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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End of a Golden Era: The Demise of a PETE Program

We are sad and a bit angry – maybe even confused.

Due to significant falling enrollments it was decided by departmental and college administrators that we will admit the last class of PETE students in the fall of 2014, and class-by-class the program will disappear in four years. While the legacy of the program will carry on through those who have graduated over the years, our students will no longer walk the halls of our building or reside in our classrooms, gymnasium, swimming pool, or local schools. Our faculty will no longer engage in teaching PETE students or supervising field experiences. Those who retain their positions will contribute to the movement and sport science curriculum, if they are lucky. Some may decide to pursue positions elsewhere. Some may be dismissed.

Purdue is not the first large research-intensive university to announce the discontinuation of its PETE program of late. The University of Michigan (the first author’s alma mater) has also decided to close its PETE program doors. This troubling trend led a colleague from another institution to point out that “this appears to be another sign of the end of the golden era in PETE.” Yes, this is true for Purdue’s contribution to the State of Indiana in preparing future physical education professionals. The other twenty-one institutions in the state that prepare physical educators will carry on – at least for the time being.

You may be asking yourself “why did this happen and did we see it coming?” And you may be wondering if we tried to prevent the closing of the program, or if there is anything you can do to safeguard your program. The remainder of this essay will address these questions and related issues.

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Social Media in PE is No Marshawn Lynch

My local NFL team are Superbowl Champions. Last season the Seattle Seahawks dominated football and no one exposed the team’s superiority more than running back Marshawn Lynch. When Marshawn carried the ball and turned on “beast mode” more often than not he was a “game changer.” Fire, the printing press, electricity, transistors, and integrated circuits were game changers too. But social media?

 

In the last issue, I confessed my ignorance about the not-so-new forms of social media that seemingly everyone except me was using. It was time to get a Twitter account and as a few of you know I’ve since “tweeted” things I felt worth sharing. But I’m still puzzled. How the heck does anyone have time to read these twittering messages that pour on us in an almost continuous daily torrent? And that’s just the tweets, not even the information they point to. Apparently, today’s millions of Twitter users have huge amounts of free time waiting to be filled. Obviously I have time-management issues to resolve.

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Celebrate Students’ Victories with a Brag Board

Not long ago I was preparing to schedule student teacher observations and field experience visits. I then discovered it was that time of the year when standardized tests took over our schools. Schedules change and teachers and administrators are overly stressed ensuring proper procedures are being followed. Some students care a great deal, while others not a bit. And of course the purpose of all of this testing is to tell us how our students, teachers, and schools are doing, and to compare each of them with others around the state, county, region, and nationally.

Perhaps your health and physical education classes have escaped the specter of standardized tests? Or maybe you are accountable for fitness tests, motor skill assessments, or have to create your own student-based learning outcomes? In either case, I believe that most teachers, parents, and administrators will tell you these standardized tests fail to adequately express the full story of what America’s students, teachers, and schools are achieving. Stories of great academic achievements rarely reference test scores. There is so much more that my students, my fellow teachers, and I do that can’t be easily assessed by standardized tests. These are the real victories that I believe are most important, and I think we should celebrate more than the means, medians, and standard deviations the testing agencies report to us.

I first saw the first “brag board” at the fitness center where I worked out. People could post their latest accomplishments, goals attained, and personal bests. I decided this was a great idea I could use to celebrate students’ real progress toward becoming lifelong movers that was not revealed with fitness tests. My original brag board started out as a white board where students could write their accomplishments in and out of class. For younger grades, I would often be the person to select content. For example, my second graders told me they were able to do the swing step while jumping rope at recess so I told them to put that on the board. The white board was short lived and quickly replaced by a large sheet of white paper. I did away with the white board because we quickly started to run out of room but I didn’t have the heart to erase anything. The papers create a lasting celebration of student success.

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Social Networking in Physical Education: Connect and Follow

I grew up in a time when you answered the phone in the kitchen and had to pull the cord into other rooms if you wanted privacy. It was a time when you never would have thought to change the channel on the TV during a commercial because it meant getting up off the couch. I played “follow the leader” and “connect the dots.”

Now, I can talk on the phone walking down the street. I can use it to watch TV with or without commercials. And, I use it to connect and follow hundreds of friends and colleagues at the same time! Boy, have things changed!

This past year, I finally decided to jump into the Physical Education social networking world. It is a vast world of hashtags and links, videos and podcasts. I’m both overwhelmed and inspired. After hours, days, and months of friending, pinning, posting, commenting and tweeting, I still have not come close to scratching the surface of the physical education network on the World Wide Web.

