PEAI Dublin October 08

I was invited to speak about using Dartfish at the PE Association of Ireland conference with Kevin Smith from Anderson High School in Shetland. Really enjoyed it as you can see from the photos below

| View Show | Create Your Own

For those of you that attended our presentation click on these previous posts about dartfish and ICT in PE for further information about Dartfish. You just have to work your way through the posts to pick up the information there is a lot of it I know. If you have any questions just leave a comment on the blog.

A couple of the other things I mentioned were Youtube for getting video content and using Zamzar to save the clips to your computer. I also mentioned the resources on my previous schools PE Wiki.

afPE Conference

I am currently just outside Chester attending the afPE conference “Hitting the targets missing the point”. I am attending both as a delegate and a presenter. Happy to report that our workshop went well. I was presenting as part of a team from Glasgow University and the work they are doing with the PG Primary PE course. My input centred on what is happening nationally with PE in Scotland in terms of Curriculum for Excellence and the opportunities this presents to educators. Secondly how Glow can facilitate CPD, collaboration, sharing practice, learning and debate between educators. Providing a portal for teachers who have completed the PG Primary PE course to continue their engagement and professional reflection.

It was also great to meet Brian Greg who was also part of the presenting team. I have exchanged emails and Blog comments with but not actually met him in person. Brian has recently been appointed as the Head Teacher at Muck school. It was interesting talking to Brian who like myself has a healthy interest in both PE and ICT. He is really excited about the potential for using Glow but has some interesting challenges to deal with. The satellite broadband connection for one which affords little more speed and bandwidth than a dial up connection. The intermittent power to the Island 5 hours of electricity per day. All of which leads to a rather frustrating Glow experience for him. However undeterred he has started a new blog from Muck which he has at times had to save posts on  a flash drive and post to his friend on the mainland to upload as it would take too long to upload from the island.

Tom Wylie’s former Chief Executive of the National Youth Agency from 1996 and retired in August 2007 keynote raised some interesting points and questions. 60% of Children are doing well at school 40% are not doing so well. That 40% can be further subdivided into the disappointed (getting by but not enjoying it), the disaffected and the disappeared (getting nowhere).

Very few young people do not learn a skill for its own sake they learn a skill because it will take them somewhere. This comes from their perception of their identity how they see themselves and where they are heading. Learning has to connect with the real world as young people want to be viewed as adults they want to engage in the real world.

Averaged out young people spend only “9 minutes” of every waking hour at school. What do we know about what they are doing off campus the other “51 minutes”. What do we know about the informal learning world beyond the school and how can we engage with it?

We don’t deliver a curriculum that conveys a prepackaged off the shelf inflexible model. We should develop the curriculum in partnership with the learners so it best meets their needs.

Margaret Talbot Chief Executive of afPE delivered her keynote “Physical education: exercising the entitlement” after a slight delay. One of my colleagues who shall remain nameless (as Margaret is not a woman you want to upset!) accidentally lifted Margaret’s presentation notes whilst retrieving her own from our workshop.

As usual Margaret was not backward at coming forward and voicing her concerns about what is happening around PE and sport in England. One of her points that strikes particular resonance with me is the issue of measuring the time allocated to PE but not actually measuring the quality of that PE. I have raised this before in relation to Scotland what is the point in meeting the target if what you are offering is not high quality.

 

Roehampton Primary PE Conference

4th Roehampton Primary physical education conference http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/primaryphysicaleducationconf/index.html‘Health and Inclusion: Providing a high quality experience for all’Friday 25th April 2008 10:00AM – 4:00PM Froebel College Roehampton University London

This one-day conference aims to bring together practitioners who are working in early years’ and primary physical education to share ideas and good practice.

Booking Form http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/primaryphysicaleducationconf/bookingform/conferencebookingform.pdf

Early Notification of SSF & SLANOPE Conference

I wanted to alert interested parties to a Sport and PE conference hosted by the Scottish Schoolsport Federation and the Scottish Local Authority Network Of Physical Education. The conference will be held at the Ratho Adventure Centre on the 22nd of May 2008 more details will be published on the SSF website http://www.scottishschoolsportfederation.org/ in due course.

Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Conferences

Developing Potential, Recognising Achievement conferences

The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award is hosting two conferences during March 2008, one in Edinburgh and one in Nairn, on the theme of the Award’s role in modern Scottish education. The events are aimed at directors of education, heads of schools services, teachers, award leaders and volunteers within schools.

The aims of the conferences include discussing how the Award contributes to the achievement of Curriculum for Excellence and sharing information about the Award’s Curriculum for Excellence Pilot Project and Award Leader Training Programme.

The conferences will include presentations from Award participants, members of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award’s national development team, employers and representatives from key bodies in Scottish education.

Places at the Edinburgh conference are going fast but there are still plenty of spaces for the Nairn Conference.

www.LTScotland.org.uk/sharedevents/2008/eventgeneral_tcm4469872.asp

Sport and PE Conference

Advanced notice of a Sport and PE conference being run jointly by Scottish Schoolsport Federation and SLANOPE. The conference is scheduled for May 22nd at Ratho Adventure centre with Bill Gammel confirmed as one of the Keynote speakers. More details to follow.

