So, PE doesn’t always get a good rap – are we all just “jocks” who run around and get amazing sun tans? or are we mis-understood because we wear shorts and sometimes flip flops to school each day?  Possibly…

However there are a number of PE teachers in the region who are keen to discuss issues that come up in our line of work – I wanted to create a PD network for me with other teachers in simliar schools or trying to work on similar issues within PE and Health and so we have decided to share our conversations with others in the hope that we can connect to other’s and share the PE love!

I am excited to share our first PE Hangout, this is more about introducing the panel – Mr Ken Forde, Mr Alex Thomas, Mr Jarrod Robinson (AKA Mr PE Geek), (Mr Blake Kampen who was missing today) and myself.  We are hoping to Hangout once a month or so and share our thoughts on curriculum, performance work, dealing with facilities, timetables, nasty weather, coaching, the stigma of  being a PE teacher and how tech is changing the subject we all love.  We hope to invite in others who have expert knowledge or who are interested in sharing along the way.  Let me know if you have any burning questions or have a passion about a topic and would like to share too.

Happy viewing.

Unboxing iPod Touch by FHKE CC BY SA

Recently I was one of 20 presenters at our annual school Speedgeeking session.  I decided to focus on iPods/iDevices and to introduce my audience to Coach’s Eye/Dropbox and Reflector.  I had 7 minutes to discuss these with my audience (between 4-7 people) and repeated the experience 7 times to new people.

I started off with the usual speel, who I am; what I teach; what I am trialing and trying to do in PE and then launched into the apps and iDevices.  But after the second round of 7 minutes, I had to take a step back.  I was finding that in the body language there was such a diverse range that I needed to change tact a little bit and slow down to meet the middle person.

I didn’t do a great job of preparing for this presentation.  I had thought about slowing down my speech, about less words and more showing of the apps themselves, putting 4 iPods on the tables for everyone to see/touch and that often less is more as there are only 7 minutes!  But I hadn’t banked on the uncomfortable moments in my presentation – how to make my audience more comfortable with mobile technology.  I hadn’t even thought about presenting to someone who had not even touched an iPod before.

Upon reflection I should have been more prepared.  I think that we do tend to shift our focus and assumption that people will naturally be curious and will come with some previous smart device experience when we spend a lot of time around them, but this was clearly not the case with a few in my crowd last week.  I had one person ask me if this (the iPod on the desk) was an iPod?, and was interested because she hadn’t seen/held/touched one before.  I had another lady who didn’t want to pick one up at all, she was very nervous and worried about the next 7 minutes and what she might be asked to do.  And of course the other extreme were the curious who nodded politely but who just wanted to see what apps I had and get into Minecraft while I was sharing something they deemed less important.

This made me think about what happens both with staff but more about our students.  While I am keen to roll out iPods and mobile tech into my classroom what are the stats on kids using technology, am I shooting too high, how much do I need to explain and what assumptions can I make about their first iDevice lesson with me in PE?  After a little research, I found some great infographics on this topic.  Kid tech according to Apple gives a very clear picture of kids under 8.  The take-aways here at that over 50% of 5-8 year olds use Tablets/iPad type devices and that 7 out of 10 kids (under 12) are using iDevices in their homes.  So it might be sufficient for me to assume that 70% of my kids will be okay with iDevices, and I need to assume that at least 30% may need more help – but with 70% of the class presumably okay, then we will outnumber those who are new to this experience, which is a very good number to have!  So my take aways here are that we need to consider the 3/10 in our class who may find technology daunting and surround them with able kids who are naturally curious and excited, and this may also be the case for our PE colleagues or other teachers/educators/administrators/parents in our learning communities.

Nutrition is a big focus in our curriculum at UNIS Hanoi.  I teach this unit to Grade 7 students every year and the challenge is to figure out what to teach and how to spend our precious 10 hours or so.

