers and coaches improve their instruction and facilitate active learning with new tech tools? -How can we effectively incorporate technology into PE and coaching to enhance student learning? -How can we effectively incorporate technology into PE and coaching at the secondary level to make our students more motivated and active learners? -How can the incorporation of technology in PE lesson design increase student efficacy? (something about lifelong learners!) -What are the systems for students tracking what they're doing health-wise which will transfer from classroom to distance learning? Doing routine enough to become classroom procedure Then I began to think about three research questions in relation to my capstone project. I want my capstone project to be a resource for secondary PE teachers for “How to Tech in PE,” including digital tools for youth, high school collegiate athletics. The goal is to make digital learning and effective implementation of technology in physical education and coaching more tangible for physical educators and coaches everywhere. Right now I'm hoping my DQ and research questions lend themselves to this goal. They are currently as follows (though evidently it can always change at any moment!)... DQ: What tools + procedures can a PE program put into place that will easily transition to distance education and support students to develop lifelong habits? RQ1: How can the incorporation of technology in PE lesson design increase student efficacy and create lifelong learners? RQ2: Which tools support a student who prefers individual exercise routines vs a student who needs the social aspect? RQ3: Which tech tools and strategies will allow youth, high school and collegiate athletic programs to effectively teach year-round?
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Lucky for me, incorporating gaming into my class comes naturally. In PE, the game is usually the curriculum itself. Every day in my class, students are “playing” something while learning/honing new skills and concepts. I believe I’ve implemented both game-based learning and gamification with my classes in the past. With game-based learning, the content is the game itself. When I have my students play capture the flag (after a brief explanation of basic rules and objectives), the onus is on them to figure out the best strategy. In this example, the strategy is the content and the students are learning the content through gameplay. Edutopia’s article “3 Ways to Use Game-Based Learning” explains “When using games, try to avoid intervening when students are figuring something out” (1). Over the years, I’ve gotten better at keeping my distance and observing my students’ brains work together to figure something out. A less experienced me would jump in and help immediately if I saw a concept wasn’t being perfectly understood at first. But I now see the great value in allowing students to figure out the best strategy to go about achieving their objective. Gamification, as opposed to game-based learning, is when game elements are introduced to support the content being learned and to help motivate students. The best example I can think of for gamification with my classes is with the team building unit I’ve been teaching for the past four years. Throughout our team building unit, students are put into teams of 6-8 and are shown a wide variety of collaborative games in which they must work together to achieve a particular goal. The games are all explained and/or modeled through direct instruction, demonstrations and cue cards. Therefore, the content is taught directly to students before the game begins, not through gameplay. The gamification aspect is enhanced with “cash” being earned through successfully completing a team building objective. Over the course of two weeks, teams go through each team building “station” and are potentially awarded a certain amount of "money" based on how successful they were in achieving their objective. At the end of the day, every teams’ “banker” deposits their cash, and totals are tallied up on a big scoreboard. I’ve incorporated scoreboards and even tournament brackets into some other units we do, however it’s important to always keep the balance between competition and sportsmanship. Sometimes introducing a scoreboard when unnecessary in PE will only lead to overly-competitive teenagers and hurt feelings. It’s important to know when to gamify and when not to. In Eddie Obeng’s Ted Talk, “Smart Failure for a Fast Changing World,” he reveals that the rules have changed regarding how our world works. Whatever we used to believe might not still apply today. He is primarily referring to globalization and tech as the cause for this change, but the notion of the old rules no longer applying and innovation as essential is incredibly relatable to our situation with needing to make a decision as to how to reopen schools and what it’s going to look like. In the “old world,” teachers and school shave been going about their ways for a long time. We cannot afford to continue to implement these outdated models, because (a) we know more effective ways to teach, and more importantly (b) we are in an unprecedented pandemic and returning to a traditional format seems to be out of the question.
I also think about Obeng’s message in relation to PE design specifically during this pandemic. The old world’s ways of teaching PE no longer apply now, for obvious reasons (close proximity, physical contact, locker rooms, etc.). Obeng mentions that in the old world, failure is unacceptable, but in our new world, innovation is essential and therefore smart failure should be encouraged. There could not be a more perfect time for me to be learning what I am in this program and have a chance to immediately apply it to my students. I will need to be innovative. Some lessons might fail, but Eddie Obeng would say not only is that okay, it’s absolutely necessary if I want to evolve with the world around me. I decided to take a break from the DQ stuff and write about transliteracy today instead. “Transliteracy is the ability to read, listen to, synthesize and apply what we gather across different platforms” (1). When I think about students demonstrating transliteracy, I think of a specific example that applied to me when I was in school. I think about all of the film and video production classes that I took in high school and college. Video production requires effectively writing a script, working a camera, choosing what shots/visuals to include, and considering when to incorporate titles, dialogue or possible captions. There is a ton of creative freedom in video production, but one must be sufficiently transliterate to pull it off. It makes me wonder about what is offered in NVUSD – Do we have video production classes for or students in high school? (I genuinely don’t know, but I can tell you we did not at my old school.)
I was a video production/media studies major in college (back when I was still trying to find my path in this world), but I think the skills I cultivated then contribute to my teaching and my general technical abilities today. That’s because making videos helped me become more transliterate! I hope for NVUSD students who are passionate about video production, we can provide them with this ever-so-important opportunity in education.
I just completed a flipped lesson plan and rarely have I been prouder of a professional creation of mine. I began exploring with Edpuzzle and was shocked at how few good PE videos I could find. I ended up finding a perfect 2:20 heart rate video on YouTube and created my own Edpuzzle by adding in five multiple choice questions. Then it was time to check out Nearpod. Again… could find very little useful stuff on there for PE. I began creating my flipped heart rate lesson slide show and after a few minutes, I was getting in the Nearpod groove. I was not in love with not being able to embed links within a slide with text. I also did not love not being able to italicize, bold, underline or change any fonts within my slides with text. Maybe one is able to —but these functions at least were not cooperating on my Mac desktop. I embedded my Edpuzzle Heart Rate video at the beginning of the Nearpod slide deck, as it serves as a perfect intro/hook. I utilized the Mac screen capture (command/shift/4) very much throughout this creation. I embedded a screenshot of portion of a google spreadsheet table. The last part of the lesson is an embedded a google form as a means of assessment and data collection.
So I had my flipped lesson, but now it was time to create my screencast. I thought of this screencast as a sort of “accompaniment” to the Nearpod slide deck. In other words, while students could probably successfully execute this lesson with just the slide deck, I wanted the screencast to be a tool to help support students’ understanding of the content and assignment. After creating my first screencastomatic, I wasn’t totally in love with my “script” and the flow. I exported the video file, dropped it into iMovie and started made a bunch of small edits there (and added background music, hopefully it’s not too distracting!). Elementary teacher Eric Sheninger offers a variety of “blended learning” options and makes the claim that students can ultimately learn in ways with technology that they simply couldn’t without it. Makes me wonder if I should be utilizing the flipped classroom more. Could my students learn more effectively from this lesson than a more traditional worksheet, pen and paper heart rate lesson? To recap, for this flipped lesson creation I used the following tech tools: Edpuzzle (first time) Nearpod (first time) Screenshots Screencastomatic (first time) Google Sheets Google Forms iMovie Can you tell I am proud of myself? |
About Dustin Green:High School PE Teacher Archives
March 2021
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