Highland Conference

I really enjoyed the Highland PE conference in the morning I gave an update on what is happening Nationally regarding PE here are some links to some of the documents and policies I referred to.

Scottish Government local authority concordat          Curriculum for Excellence         

Glow

Reaching Higher         Taking Learning outdoors       

Scottish Consumer Council Fit For the Future   

Schools Health Promotion and Nutrition Act

In the afternoon I led an ICT workshop I promised that I would write everything that I referred to. You can read it all and a bit more on this previous post the only thing that is missing is the SQA understanding standards website you can get more info and the link from this post.

If anyone wishes to discus anything regarding my presentations or wants some support developing their use of ICT write a comment in this post. You can also email me at i.stanger@LTScotland.org.uk or call me on my mobile if you want to talk to me 07811214922 If you set up a blog or a wiki let me know so I can add it to my links.

Sports Colleges conference

I have just returned from 2 wonderful days in Telford at the Sports Colleges Conference. This is the largest event of its type in Europe if not the world with well in excess of 2000 delegate in attendance

Read the conference report

All the speakers and keynotes were excellent but the stand out for me was Erin Gruwell Freedom Writers Foundation as she told the story of how she worked in Wilson High School in Long Beach, California with some very disaffected and disadvantaged pupils. The story of their learning journey together is absolutely awe inspiring and has recently been made into a film Watch the trailer below

 

The workshops were excellent and I took a lot from them. I am specifically going to follow up on a prototype camera the Evaluator that one of the schools is developing. It is basically a £30 pound video camera very child friendly with an inbuilt screen for instant playback. You could buy a set of 15 for the price of a standard video camera and deploy them 1 between 2 in a class for gathering data analysing performance etc. They could be used across the school in many departments not just PE and they save the videos in AVI format which can be uploaded to a PC for editing or storage. Hopefully be able to write a bit more about this in the near future.

A number of things really hit home during the conference. The level of Governmental support surpasses anything we have in Scotland. The Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Secretary of state for Culture, Media and Sport, Andy Burnham, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, the Rt. Hon Ed Balls and the sports minister, Gerry Sutcliffe were all present and all spoke at the conference pledging their support for PE and school sport read more. The level of additional Government funding totally eclipses the spending in Scotland: £1.2 billion up to 2008 with a further £100 million announced last year to support a target of 5 hours PE and sport per week for all pupils, an additional £30 million to support facilities in Sports Colleges announced by Ed Balls on Thursday and then an additional £750 million announced by Gordon Brown on Friday.

The other blaringly obvious fact is that in Sue Campbell PE and Sport in England have a champion who is operating at the highest political level, has the ear of the ministers and more importantly is being listened to. We have nobody doing this in Scotland we don’t even have an advisory group informing the political debate and given the Scottish Governments desire to streamline I doubt we will have one either.

 

PE Conference presentations online

Some of the presentations from the National PE conference are now available online including Alan McLean’s Key note. To access the clips got to the LTS PE site national conference page http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/physicaleducation/professionaldevelopment/nationalconference07/Index.asp

Then click on the hyperlink for the speaker or workshop you wish to see the presentation for. Please note that not all speakers or workshops have available presentations.

National PE Conference Using ICT in PE workshop

I was a little disappointed with my presentation firstly due to its rushed nature caused by the overrun from the keynote and my Internet connection dropping at the start of the workshop. Secondly the fact I had to omit content to keep to the time scale and thirdly there really was no time for interaction or discussion. Thankfully I can make some amends through this blog. As I explained yesterday through the blog we can extend the impact and the interaction from the workshop continue your engagement, give you the opportunity to raise further questions and I will provide links to all the resources I discussed an some that I did not have time to.

I started off discussing the LTS PE website unfortunately the Internet connection went down so I suggested your CPD from the workshop could be to get on the site and explore all it has to offer. What I had intended to do was to show some of the extensive resources on the site and demonstrate how you could use a wonderful free  web tool delicious to create online book marks for sites that you find interesting and useful that can then be accessed from any computer with an Internet connection.  For a simple guide watch the video below (You probably will be unable to view the video in school as it is hosted on YouTube).

You may find my PE bookmarks  useful that I have set up using delicious. You may want to consider setting this up for your PE department to tag interesting sites or share frequently visited sites with pupils. This can be accessed from any computer with an Internet connection

Thankfully the Internet connection was established and I was able to move on to talk about Blogs and Wikis. However in my rush to get back on track I did not really explain what a blog or a wiki was other than them being online collaborative tools which you can upload content too. For a For those of you who want to know a bit more about blogging I previously posted this video explaining blogging in simple terms . If you want to give blogging a go check out this post on my school blog containing tutorials on setting up and using wordpress blogs and using netvibes. If you look on the “links” section on the left hand side near the top of the page I have links to several PE blogs that you may find interesting.

The next part of the presentation focused on wikis the following video (also on YouTube) will help you understand a little more about what a wiki is.

