The online technologies available to students are numerous and come in very handy in the the physical education classroom. The online portfolio is one of the best ways to show student learning in physical education. We haved used one for two years and are continuing to tweak it. We want our classroom time to be devoted to activity and not so much sitting and listening. The online portfolio allows the students to do the learning at their own pace and time to not lose too much activity time. Currently, we have eight items for the students to complete for the semester. The students record their fitness test scores, answer 10 multiple choice questions a week, read articles and write about them, answer journal topics about class, log their outside physical activity, create a nutrition plan and create a fitness plan. This helps the students reflect on their experience in physical education and allows us to cover topics online that used to take away from our activity time.
The online portfolio allows us to cover physical fitness topics, rules of games, procedures of class, skills for games, and give the students a general knowledge of how physical education can benefit their health. It has proven to be a valuable tool and allows us to use different types of pedagogical strategies. The students can see their fitness scores up against the standards and deduce, along with possible teacher guidance, how to improve their score in a journal entry. They also answer general fitness knowledge questions from the NASPE PE ASK test. When they have been through the class and built up this knowledge base through the online and class portion, they then create a plan to help keep themselves healthy. The scaffolding of the portfolio builds their knowledge base to the end product. It gives them support along the way, then allows them to create a personalized program to follow. We are going to add webquests to the portfolio in the future.
Along with the portfolio, the physical education program could introduce a blog or wiki to discuss topics related to teen health and fitness. This would allow the students to place all their opinions in one localized spot and respond to one another. The way we have it set up now is just posting on their own page, there is no sharing.
The hardest part about using these technologies in physical education is the students want to be active and participate in the activities. They have the mind set of technology has no place in the gym, "why do we have to do it?" It is a mind set we are working to change. The students have a lot to offer, they just have to understand there is more to physical education than just playing.
The technologies my students would have the toughest time with are the discussions with an online expert, online resource validation and the RSS feeds. The online expert would need to be someone engaging and quite possibly well known for the students to pay attention to. It is all a part of changing the mind set of "just playing" in physical education. The online resource validation would be hard to monitor as most of our online work is done at home. Possibly a webquest to teach them would be helpful. The RSS feeds would be valuable as a tool for them to read and reflect on, however, I think they would find one article and not keep checking back for updates and more information. With the right mindset, the RSS feeds could be an important factor in the online portfolio.
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