The last two years, I decided to do too much take a different direction and try and step out into some new territory or to share familiar topics in a new way.  My inspiration came a little from watching Jamie Oliver’s TED talks speech where he was awarded a prize from TED for his work.  If you haven’t seen his video, I strongly suggest that you take 20 minutes and see him for yourself.

Oliver’s speech inspired me to look at some key ideas with my students.  I used my first lesson to watch and to stop along the way and discuss and just interpret some of what he says or shows as some of the concepts escaped them a little.   The main ideas we took were:

• Generational eating is changing – what our parents and grandparents ate or how food was prepared is changing.
• Sugar, salt and fat/oils are much more dominant
• Education about food is shifting out of the home and into an unknown place (is it at school?  Is it at home?  Where is it?)
• The Main Street of all towns/cities is changing to look very similar – how do we feel about this?
• School canteens are shifting away from volunteers to businesses making money – nutrition is not the prime concern.  And this is also reflected in our supermarkets.
• Who needs to make some change here to see some of the issues decrease?

Armed with our new information we discussed what this means to us at our school in our city and country.  Vietnam doesn’t have many of the issues of the West (yet) but as we see Burger King and KFC, Starbucks and eventually MacDonald’s make their way here, no doubt we will see a change and it is this that we started talking about.

The next focus was about looking at what the Food Groups suggest we eat.  Food Groups have undergone quite a change since I learned about them at school.  It is possible to get quite a different number of them designed for different countries and cultures, but since Mrs Obama has made quite a deal out of Food and is the face of the MyPlate campaign, I investigated this online information and decided to use it.  (we also looked at the Asian Food Pyramid for reference).

MyPlate is awesome.  You might not be up for the graphics or the American way of websites, but for pure information, graphics, online quizzes or test and differentiated work (for grade levels) it is hard to beat.  I asked my kids to focus on researching only from this site, and I carefully directed them to pre-prepared booklets online with quiz questions and carefully organised sections for kids to read through and be a little curious about.  My students prepared information on Food Groups and learnt about: Fruit, Vegetables, Protein, Dairy and Grains.  We shared and pooled our ideas and information on Google Docs and then made Google Presentations that we peer assessed.

Next we kept a food diary using a resource online.  You can find an online journal or just ask the kids to write this down, I asked them to keep information on 3 days including 2 school days and a weekend day.  We talked about the fact that we were conducting an experiment and the estimations of portions so that they had some tangible things to write down and compare.   We then got together and discussed the difference between the school day and weekend and I then asked them to put one of their days into the Food Tracker.  Food Tracker is just that, you can input all your food and drink for each day and the portions and it tells you the relative amounts of each food group based on your age/gender/weight etc.  It is a great statistics tool and the kids were amazed to see what they were eating and how they went.  This process takes time and relies on a good internet link!  We then screenshot the graphs and information into their OneNote page and they wrote a small analysis – basically did they eat enough?  Which Food Groups (if any) were lacking and what did they get out of the exercise?  This then led to the next section.  Students who completed this quickly were asked to input their physical exercise/activity for the week into the Physical Activity Tracker and we discussed this as well.

Portion sizes was the next conversation looking at what we should eat and what we actually eat.  And we looked at our plates at home; school and then what we were eating outside of our homes at friend’s houses or if we ate out.  It was very clear that this was not something we had a lot of knowledge about!  We looked at lots of images and we discussed their food diaries.  As this is a focus of our Grade 10 unit, I introduced this concept but didn’t go in too deep.

My main focus was to look at Media.  I chose two giants of advertising here in Hanoi – Coca Cola and Oreos.  Almost all food related media centres around these two junk foods.  English had run a unit on interpreting Media and the questions we should ask ourselves when looking at advertising, and we used those in our unraveling of a series of ads.  You can find the video series of ads here. The ads centre around two characters – usually an adult (dad) and his son or daughter.  The child is in their space, usually their bedroom, and teaches their parent the “proper” way to eat an Oreo cookie.  As Oreo is/was a major sponsor of Basketball player, Yao Ming, the references here to “dunking” a cookie are also cleverly connected.  We studied these ads and looked at their target audience and how successful their campaign was in our view.

