Laptops in PE... Useful or time wasters...

I have been blogging a bit about IT saving our time and I think it is important to review this in the light of effective use of computers in PE. I know what some PE teachers are already thinking... do computers even have a place in PE? in my mind there is no doubt they do, however only if they are providing further reinforcement to what is happening in the lesson, or if they save the time of the teacher, which may provide for better learning opportunities.

Today we finished our fitness testing and we have used the same process that we used in August where we used googledocs spreadsheets to create a form for students to submit their data from their fitness testing into a common spreadsheet, which could later be separated by class, teacher and grade and uploaded if necessary into student reports. This process involved students entering their personal and fitness test data into a google form, which saved us enormous hours and saved a whole lesson for the kids.

Why laptops instead of desktop, simple... PE is mobile.

In order to achieve the most effective IT integration into PE, the devices and tools we need to use have to be incredibly mobile, resilient and easy to use. We don't want to take away activity time from students(moving to a computer lab etc...), so it is essential that we ensure our non-activity time is reduced. We have improved the process of collecting data from students from one or my earlier blog posts about google forms for fitness testing so that students now enter their details into the spreadsheet as they finish all their testing. This saves further time and frees us up to do greater learning in our PE classes.

The biggest problem we face as a PE department is charging laptops when they are being used all day. In this situation it is essential all teachers are aware of putting laptops to sleep to save battery time after they have been used, and to ensure that during lunch times students return the laptops to be charged. Once this pattern is established effective use of laptops can become possible. Here are some ideas of how we could use them in PE:

• Fitness testing via google forms
• Entering activity levels on my food pyramid tracker
• Using flip cameras and then downloading to allow for student to observe their technique.
  
• Laptops could be used to write reflections about units.
• Please make a comment on more ways that you see laptops being effective tools in our PE classrooms.

Happy laptop intetragration!