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Learning Management System (LMS)

Explore tools, tips, and strategies for using Learning Management Systems (LMS) in education. Enhance teaching and learning with innovative solutions.

Virtual Learning Tools, Part 1: Make Schoology Work For You

by Miguel Guhlin August 20, 2020

written by Miguel Guhlin

As schools embrace learning management systems designed to make teaching and learning easier, challenges abound. Many educators are struggling to navigate the wealth of tutorials and videos available for Schoology. In this blog entry, the first in the series, we explore three Schoology-related questions. Before we go any further, allow me to share another reason why Schoology has become so pervasive in Texas.

TEA Offers Free Learning Management System

If you missed the July 30, 2020 announcement, you may not have heard that the Texas Education Agency is offering a free LMS in support of the Texas Home Learning initiative. Here’s an excerpt from the announcement:

As part of THL 3.0, TEA announced this week that it will offer all Texas school systems a world-class Learning Management System (LMS) from PowerSchool’s Schoology for two years at no cost. Like other THL 3.0 offerings, use of the Schoology LMS will be optional for Texas school systems. Currently, Schoology is used in schools representing more than one million students across Texas (1 in 5 students statewide).

If you are embarking on your first use of Schoology, this series on LMSs Made Simple will address some key questions teachers are asking.

In This Entry

This first set of questions includes the following:

How do you keep parents in the loop about missing assignments?
How do I set up non-graded discussions?
How do I disable students’ ability to reply to each other?

Ready to get started?

Did You Know?
The Texas Association for the Gifted and Talented (TAGT) is offering a free webinar for parents. The webinar, taking place on Tuesday, September 15, 2020 at 6:30 PM, is Helping Kids Thrive in Today’s World. The speaker is Christine Fonseca. Fill out this form and TAGT will send you a link to the webinar.

Identifying Missing Assignments in Schoology

We know that students may sometimes fail in completing all their assignments on time. One way to motivate them is to make sure parents can access the list of missing assignments. How do you get that done in Schoology? That’s the question Maria is asking below:

Does anyone know a way for teachers to identify missing assignments for the week? A report that shows all weekly assignments and their completion status? Families are having a hard time and I would love a quick way to provide feedback to them. Thanks for all your help.

In Schoology, the teacher can mark assignments as missing in the gradebook. Parents who have signed up can receive updates via email on missing assignments.

Did You Know?

Sign up now for this online, self-paced course that covers everything you need to know about using Schoology and setting up courses. Learn more online.

The first step involves marking student assignments as missing in the gradebook. You can see what that looks like below:

As the teacher, you can export the parent access codes as a comma-separated values (CSV) file. Open this file type in Excel or Google Sheets and then you can email merge it to send to parents. Parents can then sign up via the Schoology website using the access code:

The parent view shows them what assignments are missing or scores/grades received:

In this way, you’re able to keep parents informed of their child’s progress.

Setting Up Discussions

Setting up discussions in Schoology is straightforward. Let’s take a moment to consider the request Kris shared:

As a K-4 educator, my principal informed me I would be using Schoology this year. As a counselor, I need to set up bibliotheraphy with discussions. I don’t need to grade. What should I do?

Bibliotherapy involves using books as therapy or treatment. School counselors rely on it as a way to treat mental or psychological disorders. As the author of this study points out:

Using quality children’s literature for bibliotherapy helps students to grow socio-emotionally. It assists students in identifying with the main character in a story. That character has a disability which leads to personal insight and growth.

Source: Afolayan J. A. (1992) Documentary perspective of bibliotherapy in education. Reading Horizons 33: 137–148

While reading the book, you can set up activities such as the ones Kelly Bear suggests:

Ask open-ended questions about the story
Retell the story
Act out roles
Use puppets
Write reactions
Record thoughts through audio/video
Create art

Jumping into Schoology

How will you do this in Schoology in an online environment? One approach can involve using free digital tools like Flipgrid. You can use Flipgrid to create a safe space for student-created book talks. You embed the Flipgrid topic in a Schoology page or discussion topic. Since you can embed content into Schoology pages, assignments, and more, the sky is the limit. You can also encourage students to use Wakelet, Google Docs/Slides, or Microsoft 365. Organize their exploration of a text using one of these tools.

Did You Know?

Sign up for the Remote Learning Tools self-paced course. You’ll pick up a variety of tools that make flipped classroom, hybrid/remote learning easier.