Then we looked at the nutritional value of an Oreo cookie, and I took care to do this on the official website for Oreo’s not on a different site. .  The kids were amazed that Oreo’s don’t contain anything good for them.  We had some interesting conversations about media, ad interpretation and nutritional content, oh and Jamie Oliver’s message from the start of our unit.

Coca Cola isn’t much better.  We looked at some of their ads, this is one of the favorite ones:

Coke’s main theme was around Happiness.  We looked at their ad campaign and then once again we looked at the nutritional content, from the official Coca Cola website.  Lots of discussion here linking to the high sugar levels, the shift from drinking water to drinking carbonated drinks and our friend Jamie Oliver again.

So, lastly I looked at a portion of the Super Size Me movie - just the section about how much money companies spend on their advertising.  I started the movie at about 44:08 til about 48:30.  This was a great way to discuss the way we are targeted by marketing and advertising, and draw this whole conversation together.  If you haven’t watched this documentary, it is worth watching about a social experiment that is just so wrong!  Could you eat MacDonald’s for a month straight?

I finished this unit with a test using still advertising images and nutritional labels from Coke and from Pringles (the third biggest culprit in Hanoi) and asked the kids to discuss the ads, the nutrition and whether we should sell these at our school canteen as well as advertise the products at our school and defend their decision.  The results were very interesting with some great ideas for and against.  What do you think:

Throughout the unit we had our G7 class blog rolling looking at some TED talk videos about Nutrition such as Graham Hill’s TED talk on why he is a weekday Vegetarian.  These provided some good discussions online too.

Overall this was a super unit and if you are interested in taking any ideas, I would be happy to help you out!

Bad Position by Kennymatic licensed by CC BY

I am following on from my last post reviewing some apps that I trialled on my recent Track and Field days.   You can read back about the ideas here and the first app here.

SprintTimer

SprintTimer is a very nifty app created by Sten Kaiser.  It allows you to take photo finish images at the end of your sprint or relay events with high quality images to share with your school community.

I should have had more of a play of this app prior to using it on the day.  It isn’t complicated, but there are multiple settings you can choose from and depending on the type of event and the time being run and how you want to see your photo, you need to know how to set up to get the image you want.  The app is very professionally set up and if you had no other equipment, you could very easily capture your whole Track event (heats/finals/relays) within this app as it easily links to your Start Gun (or manual start) allowing you to record the time and time delay in every photo.

Here is one example from our day here.  I edited it in PicMonkey.  This picture was taken over a 10 second time frame.  I set the app to run for 10 seconds, started and then captured the first 10 seconds of the end of the race.  In it’s full size, this image has the time delay at the bottom so you can see exactly what the splits were as the girls completed their race.  I didn’t add the finish as a marker, but you can edit the image to show the finish line, and then add time markers for each finisher in turn so that their time is recorded.  I will use this again and to further add to the SEPEP idea, it would be great to have kids record the finish of each event.  I thought if we had 2 iPods running, as one student captured the race, the second person could edit the photos to show the finish line and finish times and then send them to a Dropbox account to be shared on School websites as well as on Social Media for the event.

I do believe that it would be great to have a team of students who could be our media team for the day. This role has traditionally been a teacher job, but if you handed out our PE iPods to each House or Grade team and asked them to look out for certain events or gender or groups of students, gave them a check list or hash tag or such, you could cover the event more usefully as the kids can see more and know who to look for, etc and then they could spend sometime downloading or sharing photos with another set of students on computers who could play with shots from Burst Mode and share them out through your Facebook, Twitter or Instagram school accounts to share with parents.

