Online/Distance – Movement Composition – Week 3

This week, the students will start learning from their fellow peers by accessing videos they all created in week 2. We were initially do this in the previous week but it seemed that that was too ambitious so I decided not to push it. One step at a time is fine.

Before going further, for anyone who hasn’t seen the plan for this unit, I have roughly outline it below. We are a little behind plan now but I think that is fine, we can easily make up time in the 5th and 6th week of the unit. Therefore, we are up to the second part of week 2, where students would normally view all of the videos that were uploaded to the shared google drive.

 

As mentioned in a previous post, a number of students didn’t initially engage with the unit and some students have not joined in at all. There are many reasons for each individual case so I have decided to try and just work with each student and each group of students where they are at in this unit. Some students are completing week 1, some week 2 and some students are being assigned with the week 3 task. I have organized this by creating a simple table to help me track where each student is at by marking “late”, “on time” or simply leaving it blank if the student had not responded or if they uploaded a video of general exercising, not the task that was specified.

 

Students who were still at week 1 or 2 of the inquiry were presented with these instructions in their Seesaw Activity list:

 

To save some space and move on to the current week, the videos can be viewed in the previous post Online/Distance – Movement Composition – Week 2, which can easily be found by clicking on the Home button Let’s move on to week 3. The students who are up to date (the majority of the students) were given their instructions through a PDF in Seesaw so that I could send them a link to the google drive where all their videos are stored, pictured earlier.

Once the students accessed the google drive they could easily find their groups folder and I encouraged them to watch some other videos from other groups as well.

 

Once they selected one of the folders, they could see all of the students doing the same activity as they were and watch those videos to learn some new moves. Here are some of the folders.

 

Here is one of the examples of a student instructional video. This is my son Zintis, in grade 2. I chose his as it is simply easier than getting parental permission at the moment when were are not on campus.

 

Reflections

Whilst I was fairly busy over the weekend downloading all of the students instruction videos and then uploading them into google Drive, this was the best part of the unit so far with students really engaging with other students on Seesaw. I encouraged students to watch, learn and practice some of the moves from their friends videos before demonstrating their progress with their own. Once they had posted however, students were keen to comment on other students progress and give them advice on how to do the trick better/easier etc.

For me as well, this was a fairly smooth week as the majority of the work had already been done beforehand. Some students experienced problems with access to the shared google drive folder but they emailed me and I was able to respond and resolve the issue fairly quickly. A number of students were keen to complete the task and uploaded videos very quickly but I sent them emails reminding them that they had all week to watch more videos and continue practicing so they could perform that move even better. So those students were encouraged to simply respond again more towards the end of the week.

The students who were behind this group in weeks 1 or 2 were more the focus of my week as I helped them understand and get involved in the unit. One or two students decided to change their ideas and rather than make them go back to week one I simply asked them to move on to week 2 and make their instructional video. When students in week 2 had completed their instructional videos, I immediately uploaded those to the shared google drive, so students in week 3 could see that more and more students were catching up and there were more videos to watch, more students to learn from.

I have decided to change plans for those students who still didn’t engage at all, even after the third attempt (including an email to the parents). I had created a Home Olympics series of challenges for my younger students but I believe some of those students might really enjoy the “one off” type of PE session to simply become active and exercise. I don’t want to keep assigning them the same task for the remainder of the school year so if there is another way I can get them engage, I will do so with the Home Olympics challenge. I have uploaded the first video with the first tasks here: