Online/Distance – Movement Composition Week 1
I recently had the opportunity to present an idea for teaching a whole unit via distance/online learning. This was presented as a webinar through the Connected PE community, led by Jarrod Robinson (The PE GEEK). I will add the same resources to this blog but if you want to view the presentation on the link below.
https://www.bigmarker.com/connectedpe/Delivering-a-Online-Movement-Composition-Unit
To view some of the other presentations, click on the link below.
https://www.bigmarker.com/communi…/connectedpe/conferences
Movement Composition
The overall idea for this unit is that students will create some sort of routine/performance, like dance, gymnastics, rollerblading, basketball, any type of movements! It is a unit that I believe I can act as more of a facilitator rather than a PE teacher giving specific teaching points and instructions. In this context, I will now be more of a digital facilitator and send my students videos, links to apps and websites as well as connect the students so they can teach one-another. To get an overall idea of what this unit will look like, I have roughly outlined the unit below:
Week 1
We use the app Seesaw as our platform to help deliver our lessons during this time of online/distance learning. I will be running this unit in Grades 2-5 as I believe that is the age groups that will be able to interact with the task and be able to independently video record themselves and upload their work. All students have an iPad with Seesaw and some other apps on it but I can also push out apps on their device if needed. In the first week, I uploaded a message for students to do two activities after they watched they introduction video which is attached below.
The first task was to try out a number of different activities they might like: Dance, gymnastics, basketball, yoga, rollerblading… anything. Then, they needed to choose the activity they think they will select for their Movement Composition and record themselves performing all of the moves they already know. For example, if I chose Jump Rope, I would make a video demonstrating all of the Jump Rope moves that I already know.
The Second task was for the students to choose one of the moves they performed in their first video and create a video explaining and teaching how to do that specific move. They should explain the teaching points of how to do that move and give a demonstration so someone could learn how to do that move from their explanation.
Here is what the students instructions look like when they open up their activities in Seesaw. They will click on the green “Add Respose” button to upload their videos.
Reflections
Within a couple of hours of uploading the activity activity on the Monday morning, I had seen a number of responses from the students who are the regular PE enthusiasts. However, the uptake of the activity was initially slower than the previous weeks when I was simply assigning challenges and home exercises. Some of the ideas have been great as well, like: Lightsaber sword routine, rollerblading and basketball dribbling mixed and gymnastics on a trampoline just to name a few. When students submitted work I responded as quickly as I could in order to see if the students understood the task and if they had submitted a general exercise video like we were doing before and if they had, I used the “Send Back” function in Seesaw to the student with instructions regarding the new unit.
On the Wednesday, I wanted to encourage more engagement with the activity so I emailed all of the students in grades 2-5 and explained the concept of the unit again. I also made a new activity for them in Seesaw as the first one had been pushed down quite a way and the students struggled scrolling through all of the activities to find the PE one. This helped but I was still hoping to get more on board. By Friday I decided to download all of the students videos and archive the activities from week 1 which is a policy we have so as not to clog up the activities list.
The overall uptake from week 1 was as follows:
- Grade 5 – 65%
- Grade 4 – 40%
- Grade 3 – 40%
- Grade 3 – 25%
There are a variety of factors as to why the numbers are not right up there at 100%. I have communicated with the grade level teachers who have informed me about the various students who have specific troubles accessing the learning and I understand, we are all trying to do the best we can. However, I still wanted to try and encourage those who have been completing other work in Seesaw but did not complete the task for PE, I wanted to try and see if I could get those students involved in the unit as opposed to general exercising. I am not against general exercising, I am encouraging them to do some of the workout apps on a daily basis seeings though they are not at school playing with friends and doing after school activities. I just want to see if we could spend 2 sessions a week focusing on completing a unit which will still cover our learning outcomes and ATL skills.
Therefore, over the weekend, I emailed all of those students and their parents to try and promote the unit a bit more. I attached the instruction video so if parent’s hadn’t seen it with their child they might now watch it and discuss it with their son or daughter. I explained to them that I understood if they couldn’t participate due to any of the various issues that are hampering everyone but if they could get involved in the unit then that would be great. This led to large and varied response from parents who either explained that it was just too much at the moment but they will keep using some of the apps to exercise or, parents who said they would help get their students going.
So now I will have students who will be at different stages of the unit as I do not want to make the students who completed their task in week 1 to have to wait until the other students have caught up. So next week, some students will be doing the first weeks work as described earlier to complete their first video while other students will be completing their instruction videos and then sharing them with students of a similar interest area.
I have a large number of students doing basketball, another large group doing jump rope and then smaller groups of rollerblading, gymnastics, hoola-hoop, trampoline gymnastics, bike riding etc. Seeings though there are 4 year levels doing this unit, I will be able to connect the students in different year levels who are undertaking the same interest area/activity.
So whilst the uptake was initially slow, more students got involved as the week progressed and I believe we will generate a lot more interest in the second week. I don’t mind having students working at different stages of the unit as I am trying to meet the students at their level and address their needs. I believe that there will be enough students at the same stage in order to share exercise ideas, and students who are behind the initial group have the advantage of accessing all of the previously made videos that will be stored in a Google Drive folder for students to access.
So I’m fairly happy with the way the unit has begun and am busy creating different folders in our Google Drive folder and sorting the videos so that we can go on to the next stage of the unit, students learning movements from other students.
I will post again next week to continue to give updates for those interested.
