Writing Reliefs for Relief Teachers

I'm away for 3 weeks this term and face the frustratingly long process of preparing my lessons for someone else to teach. Having recently developed class blogs I had the idea to use this format to set up my lessons for the relief teacher. I decided not to do all my subjects this way but did do my Year 8/9 Health and Year 9 English classes. I already have a Year 9 class blog so used this to present my work for the weeks I will be away.

Incentive Based Motivation

Recently I posted a video about how fun motivates people to do things. The video below is by career analyst Dan Pink. He presents researched based evidence that incentive based schemes in business do not produce results and in some cases can be detrimental to creativity and productivity. I couldn't help but think of the suggestions in the past 1-2 years of teachers pay being linked with incentives. Dan says that research clearly states that external incentives like money work well for tasks that have a clear goal or end point such as working on an assembly line or entering data into spreadsheets but are detrimental to tasks requiring people to think outside the square and be creative. Which area does teaching fall into?

Wiimote - Record G Forces Applied to Wiimote

The following ideas are courtesy of Jared Robinson at http://www.thepegeek.com/ and Ben Jones who Jared credits in his video explanation of how to set up the Wiimote and gives some ideas about how to use it.

Why IWB's?

The following presentation is by Chris Betcher http://chrisbetcher.com/Why IWBs

View more presentations from Chris Betcher

Handwriting?

An interesting if not one sided article slamming the poor handwriting found in UK schools.

Year 12 PE 2012

After doing some reading of Jared Robinson's blog www.thepegeek.com I have decided to try a few things next year in my Year 11/12 PE class to improve student engagement in the course and their attitude towards the revision of work.

iPhone - The Possibilities

The more I see in relation to iPhone apps the more I like it as an educational tool. Go to this link http://thepegeek.com/2009/10/21/how-to-make-powerful-virtual-learning-tours/ to watch a video explanation of an iPhone app called Runkeeper. Has more applications than for just PE - SOSE, English, Science, Maths etc.

Checkout this link http://thepegeek.com/2010/06/28/two-essential-iphone-apps-for-phys-ed-teachers/ to see two apps used for tracking students attendance in class and recording observational data on students. They are looked at from a PE teachers point of view i.e. don't need pen/paper/diary etc to take roll or record observational data during lessons which are not based in a classroom, just need an iPhone.

Both these links are to Jarrod Robinson's blog www.thepegeek.com. A great blog about IT in education with a PE focus.

Fun Motivates People

The more we can inject some fun into our classrooms the more we can motivate our students to learn. I don't mean fun for the sake of it, like 'free time' or an 'early minute' which might be fun for the students but has no real benefit for their learning. I mean fun that engages and makes students want to learn, deliberate planning by the teacher to make learning fun and improve the learning outcomes for students. Check out this video by TheFunTheory.com which I came across on www.thepegeek.com . It really goes to show what fun can do!

Sifteo Game Cubes

Wow these are amazing! I found the video below on www.thepegeek.com. These little cubes have great possibilities for student learning. This video is from 2009 before they were released for sale. They are now actually available at https://www.sifteo.com/.

Ask 500 People

A great site which allows you to ask a question and then get feedback from all around the world. Here is a question I put up that one of my Stage 1 PE students is currently asking in an issues study. When term 4 starts I'll see if she wants to use the data in her work.
http://www.ask500people.com/questions/which-is-more-important-in-reducing-obesity-nutritiondiet-or-physical-activity

What a great way for individual students or a class to find out how people around the world feel about an issue.