Category: Technology

This category recognizes the ways that rapidly changing technology can impact teaching. Read more about how to effectively use the latest technology to enhance student learning and support new and innovative teaching strategies.

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Vision Training for Athletes

In Clinic

Getting the most out of athletes isn’t an easy road: discoveries made in biomechanics and nutrition help with development and getting the most out of the body, but are you training athlete’s minds? And are you training the mind and the body together? With sports vision training, you can round out and improve overall human performance, starting from the top down.

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There are a number of key vision skills that need to be developed fully for athletes to reach their full potential. We’ve compiled the following list of 10 key vision skills to improve performance and reach new heights:

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Sports Vision for Basketball

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“In reality, it all starts with vision.” – Kareem Rush, NBA shooting guard

Sports Vision Training: 2-Part Article Series

Regardless of the age or skill level of the players at hand, there’s one constant that cannot be ignored: success in basketball comes down to simply making shots. The National Basketball League (NBA) has long been called the “make or miss league,” an adage that reflects on a number of different aspects of pro ball, but strikes home when it comes to shooting. Good shooting comes in many different forms: watch an NBA game and you will see a variety of shooting forms and techniques. While there is an underlying set of concrete fundamentals that all shooters must have, how they implement them can vary. Often overlooked by players and coaches alike, vision plays a substantial role in a shooter’s ability to put the ball in the basket.

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“Athletes are always looking for anything that can give them a competitive edge. When asked when they perform at their best, all say that ‘the game slows down.’ In reality, it all starts with vision,” says NBA shooting guard Kareem Rush.

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Introduction to Sports Vision Training

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Sports Vision Training: 2-Part Article Series

We’ve all been there: articles on this, journals on that, a recommended blog post from a colleague sitting in your inbox. It’s a lot to take in, but important to ensure we’re broadening our horizons and learning new things helps improve the coaching, training, and education we impart to the athletes with whom we work. The problems are the gaps in those resources. There have been amazing strides made in certain aspects of athletics, particularly with respect to performance. Advancements in biomechanics, nutrition, sport psychology —all incredibly important— have been common of late, but they tend to leave out a significant contributor to performance: vision.

Binovi_Logo_RGB_SM@4xOur vision accounts for as much as 80% —some argue even more— of the sensory input our brains process during our day-to-day lives. But how many drills, exercises, or activities are specifically targeting an athlete’s vision? And how many are having any significant impact on the mental processes going on behind the scenes? Most only really consider their vision when something changes with it: players see things less clearly, experience double-vision or blurriness, or notice something just isn’t quite as it should be.

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The Latest in Vision Performance Training

(2-Part Article Series) Sports Vision Training

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Built on decades of research and technological innovation, Binovi is a neuro-visual performance testing and training platform combining dedicated hardware and software, expert knowledge, and data insights to test, analyze, track, and report on visual and cognitive performance. We’ve worked with vision care, occupational therapy, and sports vision specialists to develop the tools used in child development, rehabilitation, athletic training, and more. Using Binovi, these specialists are able to identify issues with key vision skills, assign personalized plans to help remedy those issues, and improve overall performance.

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Creating Community in Online Classes: Drawing from the Strengths of Virtual Fitness Programs

The COVID-19 pandemic forced instructors to move classes designed for face-to-face delivery to remote delivery almost overnight. The shift resulted in challenges faced by students and instructors. Remote learning required students to approach their education using learning strategies differently, and during this transition, many students faced difficulties with a multitude of financial, emotional, and psychological issues related to the pandemic. In addition to being tested to adapt the delivery of content rapidly, teachers were also challenged to create and foster community in a remote learning scenario. In short, navigating this situation was complicated.

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The reality of the upcoming school year remains in question for some schools. We do not yet know how COVID-19 will change how we live and learn, but it is anticipated we will experience a new normal, one in which online course delivery is likely to play an increasing role. A frequent conversation had this past spring amongst faculty at my institution centered around the topic of how to create community in online courses. A sense of community is critically important to creating a safe and productive learning space and improving retention. Nevertheless, knowing the value of community and understanding how to create and foster it are two different things.

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This article shares the four elements of the Theory of Sense of Community (TSOC) (McMillan & Chavis, 1986), identifies how virtual fitness programming utilizes the four elements of the TSOC to establish and facilitate community within the online fitness environment and provides examples of strategies teachers can use to create and enhance a sense of community within online courses.

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Effectively Utilizing Social Media With Your Sports Team

What often happens in the real world transcends the sports world. This is also true regarding social media. With today’s technology advances, it is essential for sports coaches to utilize social media platforms in teaching their athletes.

Mullin, Hardy, and Sutton (2014) noted that Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Foursquare, Tumblr, and Pinterest are the most popular social media platforms. Additional popular social media platforms include Snapchat, YouTube, WhatsApp, and LinkedIn. Social media enables us to watch and share videos and photos, read and write blogs, post on social networking sites, and have online conversations (Newman, Peck, Harris, & Willhide, 2013). In today’s world, new media is defined as digital & social media. Social media encompasses all of the interactions between people online and all the ways they participate in and share information, knowledge, and opinions while using web-based applications to communicate (Newman, Peck, Harris, & Willhide, 2013).  In regard to sport, Coakley (2017) noted four characteristics of new media or digital and social media:

  1. Extend and radically change (potentially) our connections with the world.
  2. Are not limited to sequential programming.
  3. Enable each of us to be the “editors” of our media experiences if we wish.
  4. Give us the potential to create our own sports realities and experiences as spectators and virtual athletes.

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Utilizing Assessment Technology in Physical Education

Assessment in physical education is a key accountability measure for both the student and the teacher.  The primary goal of assessment should be the enhancement of learning (NASPE, 2004), not an add-on (Nye, Dubay, Gilbert, & Wajciechowski, 2009).

Unfortunately, due to time constraints or uncertainty of the purpose, assessment in many physical education programs is inadequate. Common reasons physical educators do not assess include a) “It takes up too much time.”  Teachers may feel they do not have enough time to spend collecting assessment data, when they only see the students for 40 minutes, once a week. b) “I don’t know how.”  Teachers might not know how to assess and/or what to assess. c) “It won’t change anything, why even bother.”  Teachers might assess and collect data, but do not use it to inform instruction.  Fortunately, it has never been easier to collect, organize and save assessment data using technology in physical education. This article highlights two technology resources a physical education teacher can use to collect student data, Kahoot and MetricMe.

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