Course Reflection

1) Has your perspective and/or feelings changed about technology in instruction as a result of being in this course? How?

Over the course of this semester, I have learned that integrating technology into my physical education class is much more doable than I imagined. Although time consuming, I think using the technology tools we learned about will keep my students more engaged and more productive during their time in my class. Now that a lot of school districts are moving towards providing personal devices for each student, using these tools are easier than ever for students and provides a great way for teachers to monitor student learning.

2) Which technologies or tools used in this course stand out to you? Why?

During this semester and the detailed research we have done on varying online technology tools we can implement into our classrooms, I thought that the Vlog and Screencastify tools really stood out the most. Both of these tools have so many uses. From the teacher's standpoint, these tools make it easy to see whether or not students are meeting ISTE standards. Being able to see what students are seeing on their screens for classwork makes it almost impossible for students to"sneak in under the radar" with classwork. They are forced to demonstrate learning with these tools, which makes it much easier for teachers to gauge learning in their classrooms,

3) Which technology(-ies) are you most eager to use in the classroom? How will you use it? (This may or may not be the one(s) chosen for your final project.)

I am really excited to implement blogging into my physical education and health classes. Students love technology today, and I think it will excited them to learn that they will be graded on what they write online. This also teaches them that what they write online stays forever, and it is the same thing as saying those words in real life. Students today need to learn to use words that are constructive for learning and bettering the world,  rather than destructive language.

4) Based on your answer to number 3, do you think you can implement the tech. tool in a planned upcoming lesson that you will be teaching? Or, suggest it to your CT to use in an upcoming lesson? Explain.

I think I will be able to implement these technological tools into my classroom next semester. I have the opportunity to work with a younger physical educator who is very open to trying new methods and developing new ideas. It might be difficult to try blogging with middle school, but it might be worth trying. My students are constantly surprising me with how much they know about technology at such a young age... so it could work!  I am very excited to begin my journey student teaching in Hudsonville, implementing technology at Baldwin St. Middle School in Health and PE classes!

TILP: Heart Rate

For my final lesson, I will be integrating technology into a heart rate fitness development plan. For five days, my students will be monitoring their maximum, minimum, and average heart rates through the use of a tracking device. Heart rate monitors are expensive, but having a class set and assigning each student to a monitor for the week would be more realistic. My district for the final project has many resources we can utilize, so each students gets to borrow and track their daily heart rate levels using their own app on the iPad. Students will make daily entries on the class using Google Drive to log max, min, average heart rate, and total time in zone over the course of 5 days on a class shared powerpoint. Each student will write about what activities they participated in for each day and at the end of the lesson, they will reflect on how their time in zone is related to their overall heart rate stats and activities in which they participated in a presentation of their choice (PowerPoint, Prezi, a personal video, or Screencastify). 

The fact is that student's today LOVE using technology. By integrating both the device and the final project using multi-media, students are much more likely to show enthusiasm towards physical education and fitness. I think in the future, students will be required to have their own means of tracking personal fitness data, such as a FitBit or a heart rate monitor or any other sort of tracking device. They are becoming more and more common, and I think that as physical fitness rises, so will the prevalence of these devices. It is a great, relative way to teach students about health and fitness for life!

Gifted Students

1) What is something that surprised you or that you learned from the videos? What myth or prior belief do you find out was false and what is the reality?

> One thing that I was surprised to learn from these videos on gifted and talented students was that the "new normal" is recognized as anxiety and fear of trying new things. This really made me self-reflect a bit about my own educational experiences. I was a straight A student in grade school. And when I clearly understood class material, I was confident and would often tutor my friends in math and on class projects. But when I did not understand something, I was awkward and easily frustrated and definitely felt anxious about class. This is exactly what the video was talking about with gifted students. I did have a perfectionist outlook on school and grades. I guess I always knew I was a good student, but this video kind of brought it all together for me.

> Additionally, I found this sentence from the video quite provoking: "we can't hold bad academic challenges based on their emotional or social levels". As a teacher, we can easily recognize students who are "outcasts" or "loners". But just because they prefer to work on their own doesn't mean they are less gifted academically. According to this video, it's actually quite the opposite. Choosing to work individually is normal for gifted students.  We need to continue to challenge these students as much as we would with others who are more social and outgoing.

2) How can you use what you learned in your present and future classrooms? How can technology play a part? Be specific.

> I will use this in my gym classroom when allowing students to work individually or with groups. We often do fitness activities where students can choose to work individually on activities or by themselves. I can already imagine the handful of kids in my placement classroom that would work individually.. This is a great opportunity for the teacher to build student-teacher relationships. I would participate with these students to try to get to know them better and motivate them to try harder and/or think of new ways to accomplish the same task. This would challenge them in a way that maybe their peers would not.

