Professional development (PD) is often a weak area for physical education teachers, particularly in more rural areas. Thanks to technology, there are a plethora of opportunities available now for us to learn new ideas. Many equipment and curriculum companies, including SPARK/Sportime, are offering free webinars each month to share new teaching methodologies. Can’t make it at the assigned time due to coaching, class, or time zone? Still register as most webinars are recorded and can be viewed at your convenience. The only downside is losing the ability to interact with the presenter. Artie Kamiya’s National PE Institute will be streaming each day’s keynote addresses live the week of July 28. Additionally, Twitter can assist you in finding great PD offerings or a simple way to network with professionals all over the world. A simple search of #physed can direct you to multiple opportunities and the Monday night PE Twitter chats.
Looking for new tools for your teaching toolbox? Many apps and programs are available to make teaching innovative and fun. Also, they can lighten our workload and enable us to focus our energies in other directions. Jarrod Robinson, the P.E. Geek, is constantly developing new apps that assist with student learning, record keeping, and class management. Thinking about flipping your gym? Investigate programs such as Edmodo, Blendspace, or Classflow. These can assist you in previewing content and activities with your students via documents or uploaded video. If you are looking to switch all of your class documents over to cloud storage, Dropbox, Evernote, or Box all offer great storage options that enable access to your “stuff” from anywhere. Another benefit is the ability to share documents or files with users in your entire department. Developing a Livebinder is another method to store all of your documents together for use in a few mouse clicks. As you can see, there are many options for physical educators to become better teachers.
Oh yes, the challenge part. That is my personal challenge to you for the next month. Investigate one of these options or another that you stumble across that you may want to use this school year. Attend a webinar, watch the keynotes, or try a new app or program. Perhaps you will find nothing that fits your needs, but at least you are learning what won’t work. However, you may find an idea or tool that can make you a better teacher and assist your students learn the content. As I heard from Dr. Jayne Greenberg of Miami Dade County last week, “Do you want to teach for 30 years, or do you want to teach one year 30 times?” We owe it to ourselves and our students to try to get better each year.
If you try one of the above items, please post your thoughts about it to the comments section. That may assist others in their search.