We don’t have a great student turnout to our High School events, but I wonder if you have alternate jobs to kids (like SEPEP teaches) such as: social media, reporters, computer analysts of photos, coaches (warm up, technique etc), House Captains for leadership of the House groups, post-event write up, foul jump referee etc then the event might be more owned by our student body. I mean no disrespect to our PE HOD and PE TA and our school Operations team for the awesome events, I only want to see us add to this day.

Burst Mode

Burst mode takes 50 rapid photographs in about 3 seconds. It is awesome for capturing technique as you don’t have to slow a video down, you get to see the strengths and errors in stills. I saved about 8 photos to my photo gallery for each person, and then synced to Dropbox. I made these quick collages in Comic Life and it gives a great reference for students or teachers on technique. I like this app so much, I would like to use it in place of Coach’s Eye in a unit so that students have easier access to their pictures off of class iPods, as the screencast and save time takes a long time with 4 iPods and 21 students. The photos saved quickly and the picture collages below would be a great discussion point for blogs or comparison from first to last lesson in events like Long Jump, High Jump or any throwing field event.

High Jump

Long Jump

Comic Life

Comic life is a great program for Apple or Windows and now is available as an app for iDevices.  You can very quickly create content as a comic strip with images from your computer gallery and add notations, comments, colour and dress it up neatly.  I used Comic Life to create the images above.  It doesn’t take long to get going with it and students really enjoy using it.  I imagine that you could take your Burst Mode photos, have them in a Dropbox or easily accessible folder that students could access.  You can then ask them to create a collage of their technique and then you could annotate using Comic Life or you could ask them to screencast over the top or you could use something like Explain Everything or OneNote as your default creation tool.  My students are now at the stage where I would be happy to have them use any program they like – as long as they address the assessment task criterion and I can access their work either through Dropbox or on their school blogs.

I am proud to introduce to you my latest app: PE Activities.  A fabulous new database designed for those who teach or coach kids. The app allows the user to easily sort the games or activities in a variety of ways to find and catalogue the games quickly and efficiently. Sort your games by tags – such as tagging games, warm up, TGfU etc. and then add your own tags to create class sets or to find your sets more easily. Choose favorite games and then sort accordingly. Give games ratings and then find your 5-star games with the touch of a button. Heading out to your class, save your class games to a list to find and play in that particular lesson. The app also has a history log so that you can easily go back to the game you found but maybe had forgotten the name. More complex games come with built in diagrams to assist understanding the set up or the action.

The basic PE Activities app is free with the option to purchase various additions depending on what the user would like to do with the app. Buy game sets, or unlock functions such as adding photos and user games or unlock all the functions for a discounted rate!

Please visit my business website for more details.  We hope you enjoy using our apps:  Apps for Academics.

[16/365] Leapin’ Lizard (Explored) by Pasukaru76 licensed CC BY

So you have Track and Field day coming up for your school.  What apps or devices could be used to really share your Sports Day with the school community both on and off campus?    We have recently had our MS T&F day and this week our HS T&F day.  I have thought about what we could do to bring more to our day, and this is the list I have come up with – feel free to add/share your experiences or ideas!

Race Splitter ($34.99) is a timing device for your longer runs Cross country or any other racing you might complete.  You enter in competitor names or just bib numbers prior to the race and then as the runners finish, you type in their bib numbers and then you will have a record of the finishers by time. If you enter other information such as gender or age, you can then sort your runners by this data.  This means you could run your events together (eg. boys and girls 12, 13 and 14 years 3000m) and then sort them afterwards.  Race Splitter is an app for iPad, iPhone and also has a webpage so you can share your results very quickly after the completion of your race in a professional format.

SprintTimer is a nifty little app ($1.99) that allows you to take some awesome photo finish photos.  You can either take photos that are linked to your start time (and so the winning time and subsequent times for 2nd place are recorded) or you can set up to record a set time (eg. over 10 seconds) and then record a 10 second time that shows your runners finishing in that window of time.  The photos can then be shared on Social media or printed and put up in your PE office or blogged or whatever so that the kids can see the finish.  If you don’t have a lot of money, you might like to use SprintTimer to be your official race time keeper – sync it with the starter gun or signal to record accurate results from one app and one device.