> Playing online games with friends from all over the world can help these students not feel so isolated. During PE, we sometimes use technology for virtual fitness, such as "Adventures to Fitness". These videos are led by an adventurer who teaches the students about everything from history and geology to biology of animals across the globe. This could be especially effective for gifted students at the elementary level because there is a lot of advanced knowledge embedded into the class video. So although the exercises are easy, the advanced knowledge base within the video is a good challenge for the gifted students.

UDL Vlog: Options for Perceptions

Catfishing

"On free dating sites, at least 10% of new accounts are from scammers, says Marketdata Enterprise, Inc.

Catfish, anyone?"

The internet has been a useful tool for my entire life. I can never remember a time where I didn't have access to the Wordl Wide Web. Of course, we have evolved from the grossly slow dial up to high speed wireless internet. And even now we have handheld computers that can have 4G internet access at essentially anytime and anywhere. Social media has exploded in our society as a way of communicating and, to my dismay, a method of meeting new people. Although this progress in technology can holds great value in our society, there are also negative consequences our students are facing as a result of social media. One of these threats is catfishing.

According to Merriam Webster's dictionary, the term "catfish" means a person who sets up a false personal profile on a social networking site for fraudulent or deceptive purposes. This type of trickery can occur to anyone who has a social media profile, including websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, any email site, and of course, dating sites. Commonly, a catfisher will create a fake profile to capture the attention of the their victim, whether it be through a friendship or romantic relationship. In these fake relationships, it is tempting to stretch the actual truth or to only show the side of yourself that you think is best for the world to see. The truth is that most of us do this from time to time. But the scary thing with social media is that you can be anything; you can create any image of yourself that you want the world to see. And when this "profile" isn't the real you, you are free to say everything and anything with no worry that your will will trace back to the real you.

Because the term "catfish" is so new to our society, there isn't a law regarding consequences for proving an individual as a victim to this threat. But according to HG.org on legal resources, there are other already existing related laws that provide protection from these online perpetrators:

"Fraud claims may be premised on the fact that a person materially represented himself or herself, another person reasonably relied on this misrepresentation, the person knew that the representation was false and intended the other person to rely on it and the other person was injured in some manner". 

Although it may be difficult to prove, injury to the person involved is what crosses the line when it comes to catfishing. One method of injury includes intentional inflection of emotional stress.

"Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress claims are successful when the victim can prove that the defendant’s conduct is extreme and outrageous and that conduct resulted in severe emotional distress in the victim".

If the victim can demonstrate psychological damage from the conduct of the catfisher, then they may be legally protected from this threat. Another means of justice could be misappropriation of likeness:

"Misappropriation of Likeness requires showing that the perpetrator used a protected attribute of another individual in an exploitative manner without the consent of the person to whom the attribute belonged".

This is a misrepresentation of an individual, such as using photos of someone else and claiming them as their own. There are a few other related claims an individual can make depending on the specific situation. These include harassment, stalking and defamation.

Thankfully, I found many resources for teaching the dangers of catfishing to my future students. One stood out above the rest, and I think I could use this in a high school health class. This presentation has warning signs, popular examples, statistics, and ways to keep your identity safe while using social media. Here is a link to the presentation I would use when teaching the dangers of social media, and methods of being safe while online.

Resources:

Can I Sue For Being Catfished. (2016). Retrieved October 12, 2016, from https://www.hg.org/article.asp?id=33850 

Catfish. (n.d.). Retrieved October 12, 2016, from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/catfish

Catfishing: Pretending to be Someone Else Online. (n.d.). Retrieved October 12, 2016, from http://us.reachout.com/facts/factsheet/catfish-pretending-to-be-someone-else-online

Sutton, R. (2014). 16 Scary Statistics of Online Dating. Retrieved October 12, 2016, from https://www.phactual.com/16-scary-statistics-of-online-dating/

Warning Sign of a Catfish Online. (n.d.). Retrieved October 12, 2016, from http://visual.ly/warning-sign-catfish-online 

Does More Homework Mean More Learning?

When I was in high school, I had a sardonic teacher named Mr. Green. He taught history and always assigned reading homework from the textbook in preparation for the next class meeting. As all the students groaned in unison, Mr. Green would say, "We always have homework, stop complaining!" And he was right; we DID always have homework. I don't think we went one class meeting without it. The surprising thing, is that none of my peers ever asked the question, why? Why do we always have homework? What is the purpose of assigning work outside of school?

I always assumed we had homework because our teachers couldn't fit all the material we needed to learn during class. So by assigning homework, we could learn more on our own time to compensate for the lack of time. But we all know that not all students do their homework, and even for those that complete homework, it doesn't mean they absorbed any pertinent information. Is there truth behind the common myth that homework means more learning? Is there even a significant advantage to giving students more work? I decided to find out for myself!