I demonstrated the Banchory H/Int2 wiki and explained that the content was there for people to download and use and share as long as they were willing to reciprocate and acknowledge the source. Wikis offer real scope for collaboration between teachers for resource development between teachers and pupils for learning. I explained that teachers can sign up for free wikis that are advert free at wikispaces. Wikispaces also has video tutorials to help get you started within their help section.

When I was discussing the wikis I highlighted using Youtube to incorporate inspirational and interesting videos. There is actually a lot of very good content on you tube and other video hosting sites such as google video. However most schools block these sites a way round this is to use a third party software to save the clips to your computer this article form Wired explains how to do it and the software to use. We use the videos as a hook for the pupils and also to make the wiki more attractive and lastly to engage the children though adopting a piece of their own culture. Our pupils are creating their own environments outside school with video audio text and many other applications in sites such as bebo and myspace and facebook and we want our wiki to reflect some of that cool. Remember Alan McLean’s keynote he referred to the motivation of the learners if the subject had a perception of being cool. 

The next software I demonstrated was Observing Children Moving and how it could be used as a teacher or indeed a pupil resource. You can watch a review of this software on this Teachers TV video. The video also reviews 2 other pieces of software for use in PE.

The next pieces of software I discussed using were from Birchfield these included the PE specific content in the  lesson kits and lesson builder  I left out the Quiz Genie due to time constraints. Using the lesson kit I explained how you could use the predetermined content to run ready made multi media lessons to bring topics to life you can then use the quizzes and interactive activities to reinforce learning and check understanding. I then explained how you can use the lesson builder module to tailor the content to your own needs and create new lessons that use the Birchfield resources and/or your own resources.

The Quiz Genie I mentioned above can be used to make and play interactive PE quizzes and games.  They can be incorporated into practical lessons during non playing time in activities such as badminton and basketball using a laptop. I call this ”stealth learning” effect where the pupils are engaged in playing games and don’t actually comprehend that they are learning the theory or the “boring bit” of PE as pupils often call it.

However if we just use the Birchfield or any similar resource to create lessons which we deliver to the pupils I think we are missing a trick and really all we are doing is a 21st century version of chalk and talk with bells and whistles added.  Use it for active learning give the pupils a task to design a presentation that allows them to incorporate text, audio, video animation and deliver it the rest of the class. Allow them to design the quizzes or drag and drop activities for each other then play them. This will develop ICT skills, literacy, communication and engage the pupils in the theory and in my opinion reinforce learning in a powerful way . How often have we said the pupils are great during practical but when we try to teach them any theory they switch off.

The presentation moved on to focus on Dartfish. I began giving an overview of the “player module” and how we use it with a bank of model performances or inspirational clips. We use these a focus for the lesson the video clips are our WALT and WILF for those of you familiar with AiFL. I then moved on to the “in the action module” using “Live Delay” and how it can be used with a class to give lots of visual feedback very simply and quickly. Then on to gathering clips and using some of the drawing tools like my favourite the “clone tool”.  I then moved on to comparing performances with a model performer and using the different options; side by side, picture in picture and basic blend. As I did all of this I demonstrated all these functions on the remote control which is brilliant as you can move away from the computer. This all resonates again with Alan McLean as during his keynote he explained that feedback is crucial for motivating learners especially feedback that show the learner improving and we all need to give more feedback. Feedback which is meaningful and not “plastic praise” as Alan called it and what could be more meaningful than watching your own performance in PE and how it is developing.

I then moved on to the “analyser module” and explained how to edit a new movie and add drawings to it, how to use the print facility to produce worksheets and finally media-books. I explained how we are using the media books to complete the NAB in Higher and Int 2 PE. The fact that the pupils can create a multimedia workbook with text video and audio is more engaging for the pupils and quicker and easier to complete than the NAB logbook. We have also used the media-books to complete Standard Grade evaluating questions. I highlighted the ability to create teaching, CPD resources and pupil tasks. I also mentioned that the media books can be shared and then viewed with a free piece of software Dartviewer that can be downloaded from Dartfish. I also demonstrated how you can produce printed worksheets that incorporates the content form the media books to and further supplement the learning resources. You can also download a free trial version but be sure to check out the system requirements to ensure your computer can run the software.

You can also get a bit more of an insight into Dartfish on my previous post “Using Dartfish at Stirling University” There are photos, a video clip to view and a Dartfish user guide that you can download and use.

The next pieces of software I briefly highlighted were all centred around creating audio files Say and Post quite simply the easiest way to get audio content online read my previous post for more info. I mentioned Textaloud MP3 and how I used it as a text reader and its ability to turn text into an MP3 audio file to create revision resources. However you  the voice can become a bit difficult to listen to for an extended period of time. We have started to use Audacity to create and edit our own audio files using our own voices.

Links to other websites I would have referred to during the presentation had I the time:

iTunes   Teachers TV PE videos   iDance   Get Physical

The time was cut far too short to talk about this topic I didn’t even get near using mobile phones and the potential of these devices. If anyone wishes to discus anything regarding the presentation or want some support developing their use of ICT write a comment in this post. You can also email me at i.stanger@LTScotland.org.uk or call me on 01382 443613 or my mobile which is probably the best option if you want to talk to me 07811214922. I look forward to our continued engagement.