Schoology allows us to set up book-centered folders that may contain relevant resources. What’s more, we can use groups in grading to assign specific students to the bibliotherapy. This means we have to take a few steps though first.

The first step is to get a list of students into the Bibliotherapy course. You have the option of either creating a course for each book (cumbersome) or student, or a course with many books. That is, create the course and then create a “Materials” folder for each book. Then you are able to create pages or discussions that take advantage of grading groups.

Here’s a short video on how to do that in Schoology:

Disabling Students Replying to Each Other’s Posts

Mayra shares a common challenge. At the start of the year, you may want to limit students’ ability to send each other messages. Schoology has an amazing feature known as “Updates.” Google Classroom users have it as well, but for them, it’s the “Stream.” This common feature also appears in Edmodo.

What may not be so obvious is “How do you disable students’ ability to reply to each other’s posts in Schoology?” Some possible responses include:

Adjust Course Options to turn on moderation or turn that feature off
Ask your Schoology administrator to disable that and the “liking” feature
Disable comments for each post
Set up a discussion that requires students to post first. This means they must post first before they see what others have written.

Since it can be a bit confusing, let’s walk through each of these in a short video.

Hopefully, this first blog in our series was able to answer a question or two you may have about Schoology. In the next installment, we’ll cover some of the ways educators are brightening up their online courses.

August 20, 2020 2 comments

Learning Management System (LMS)

Tracking Attendance for Virtual Learners

by Miguel Guhlin August 19, 2020

written by Miguel Guhlin

For decades, teachers took student attendance with visual checks and marks on paper. Then attendance tracking became an exercise in logging student absences and tardies in digital gradebooks. When teachers exchanged physical classrooms for virtual, however, it created a problem.

Few gave thought to how to track attendance. They scrambled to answer the question, “How can I track it in my learning management system?” In this blog entry, we’ll explore how some popular LMSs handle attendance tracking.

TCEA offers amazing learning management system (LMS) self-paced courses. These are designed to take the sting out of having to sit through hours of Zoom lessons only to realize that the presenters went too fast. Instead, take your time and learn what you need to be successful via TCEA’s courses. Learn more about why we did this on the Ed Tech Club podcast.

The Existential Question: Are They Here? Or There?

“Why can’t we call out their names and take attendance like we always have?” I overheard a teacher ask in a webinar. The question remains, How do you verify a student is sitting in your virtual classroom? That’s an important question since school funding is tied to average daily attendance (ADA):

The average daily attendance (ADA) is the total days of student attendance divided by the number of instructional days for the specified time period. For example, a student attending every day would equal one ADA. ADA is not the same as enrollment, which is the number of students enrolled in a campus on a given day. (Source: Texas Education Agency)

Some LMSs have attendance tracking built-in. Some educators are relying on one-question non-graded assignments, visual check-in, or Flipgrid to keep track of who’s there. Which of these solutions will work best?

#1 – Schoology Attendance Tracking

Using Schoology? If you have access to Schoology Enterprise, you have several ways to track students in the course. These analytics include assignment, discussion, link clicking, and materials access. Armed with this information, you can see the impact of your assignments and work. But what about attendance tracking?

Did You Know?

TCEA offers a $29 Schoology Educator course you can take to get up to speed on Schoology Basic and Enterprise features. Bulk discounts are available, and you get a digital badge and certificate. You also earn 12 CPE credit hours. Learn more.

One easy way is to take attendance with the Attendance menu, available in Schoology Basic. You can see what that looks like below:

Schoology Enterprise gives you even more information via their Analytics menu option. Their analystics system provides access to:

Consistent tracking of Schoology usage across web, iOS app, and Android app use
An insight dashboard. This dashboard provides insights into how students are accessing the classroom, including what materials students are viewing and the amount of time spent.

Source: View Image Source

Educators can export user analytic statistics as a comma-separated values (CSV) (a.k.a. comma-delimited) file. This makes importing the file to a spreadsheet program easy. Once in a spreadsheet (e.g. Excel, Google Sheets), you can generate graphs and more reports if needed. In summary, Schoology Basic gets you started with attendance tracking. Schoology Enterprise provides a wealth of information teachers can use.

#2 – Canvas

As you may know, Instructure’s Canvas is a popular choice for many school districts. But how do you track attendance in Canvas?

Canvas, like Schoology, enjoys an analytics section. It also has a specific feature to track attendance. That feature is the Roll Call Attendance Tool. It masquerades as an assignment. Here’s how Canvas Basic Guide describes it:

The Attendance (Roll Call) tool is an external app (LTI). Use it to take attendance in Canvas courses.

Enabled at the account level, use the Roll Call Attendance tool in all courses in a Canvas account. Some districts are choosing to not use fancy, outside LTIs.

#3 – Seesaw

Why did your district pivot from a more age-appropriate LMS like Seesaw? If that’s a question you’ve been asking yourself, here’s why. Unlike Schoology and Canvas, tracking attendance isn’t obvious in Seesaw or Google Classroom. There aren’t any fancy analytics in these tools. That’s why some school districts dropped Google Classroom and Seesaw. Some districts, like San Antonio ISD, dropped Seesaw and pushed everyone to Canvas. The problem, however, is that Seesaw for Schools is easy to work with for younger students.

While some districts compensated by tracking attendance in daily face-to-face, live (a.k.a. synchronous) meetings, others preferred daily assignments. The problem with that approach is that there is a time lag from when the student submits the assignments to when the teacher grades and puts it in the book. Putting the information into the attendance book is thus a manual process.

Were you aware that TCEA member Brittany Beaird created an amazing online course to assist you in learning Seesaw? Become an overnight pro with the highly-rated Seesaw Educator course. Or learn how to Bitmoji your virtual classroom with TCEA member Lisa Marie Bennett.

Even so, it is possible to track attendance in Seesaw without assignments. This approach relies on Seesaw’s Skills.

How do you track attendance with students in Seesaw? One approach that Lisa Monthie (Waco ISD) suggests is using Seesaw Skills. Kris Szajner describes this approach in the video below:

Source: Kris Szajner (@KSzajner)

“You can click on the skill and grade it by giving it stars. There’s a report that gives you the grades in a CSV file,” says Lisa Monthie (Waco ISD). This makes it easy to import into an external digital attendance tracking system. Chances are, your school won’t allow import into the gradebook system. That means most folks will be using the manual approach to transfer grades.

#4 – Google Classroom

Using Google Classroom as your LMS? One of the ways G Suite EDU educators are tracking attendance is to rely on a scheduled Google Meet.

Sign up now for Google Classroom, TCEA’s online, self-paced course. Learn what others are saying about this and TCEA’s other online courses.

As mentioned in previous blog entries, you can use Google Chrome browser add-ons. In my blog entry, Google Meet Add-Ons and Updates, I share several tools you can use. Some of those Google Meet tools for tracking attendance include:

Meet Attendance – Collect attendance in a Google Sheet from a Google Meet
Google Meet Plus – An amazing tool that is a must-have for any teacher. You can drop links, famous quotes, or use a whiteboard that tracks who did what.

Need analytics to complement Google Classroom? Find a few solutions in Five Amazing Add-Ons for Google Classroom. One worth looking at is Classwork Zoom.

Have the freedom to try a different tracking approach? Give this last option a try.

#5 – Flipgrid for Student Attendance

“Worried about evidence of attendance for school funding? No problem, it took me about three minutes to schedule my weekly Flipgrid attendance,” says Dr. Randall Sampson (@RandallSampson). He goes on to say the following:

I can insert attendance in required SIS and have a back-up security blanket of evidence. Plus, all videos are time stamped! Today’s scheduled attendance is working. I also receive email confirmations every time a student checks in for attendance. What does a school get from a 15-second Flipgrid attendance video? Export your Flipgrid Attendance videos to a spreadsheet.

Wow, let’s unpack some of that. Dr. Sampson asserts that you can use Flipgrid to:

Collect time-stamped attendance
Receive email confirmations
Export attendance records to a spreadsheet

“I want to keep it super simple. I set it to 15 seconds. Student: State your ‘first and last name’ and say ‘here,'” Dr. Sampson says. Isn’t that amazing? Thanks to Microsoft, Flipgrid.com is available at no cost to educators around the world. Get your free education account now.

Now that you’ve seen some different approaches to attendance tracking, share what you are doing. Have no doubt, attendance tracking is about bringing money into the school district. This makes doing it right and in a consistent manner important to your admins. Finally, don’t forget to explore TCEA’s free Remote Learning resources and blog entries.

