5 Simple Ways to Improve Physical Education w/ #Edtech

May 05, 2017

5 Simple Ways to Improve Physical Education w/ #Edtech

Jarrod Robinson, the PE Geek, shares on episode 70 of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

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Today Jarrod Robinson @mrrobbo gives us the apps, tools, and mindset to rock physical education class. This conversation is so much fun and will give PE teachers and coaches lots of ideas for using technology to improve sports performance and get fit.

improve physical education with technology

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In today’s show, Jarod Robinson geeks out Physical Education Class:

Replay apps to help kids see what to improve
Team creation apps to make picking teams faster
Custom Workouts with Sworkit
Fast fitness music on fit radio
Making fitness portfolios with Seesaw

I hope you enjoy this episode with Jarod Robinson!

Want to hear another episode on movement in schools? Listen to Rob Donatelli talk about 5 easy brain breaks for your classroom.

Selected Links from this Episode

Scroll down to read the transcript for how he uses these apps or listen now.

Full Bio As Submitted

Jarrod Robinson

I travel the world helping #physed teachers use technology more meaningfully in their classes. Founder of www.connectedpe.com & over 100 educational software products & services.

Transcript of episode 70 5 Simple Ways to Improve Physical Education w/ #Edtech with Jarrod Robinson the PE Geek

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[Recording starts 0:00:00]

Today we talk to my favorite P.E. geek, Jarrod Robinson @mrrobbo from down under about five simple ways to improve physical education with Ed tech. This is episode 70.

The Ten-minute Teacher podcast with Vicki Davis. Every week day you’ll learn powerful practical ways to be a more remarkable teacher today.

VICKI: Today Jarrod Robinson, the P.E. geek is helping us learn five simple ways to improve physical education with technology. So Jarrod, technology in P.E., how do we start?

JARROD: That’s a really good question and it has evolved over many years since we sort of began this journey of looking at technology and phys Ed. But if you’re a phys Ed teacher listening, if you’re a general classroom teacher listening and you’re looking for ways that you can implement technology there’s lots of things that you can do. The very first thing that you might consider using is utilizing a video delay tool. Are you familiar with video delay tools at all?

VICKI: I might be. I don’t know. I’ve never heard them called video delay tools so tell me what it is.

JARROD: Think about yourself looking in a mirror and you’re looking at a mirror reflection and just imagine that mirror is not in real time, you know, you’re brushing your hair and the actual reflection that you see is delayed by a given delay period that you set. So I see a lot of teachers using video delay tools such as Replay It on the Chrome store http://ift.tt/2pNB6In and video delay tools such as BAM Video Delay. http://ift.tt/2pMVJT7 So there’s a big group of these. And what they enable you to do is complete a performance and then you’ve for a given delay period to get back to the device whether it’s a laptop or an iPad or an android tablet and see that. So you can imagine, it’s sort of like having an instant replay in your classroom and that brings out this enormous array of possibilities.

[00:02:00]

VICKI: Yeah, because you’re teaching a kid how to shoot a basketball shot and they say, “No, I am doing it right, I am doing it right.” And you’re like, “No, you’re not seeing what I’m seeing.” Well, now they can go see it and they see, “Oh, I am not doing it like I’m supposed to.”

JARROD: Amazingly, that’s something that happens a lot, people don’t really understand the full movement just through experience that they do themselves. And just by overlaying a simple replay, you can paint a very different story. And that’s appropriate not just for phys Ed but any performance-based thing that we do and the replay tools make that possible.

You know, anywhere from a 2 second replay up to a 10 minute replay, you can set within these tools and then give the students time to get back to it and in the context of what they’re doing see the feedback. So that would be step number one available for all situations.

I think the second thing that I’m seeing a lot of teachers use is this idea of, having almost, like, a workout happen on a larger screen in their P.E. classroom. So you can imagine, you’ve got a projector, you’ve got a portable T.V. that goes in. And rather than the teacher at the front of the room trying to run a workout and think they know everything you can play a lot apps like Sworkit https://sworkit.com/which is available on all platforms and you can say how much time you’ve got and then press play. And then an actual expert will lead the work out for five minutes or ten minutes. And you’ve effectively cloned yourself because during that time period where the workout is running you can actually then walk around and assist.

So I think that’ s tremendously powerful thing to do – to clone yourself.

VICKI: Awesome. Love it. Okay, what else?

JARROD: I could never stop without talking about Fit Radio. So Fit Radio is a must for any classroom environment where you want to have music that correlates to the activity that’s happening.

[00:04:00]

Now, Fit Radio http://ift.tt/1912gLS is great because you hit play in the app or on the website and for free, it will stream out classroom-friendly music for your students that’s designed to get them moving and active. It’s sort of high energy so you can say we’re doing yoga, we’re doing aerobics and the music will adjust to fit that. So I think music is a great platform in all classes and Fit Radio is designed so that you can just press play and sort of forget about it and just have the music do its job.