So, for those of you perhaps contemplating joining the online social media frenzy, I’m going to introduce you to three popular ways of connecting – Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook. Now YOU can join in the fun!

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Summer Activities are a great time to relax, refuel and re-furbish

For most of us the school year is coming to a close. But for teachers, it’s a good time to reflect and think about what worked, what didn’t work, and the reasons for both. To get a head start for the next school term, I find it helpful to create a calendar with large space blocks to enter pertinent daily comments. Entries can include behavior issues, positive lessons, and accidents, parental concerns, or anything you think important for future use.

These entries can help remind you of past problems you can avoid and the details of events you might need in a future meeting. With the advent of smart phones and tablets, you can also easily add daily reminders and notes into an App. But, sometimes it’s also good to have a back up just in case of a technology glitch.

Before packing your bags for a much anticipated and probably needed vacation, I encourage you to plan what needs to be done to take you through the first week of teaching. Even the relaxing part of your summer activities can combine refueling and refurbishing too. For teachers, learning never stops. Observing what young people are doing helps us to better appreciate what makes our students tick, and how they’ll likely react to our teaching and the lessons we are planning to present to them.

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Online Physical Education: The Elephant in the Room

There’s a feeling among some physical educators that Online Physical Education (OLPE) has been thrust upon them. These same physical educators also feel that OLPE cannot contribute to a meaningful physical education curriculum experience. Despite these reservations, many states are now requiring high school students to take at least one online course before graduation (Brown, 2012; Watson et al., 2012).

Others make online courses available and accept them towards an earned high school diploma. In 2007, the National Association for Sports and Physical Education (NASPE) developed a position paper that identified NASPE’s preliminary position for OLPE courses. Today, students across the country are increasingly electing to take OLPE courses. Recently, former NASPE President Craig Buschner expressed his thoughts on OLPE in pelinks4u. This paper indicated that OLPE lacked ‘best practice,’ should address the same curriculum as traditional PE, and that hybrid/blended models of OLPE delivery may be best suited to the needs of public school students.

For some, OLPE is an oxymoron since the very thought of physical education taken online creates a contradictory image in their mind. Some, upon hearing about OLPE perhaps imagine students sitting in front of a computer completing reports or worse yet playing video games and turning in activity logs showing that they have engaged in physical activity when in fact they haven’t. For others, OLPE may conjure images of the humans in the movie Wall-E who had stopped moving and depended on technology to meet their every need resulting in a morbidly obese populace that had lost the ability and desire to move. Worse yet the prospect of OLPE raises fears that trained physical educators will not be needed as instructors in virtual settings that rely on technology rather than traditional physical activities, facilities, and equipment.

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Secondary Online Physical Education: Walking a Tightrope

Nine years ago while serving on the Board of Directors of NASPE, a high-school teacher asked me for “our position” on secondary online physical education (OLPE). This Southwest teacher was concerned about his school district’s hasty adoption of online learning. He wanted to know more about online learning but felt conflicted. As an award recipient for his effective teaching and service on behalf of the school, department, and state association he said, “I feel like I’m walking a tightrope.” At the time, NASPE had no official position. We realized one was needed! This was a tipping point. The wonders of the digital age and online learning were intersecting with school physical education. More than a few physical education programs and teachers were being asked to transition from traditional, face-to-face teaching, to online instruction.

Subsequently, NASPE published a position paper entitled Initial Guidelines for Online Physical Education (2007). The skinny was that “no published evidence of OLPE learning existed, that OLPE should meet national standards for learning, that a hybrid model was a reasonable instructional alternative until research was available, and that OLPE was an exciting and attractive – yet untested – alternative to delivering quality PE.” Later, NASPE published the paper Appropriate Use of Instructional Technology in PE (2009). Reasonably, NASPE advocated technology as “a tool for learning if used appropriately for instructional effectiveness…that it could supplement, but not substitute, for effective instruction.”

As long as school physical education survives or thrives (see Mike Metzler’s recent pelinks4u essay for thoughts on this), physical educators will always be concerned about what to teach and how to teach. Recently, the Shape of the Nation Report (SON, 2012) reported that 30 states now grant credit for online physical education, however, only 17 states require certified PE teachers. It made me wonder who teaches these courses in the other 13 states? Some futurists predict that by 2020 half of all secondary education courses will be delivered online. If true, before long many school physical educators will be challenged to walk this instructional tightrope.

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