Twitter – if you don’t use Twitter you are really missing out on some of the best PD you can get!  However, sharing your results, the feel and an ongoing timetable of the day is a great way to get to your community.  Share a #hashtag for your event so that it can be easily tracked on other social media platforms like Twitterfall or Hootsuite and start sharing the day as it unfolds – let people know if records are broken, when the next event is or the favorite’s to watch.

Instagram – Share photos through your school created #hashtag.  Share the #hashtag with your student, teacher and parent community so that everyone can see the days events with some running commentary.  Be sure that your school is clear on media agreements, and don’t name anyone specifically if this is not permitted at your school. Share the guidelines for including photos so that everyone can share and enjoy the memories of the day.

If you run a swimming pool as well as Track and Field carnival/s, you might like to consider making a an expensive long term purchase to assist your program.  Colorado Timing - Infinity Start system and Dolphin Wireless Stopwatch System which integrates fully with Hi-Tek Meet Management interface offer some very powerful options for starting/finishing and capturing results quickly and easily.  Our school uses them for all competitive meets and they have paid themselves back with the time saved and the much more accurate results recorded.

Facebook provides an easy social media format for sharing your Sports Day with the wider community.  Perhaps employ some injured or media focused students to be responsible for your school’s Facebook page or create one for the day so that you can share all the photos and events and spread goodwill to those not there at the time or for students, teachers and parents to catch up on after the event.

Burst Mode is a handy app for capturing 50 rapidly successive shots of an action – eg. javelin throw or long jump.  You wait until the athlete is about to jump/throw and then capture the shots.  Quickly save the ones you want to your Photo Gallery for use later with your students or if you are focused on a particular athlete, show them the progression and discuss technique before the next attempt.  I will share an example of this in an upcoming Blog post.

Please do share with me and others what you used and how it went, did it take a lot of preparation and did you get any feedback from the community?

Hello, this is a shark by licensed by Johnson Cameraface CC BY NC SA

How does your school monitor and manage its mobile devices?  Do you have school/class based mobile devices?  Do you BYOD (Bring your own device)?  Or a combination of both?  How do you ensure that your work based devices are monitored and the way they are used studied?  Do they get used for the reason that people wanted them?   Which teachers use them?  Which apps are mostly used?  Where do your devices travel around your school?  Do you have access to Volume Purchase Program (VPP) through Apple?  What does your school or PE Department or IT office do?

A recent study indicates that more employees are using their own devices at work and that in using their own devices they are happier, more productive and less stressed.  Is it time that we looked at how we could do the same for the devices we use at school and with our students.  If we can use devices at school that mirror those that they own, or we can give students mobile devices that they can use in PE or other subjects, we may see some shift in the comfort of technology, their experiences as peer coaches as well as start to shift in our classes to the high use of mobile technology that happens in real-life outside of school.

Mobile Device Management (MDM) is a set up that monitors all of your mobile devices bridging the divide between operation systems and types.  The focus is to optimize mobile communication, to lessen frustration and to ensure security and functionality in your workplace.  There are many different companies that offer MDM packages and when you begin to read more about these systems, it is clear from company testimonials that there are some big name companies and government departments already using this software and for good reason.

As we move more and more into a mobile device dominated world, it is important that we track who is logging onto our workplace networks and sharing potentially confidential documents through iCloud type servers and through personal devices.  While this might not be as important to Educational settings, it is clear that it is worth investigating within certain Government departments or to keep patent secrets in companies like Apple or Google.

Network Asia reports that Forrester Research predicts that with the growth in Mobile devices, companies that operate using them will have to manage them very differently in the future.  Keeping these MDM platforms up to date with the current trend/s is going to prove important as we see more devices and more uses of them in our workplaces.