VICKI: Now, what generation? Is it like Muzak in an elevator or is it like old ‘80s or is it more modern?

JARROD: It’s a bit of a conversation of lots of new stuff, old stuff and I think the cool part about it is it’s all mixed together and it’s mapped to types of activities. So if you’re running then it’s obviously a little bit more upbeat and higher tempo. So the sort of songs that weeds into it, matching of that size and that type. But there’s also a phys Ed-centric channel. http://ift.tt/2pN0pbw Ed So you can press the phys Ed channel in the app and you can get a collection of phys Ed -appropriate music that you can use for stations it’s really powerful.

VICKI: Okay. What’s our fourth?

JARROD: Team Shake. http://ift.tt/2pNkUacSo I think this is an app that has been so widely received in all contexts of teachers that I work with. And the essential premise is that it lets you randomly decide teams in a flash. And obviously this is something that all classroom teachers do. They create groups, they create teams, and Team Shake lets you do that by simply putting in the list of students, shake the device and you get your randomly-generated teams. But there’s more to it than just being random in that you can actually say which students should work together and which students shouldn’t work together. And basically, it will create random assortment, but take into mind those things that you would do if you were creating teams just on the stop with your kids.

[00:06:00]

It’s an amazing tool, speeds up the amount of time that you can then spend on actually doing the activity rather than decide teams which I think is a big problem.

VICKI: Awesome. Okay, what’s our last?

JARROD: Seesaw. https://web.seesaw.me/Seesaw is such a widely used tool across education platforms, all classroom environments. But phys Ed is really sort of taken to the use of the Seesaw portfolio capturing tool which is available on all device types again. And essentially, it’s just a portfolio tool where you can capture videos and audio and photos and you can assign them to students. And then it gives parents the ability to follow on from home.

(Editor’s note: We did a full episode on Seesaw here: http://ift.tt/2n0R3qN )

So we’re seeing lots of P.E. teachers start to capture authentic means for what students are doing in their classroom and Seesaw is the best tool for making that happen in my opinion.

VICKI: But Jarrod, what kinds of things are they capturing to go in their phys Ed portfolio?

JARROD: Yes, so let’s say you’re doing a gymnastics unit and you’ve got a display, some sort of gymnastics presentation of skills, for example. So you might have the students capture their skills that they’ve accrued throughout that unit in their portfolio of actual video evidence of what they’ve achieved. And then that’s shareable. And then the best part of about it from a teacher perspective is being able to look at Seesaw and actually see where students were at rather than doing the old ‘let’s just do a bit of a gut feeling of where they fit it in.’ That’s actually got some real evidence there to drive your assessment and drive what they’ve been able to achieve in your classroom.

So I think it’s tremendous.

VICKI: So Jarrod, as we finish up, what do you think is the most transformational thing you’ve ever learned that really made you a better phys Ed teacher? Like, when you learned that, everything changed. What was it?

JARROD: It’s that you don’t have to be alone. That’s so cliché for many people to say that. But if you’ve got the ability to connect to other people just like we are right now through social media or any sort of other platform, that’s the real leverage.

(See Jarrod’s Website https://thepegeek.com/ to connect with other physical education teachers.)

[00:08:00]

You know, being able to share ideas, being able to share ideas, being able to critique one another or learn from one another. And do it on [mass], not just locally because we’ve exultantly had nice local connections. But being able to do that globally, as I sit here in Australia and talk to you we can share ideas and that really has been the difference maker between when I first rolled into classrooms in 2008 to now; being able to tap out to those people who have expertise in those areas that I can leverage.

VICKI: And that connection is so important it will finish up. We were laughing before the show, remarkable teachers about – Jarrod actually Skyped with my students quite some time ago. I needed them to have a connection and I wanted them to guess where somebody was in the world. And he was watching the kangaroos hop by as he was driving down the road. It was just such an amazing experience. So he’s been on my radar for a very long time. And phys Ed teachers an really all of us can learn from Jarrod because we need more physical education in all of our classes, we need more physical movement because the brain the body are connected and we want that brain moving and we want that body moving.

So get out there, be remarkable and amp up your phys Ed classroom.

Hello Remarkable Teachers, would you please help me do something? I’m trying to help more people find out about the Ten Minute Teacher Show. To do that, if you just could take some time to go to iTunes http://ift.tt/2o0iP6w or to Stitcher http://ift.tt/2pN0NH8or to leave a review. It really does help. Thank you so much.

Thank you for listening to the Ten-minute Teacher Podcast. You can download the show notes and see the archive at http://ift.tt/2quX4Nu. Never stop learning.

[End of Audio 0:09:51]

[Transcription created by tranzify.com. Some additional editing has been done to add grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors. Every attempt has been made to correct spelling. For permissions, please email lisa@coolcatteacher.com]

The post 5 Simple Ways to Improve Physical Education w/ #Edtech appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!