As an aspiring teacher, I believe there are some benefits to assigning homework for our students. Homework can enhance the time we have in class with out students. According to a 2006 article written by researchers at Duke University, homework can require students to integrate separately learned skills and concepts (Cooper, Robinson, & Patall, 2006). While we direct these skills and concepts in class, students can continue learning at home by applying them in assignments without the teacher telling them what to do next. But there are also arguments that any activity [homework] remains rewarding for only so long, and children may become overexposed to  academic tasks (Bryan, Nelson, & Mathru, 1995).

This topic has continued to be controversial for many years, but some research I found cannot be ignored. In an article discussing how homework effects our students, the authors pointed out how students always speak of the high stakes of homework in terms of grades (Sallee & Rigler, 2008). It's true, nearly every homework assignment I have ever been given had a grade associated with it. Sometimes it was a simple completion grade. But in core subject areas, like math, science and history, homework quality was a heavy percentage of our overall grade in the class. These authors further argued that the high expectation for all students to read and understand the material in a way that both enables them to complete the homework AND prepare for a quiz in class the next day is a lot to expect of grade school students (Sallee & Rigler, 2008). The authors ask, if teachers put high pressure on performance (grades) and little allowance for questioning and uncertainty (outside of class), it again leads us to the question of the high expectations of homework (Sallee & Rigler, 2008). I think this expectation is too much to ask of all students. There is too much variance between how each student learns best, and making them figre it out on their own is not going to benefit most students. Not all of them have parents at home who have time to help them with homework when questions arise. We might be unintentionally making students use outside resources to perform on homework assignments. I don't think this enhances learning at all. If anything, I think it makes students discouraged with learning. If they have to learn everything on their own anyway, why should they attend class? Why should they pay attention in class? What is the point of school?

In another study, the authors interviewed many teachers asking why they assigned homework to students. They responded that they gave homework on a regular basis to students to meet parent expectations and to meet school district requirements, and both of these reasons for assigning homework are consistent with findings from other educational researchers (Brock, Fisher, Flood, Lapp, & Tao Han, 2007). These findings seem ridiculous to me! It is my teaching philosophy that we are here to help our STUDENTS learned more about the world and to cater to their individual needs to achieve academic excellence, not to please parents. Although I do understand wanting to follow district requirements, this seems like a ridiculous standard. I would ask any colleague who was in favor for homework standards this question; to what extent do those teachers take into account their students needs to successfully complete their homework? Is there a specific and reachable objective for each assignment? If the answer is no, then I don't believe that homework should be assigned.

I have concluded from my research that the amount of homework assigned in a class is not conducive to the amount of information students learn. Just because we are giving a certain amount of homework every night does not mean that students are learning more overall. We should be teaching our students valuable information and concepts during class in an atmosphere that fosters high level, critical thinking. This is the only way we can ensure that our students are getting positive experiences from their academic careers. 


Resources:

Cooper, H., Robinson, J., & Patall, E. (2006). Does Homework Improve Academic Achievement? A Synthesis of Research, 1987-2003. Review of Educational Research, 76(1), 1-62.

Bryan, T., Nelson, C., & Mathru, S. (1995). Homework: A survey of primary students in regular, resource, and self-contained special education classrooms. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 27, 85-90.

Sallee, B., & Rigler, N. (2008). Doing our homework on homework: How does homework help? English Journal, 98(2), 46-51

Brock, C., Fisher, D., Flood, J., Lapp, D., & Tao Han, K. (2007) Does homework matter? An investigation of teacher perceptions about homework practices for children from non-dominant background. Urban Education, 42(4) 19-24

Blogs in PE

Blogs are a great use of technology in physical education. This content area not only carries a physical domain, but we are also responsible for the development of cognitive and affective physical literacy. With these concepts, fitness development and health is an essential component.

When I am a teacher, I could have my students log their food intake and daily exercise routine on a personal blog. From the initial entries during the first few weeks of class, I can then have my students analyze their own behaviors: What is keeping them from making healthier choices? Who influences their choices? Can these factors be changed? How can we change them? Blogging all this information would be a great way for students to keep track of personal data. I can set it up so that only I can see what they write for confidentiality purposes. From this, I can help each student create a reachable health goal for the end of the semester. We can have blog check in weeks when I sit down individually with each student and ask if the goal was appropriate or if it needs to be changed. I could grade the students on their online blogs and whether they made appropriate goals and showed signs of progress. Even if they didn't meet their goal, the blog would show proof of effort or (lack thereof) towards a reaching goal. 

Especially in PE, goal setting can be a touchy subject because of the obesity epidemic in our country.With a blog, the goal setting experience can be more personable and meaningful to the student. They can have their own voice without knowing what other students wrote and not feel like anyone else might judge them for their comments. My students can find new appreciation of health and fitness when they meet their personal goal, which is what inspired me to want to be a part of this profession.