There are a bunch of different companies offering MDM platforms.  Ken Hess writing for ZDnet has kindly listed the top 10 MDM suites (in alphabetical order) that are worth investigating for schools or companies looking into this for their employees.  Amongst the things to look out for, Hess writes that the MDM you choose must  support more than one platform and must support Apple iOS to be most productive and keep up with current usage.

But what does an MDM provide in an Educational setting?  Depending on where your school is and how MDM works with other systems like Apple, there is a lot that can be added by using one.  Here is a list of how it could be utilised for school mobile devices:

• centralise management of school device inventory, reporting, updates and installs – remove having one person plug in each device to a mother computer for updates and installs, you only need to select the devices you want to put certain apps or other on and send them automatically.
• Remote configuration, password and wiping – add a password to all the class iDevices or wipe off information if the device is stolen or leaves campus by mistake.
• Manage devices across platforms – not sure if you want to use Apple or Android?  use both, have the ability to manage any platform your choose from your MDM
• Remotely turn off or remove apps that are not required for your class – have the ability to take off any apps that will distract your PE class but put them back on for use in your Science group on the same day without having to plug them in or have them close to your Mother computer.
• VPP – work with Apple for Volume Purchasing so that you are not ‘stealing’ apps but buying them legitimately for each of your devices.
• Work with app vendors directly – go outside of Google Store or iTunes and buy from vendors directly selling apps and have them uploaded externally run by your MDM.
• GPS – track where your devices are being used
• Monitor use- monitor which apps are being used and when to ensure that your money has been well spent.
• Privacy – protect student photos or data from being emailed from a school device to private email or other online programs.  Limit programs or social media during certain hours or remove inappropriate sites or information gathering from school devices.
• Allow both school and BYOD to run through MDM.  This would mean that students (and teachers/parents) would need to sign up to your MDM platform and would need to be informed of the information that can be gathered through this, but this would allow you to monitor information and how it is shared.

There are other ways to use MDM’s in schools, but this starts off with some ideas for our school and others.

Some other posts or inquiries about what other schools are using can be found here.  Dana Watts at the American School in Delhi and she is a guru on iPads and iPad Education.  Her school uses Casper Suite as this also works with Apple VPP, she would be another person to contact for more information.

If you have anything to share on what your school does and how we could learn from your efforts, please leave a comment so we can work out what we are going to do as we deploy more iDevices at UNIS Hanoi next year.

071of365[NTR23] by licensed by ntr23 CC BY SA NC

As I have been working on my PE iPod trial I have had to do some research on different issues that I hadn’t really thought about when I began working with mobile technology.  I knew that there would be issues, we are in Vietnam and running a server and network that is limited for many reasons, but I hadn’t really thought deeply about how this would impact us as a school and what might need to be used/built/employed for greater functionality.  I am going to share some of my research over a number of blog posts, but what I really want is to find out what other multi-mobile device and BYOD (Bring your own device) schools are doing in an attempt to share and research in order to help UNIS make some decisions about how to move forward.

A more mobile workforce…

According to a recent study conducted by VNware New Way of Life 2013, employees are closing the gap between work and personal life and with this  employees are happier and more efficient, especially if they can use their own technology to complete their work.

Highlights from this study (conducted on 2142 participants over 12 Asia-Pacific countries with 60% from the Millennium Generation – born 1977-1992) include the following:

 Infographic from the study linked above

The most interesting for me as a personal device user at work and in the Asia-Pacific region are that I am not alone.  83% of employees take their own devices to work and that my IT department is fully aware but that they struggle to offer IT support to me – this seems to be a trend, but I also question whether my IT department should be offering my this assistance?  Is it their job to be able to offer help to all BYOD at our school – apple, blackberry, android etc.  Can this be possible?  But I also like knowing that I am not alone in feeling happier, I know what my devices offer and I am comfortable using them at work, so are over 69% of those surveyed.  And using my iPad and Android nexus phone allows me to be less stressed because I am used to the apps and layout, I have the tech configured for my use and my class use.  I can be more functional and productive and a lot less stressed – all reasons why others also prefer their own devices.  So, armed with new research, maybe one option to consider is to have students BYOD to school to use in PE.  If we know that we are filming and screencasting and then sharing, maybe we should be exploring how they could use their devices to do this – not just relying on our own class devices – but still have these as the fall-back or instructional model.

