Burst Mode – T&F Day review
My school recently held two Track and Field days – one for Middle and one for High school. As a tech type person I decided to trial some apps for sharing technique but more to capture some flavor of the events over the day. I found that it would have been more useful to have a clear plan of use for the day, which apps and how to really use them, as some settings were more effective for different events. I used my iPod 5 and I didn’t have internet access on our field, so no real time sharing happened. But I did share images with some students on the day, and plan to print out some for sharing later on.
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 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 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.