Shiny New iPods!

A few months back I began to campaign for an iPod trial in my PE classes at UNIS Hanoi.  Today the final four of my new iPod 5 Generations arrived and I have spent the last hour tonight plugging them in, syncing them up and preparing them for the first day of use tomorrow.  I feel like a parent preparing the children for the first day of school.  “What did you pack for them?” I hear you asking.  Well let me share a few of the various apps I have chosen for my first work this week.

 

Coaches Eye – Coaches eye is one of my favourite apps in my classes.  I use it almost every day and in every lesson.  There are other apps that allow you to film and then notate and screencast but I like the way this one works flawlessly with Dropbox and Google Drive and quickly allows you to notate, screencast and save to Dropbox ready to share with students.  The students like using it, they can quickly navigate it’s functionality and with HD and zooming functions, you can show everybody what is happening very quickly.

 

 

Dropbox – I think most people are familiar with the concept here.  I am using Dropbox to link all of my devices together to my work tablet and my home Mac as well as share documents and videos with my students and to link my work to my course advisor and to my programmers in different parts of the World.  My hope is that students will be able to take video, screencast and select their best piece/pieces they want and to upload them to their own Dropbox so that they have records that they can then blog with or share in other forums/places.

 

 

 

WordPress – this new addition to my app must-haves is really exciting for my students who tend to see blogging as another task for homework. I am hopeful that they can log into their accounts here and be able to quickly complete a blogging task or reflection sum up of their work on these iPods and maybe add some photos from their lessons and submit it for the World to enjoy.  (not sure yet if this will work with the sign in issues with multiple users, but we shall find out!)

 

 

 

Badminton Scoring – this nifty little app is great for teaching my students about the service rules and helping them to keep score during our round robin assessment work this week.  I hope that it will add the excitement of our unit and also be a great way to collaborate with others at the end of Mastering a unit work.

 

 

 

 

Quizlet – for those quick quiz moments where you want students to be a part of the action from the pre-prepared quizzes set or to give something for those who are ahead or trying to catch up.  I am thinking of some warm up exercises that rely on answering questions before or after completing activities.

 

 

 

 

 

Scan – for the QR code work that I am  using in class.  We have made instructional videos (and now I am thinking about voice threads too) for help in our Badminton and T&F units, so now we need to have access to them when we are out on the court/field.  Perfect.

 

 

 

 

 

Google Drive – my new other fave app.  I use Google much like Dropbox to ensure I can keep up with documents anywhere on any device and I share these with students, colleagues, programmers, developers, family and friends depending on what I am doing and where. I am going to use this with my students for them to log in and upload video from Coaches Eye or from other places and encourage them to use spreadsheets for work we are doing and to log their progress on activities where answers are required. (I am also going to try socrative for the feedback factor too).

 

 

Sports Rules for Teachers – I am going to find this very useful for students to access on the field/court.  I am not the World’s best dictionary for rules and it will be nice to have the students be able to look these up themselves as they need to.

 

 

 

 

I have more on here than this, but this is just a start.  So tomorrow, I will be umpiring and checking rules in Badminton, as well as taking Coaches eye videos and looking at the technique we have been mastering.  We will be listening to the Playlist in our Dance lessons and taking Coaches Eye and screencasting our dance videos (feedback from other students on student work) and then sending it to either Google Drive or Dropbox for sharing.  Busy day ahead, very excited to see how it goes.