Did you find any of this infographic and stats interesting?  How does this relate to you school and your own practice?

Pioneering new ideas or changing to new ways of operating takes time. People look at you a little differently and can often expect rapid shift or change in a short amount of time.  If this sounds familiar, keep going!

It has taken a while to get really into the trial with my MS HS students. My initial excitement is not waning but it has taken time to work out how we are going to use these devices to really engage student learning and to ensure that they will work. A few notes of the process over the last few weeks:

• iDevices are designed to be configured to iTunes and to keep resources, the idea being that you will own or have 1:1 use and with this comes some issues for ‘class’ sets.

○ Getting information on – this takes time and much planning. I made the decision for ease, to use my home Mac and personal iTunes account, it made sense as I was running a trial, but this may not be appropriate for your PE Dept.  To go from a trial programme to an immersion programme we would need to discuss in depth how we were going to get information (apps, videos, documents) on and off the iDevices and if one person/teacher would do this or each teacher do their own. This would also be impacted if we had ONE set for all teachers or if each teacher had 4 or 5 as their personal class sets.

○ Updates to iDevices – iDevices update and need to update regularly – about every week. This involves being plugged into the iTunes account computer (this can be done remotely but the device still needs to be near the computer) and every so often a large update is done (more than 5 hours to download onto each device). My home MAC has 4 USB outlets, so I can update 4 iDevices at once, this would need to be considered for more than 4 how we would have enough USB ports/computer.

○ Syncs – each iPod has to be the same as the other so that if one student uses iPod01 and then iPod03 they can find the apps they were using. This involves checking that the apps are synced and that you are updating apps regularly.

○ Getting information out – students make a video or analysis, now they need to use it. Each video needs to be completed, saved and then remotely accessed by the student, and we need to do this for a class on the set we have. This takes time. I have had my G08 students take Badminton shot analysis, they then save to Drop Box* and I then pick up the videos from my DropBox folder on my tablet, we then put these into the \\data\pe folder for the students to access. Some apps allow you to download through iTunes as well, this may be quicker but still it requires you to download from each device. Air sharing or other such devices might also prove to be quicker but this would need to be investigated.

○ Apps and iPods are fun but…. – there is a pure distraction level to begin with, students want to see what apps we have on the iPods, which music I have put on and check things out and this is great, but I need to be very clear about which apps we are using and how and when and how to save etc. Hopefully after time they will be better at this, but this takes time and needs to be factored into the process of teaching/learning/expectation.

○ Analysis – is important and I am seeing change in technique and in confidence from students, I haven’t measured this in a quantitative study but when I ask the kids what they got from using the iPods they smile at me and converse with discussion about what they do well, where they want to improve or what they found interesting about their technique when they watched it – all new and exciting for them. They are engaged in Peer coaching every lesson, but this takes things to a new level. I have a number of articles, shared by Ken Forde on ICT studies and PE and all are very positive about the importance of students using ICT in PE and their advantages.  You can read them here.

○ Changing the way I teach – I am generally someone who is organised but I do like to mix things up when I see where a lesson is heading, this is not always possible if you haven’t got that video or app that would be perfect for this situation. This takes a while to work out.

○ Using the devices – UNIS has spent a small fortune on these devices, I feel a certain obligation to use them, and this has been a pressure on me! I have tried to really get out with them, but this doesn’t work for every lesson and has been hard where staff are not as interested, or where we are out numbered (eg.50 kids to 4 iPods) when team teaching.

○ iPods are not 3G and so we are at the mercy of the network. This means currently that we cannot use them outside on the fields. It is important that we know where they will work if you need internet for your work. Apps and using them are fine, but accessing QR codes or video or uploading/downloading won’t be possible in these places.

○ Theft – I have had one cable stolen – this is another issue to think about, where would we safely put these devices each day, and often they do need to be taken home to work on the lessons apps/videos or to get things to DropBox. Ideally the students could do this in class, but they do need to be monitored for excess videos etc. to watch memory space and also just keeping things tidy. Are they insured at home? Travelling home?

Questions that I am still wondering about:

1. How do we link to an appropriate iTunes store?  I am using the Australian store as this is where my home iTunes account is linked.  Do we know how this will go?  Will we each need iTunes top up cards or linked to a credit card – which store would be optimal for us as a school/department?  Is the Vietnamese iTunes store enough for us?

2. Mobile technology requires planning, is our department going to use iPads in place of something they do (eg. screencasting over video clips on our tablets) and will this push ICT futher or will it result in spending more money with little thought for how we get going and use this technology effectively?

3. Who and How will we use PD to really delve deeply and help get people moving and shaking?

Trialing:
At the moment I am using my 4  iPods (5th Generation):

1. G8 Badminton – I have created a unit where we are working our way through levels, we are constantly peer coaching and working on mastering skills. We start our service and shot work next week and I have uploaded 4 exemplar videos onto the iPods into Coaches Eye. Students will film their partner completing the Service levels at the beginning and end (pre and post practice). They will then do a comparison with the exemplar video and the pre-practice shot using the analysis tool in Coaches Eye. We will save these to DropBox and use them in our blog work analysis of our skills. The second one will be our post-practice serve and our pre-service serve and an analysis of the two. Again Drop box and Blog work with this video. Each student will need to film/be filmed and complete the analysis on the App, giving me about 5 students to one iPod. We will complete this for 4 different serve/shots.

2. G9 Track and Field – I took the iPods into my High Jump lessons this week, we used them to take video of 4 students completing high jump. I asked the students to film. I ran the station and gave verbal feedback and then the four filmed students watched their video while the second iPod was used to video the next four students. After the first four had finished watching and chatting, one of them filmed the next four and we rotated. Students were interested in their work and were keen to “see” their improvements. I think that this could have been stronger if I had some exemplar films or the technique written down/pictures for them to see how they could be stronger, but the comments indicated that they are processing what they see themselves doing and this was very strong in terms of performance growth.

3. Track and Field Day – I used Burst Mode and SprintTimer to take some footage of MS T&F day. I photographed kids completing events to make some collages, I think this would be an awesome way to have kids complete technique analysis in stead of snipping clips from video (as I do in G7 at the moment) and they could the make a collage using Comic Life or other to analyse their technique. SprintTimer gives awesome photo finish photos. This allows you to show a photo finish of all sprint or relay races which is a powerful way for kids to share the finish of their race. I think we could have kids who are injured be in charge of this next year. I also think we could have installed Instagram and asked key people to contribute to the day with a specific hashtag to share with each other and the community. I might try to make this work for HS T&F day later in the month.

*DropBox – this is by far the easiest way to get information off of the iPods. I have set up a UNIS account and synced every iPod to it, then the students can save their video work into this account folder. I have access to this from my school tablet and then put the student work into our school network account but this means that they only have access to their work when on campus. We need to think more creatively about this process as we are asking students to do more filming and/or analysis of their video work which would be best done from home (speedier access and we don’t always have time to get tablets out in PE to collect films and I don’t like asking the students to do this for homework while on campus). Ken Forde at WAB (@KenForde) has some creative ideas for using DropBox with his students, he would be someone to talk to about this process as it takes a little while to set up and administer so it would need to be done in advance and checked on to ensure that it would work for us here at UNIS