August 19, 2020 2 comments

Learning Management System (LMS)

Three Ways A New LMS Succeeds

by Miguel Guhlin February 15, 2019

written by Miguel Guhlin

Ready to put an end to your learning management system? Tired of paying exorbitant fees for clunky features, low use, and high cost? You’re not alone. “Research shows that almost half of all organizations,” says Debbie Williams, feel the same way. In this blog entry, let’s take a look at a popular LMS and how it compares to Debbie’s three reasons why LMSs often fail today. The LMS? Microsoft Teams, which boasted a 251% usage growth in education.

Check out G2’s Learning Management System Comparison Tool

Get an overview of the Learning Management System (LMS) category at a glance

Reason #1 – LMSs Are Not Student-Centered

“The LMS is the biggest barrier to learning,” says Steve Dineen. The reason Steve offers is that the LMS meets the needs of the teachers. What happened to student-centered learning? Student-centered learning means more than teaching skills and strategies. It means that learners leave with skills and strategies that have an immediate impact on their lives. When LMSs focus on making course delivery or facilitation easier, they are off target.

To create student-centered learning opportunities, focus on increased relevance to the student experience. Make sure that students have a choice over they want to learn. And, last, keep assessment options open. The main challenge for teachers using learning management systems is one of control. They micro-manage learning components, many of which may be irrelevant to the learner.

Recent Microsoft Teams Updates

Let’s review how Microsoft Teams approaches both teacher and student support. The LMS that ensures student-centered learning wins. That said, easing the job of the teacher is also important. Here are some new developments that MS Teams announced in January 2019.

Faster grading and submission of grades into the district’s Student Information System (SIS). The SIS connection happens via the new Grade Sync tool.
Grading can happen via iOS and Android apps.
Quicker creation of new assignments and ability to categorize assignments
A Class Materials space that supports sharing of reference materials to guide students. This space prevents students from removing content.
Creation, import, and export of rubrics in Teams
Makes it easier for students to enroll in a class (a.k.a. “Team”) using a class code to engage in student-to-teacher chats.

The popular LMS from Microsoft introduced new integrations as well. These include Moodle , TurnItIn, and ThingLink. The last integration (ThingLink) offers more options for students. It can make creating interactive maps, presentations, and virtual 360-degree tours possible. What’s more, students can create infographics that incorporate text, images, sound, and video.

Microsoft Teams eases the creation of student-centered learning. They can create in Microsoft OneNote in their own space. Their work gets graded in Teams or OneNote (teacher’s preference). What’s more, technologies like Immersive Reader ease students’ comprehension.

And let’s not forget that Microsoft made Flipgrid available to all educators free. It makes it simpler to capture video and audio creations, including student annotations.

Reason #2 – Maintaining an LMS Can Be Tough

As a technology director, I managed thirteen instances of Moodle. This was all done via command line interface (CLI) on a district-hosted, Ubuntu GNU/Linux server. As such, I know first hand what a monster self-hosted LMSs can be. Even when implementing LMSs in the Cloud, a school district can face certain struggles that may include:

Account management
Regular updates to the LMS code (e.g. PHP, HTML, MySQL)
Granting new rights to educators and students
Enrollment of students in the appropriate online course

These issues, simple to list, are tough in practice. Many districts lack the staff expertise, time, or single-minded focus required. That makes the decision to move easy. Districts have shifted from self-hosted LMSs to cloud-hosted, vendor-managed systems.

Microsoft Teams handles each of these with ease. Let’s review how below:

Not sure how to handle account management? Check with the School Data Sync team at Microsoft. This free service creates class teams for MS Teams and OneNote Class notebooks. It facilitates rostering and Single Sign-On (SSO) integration for many third-party applications.
Worried about your LMS getting hacked since you didn’t do an update? No need to worry. Let the Microsoft Teams support folks handle this for you. Wish you had a direct line to the project lead? Send a tweet out to Justin Chando (@justinchando).
Enrollment woes plaguing you? Get teachers and students sorted into appropriate virtual spaces by using automated solutions like School Data Sync to take the burden off.

Microsoft Teams makes LMS maintenance worries go away. Isn’t that nice?

Reason #3 – It Can Be Tough to Get Teachers Using It

Hit a brick wall getting teachers to use an LMS with their students? That obstacle is another piece of the wall teachers encounter. They encounter obstacles and so and reluctance grows. After all, no one wants to use something that adds time and effort to their workload.

“I also am seeing that if you just blanket present something to an entire staff and have expectations of using immediately, it won’t happen… I always tell my admin pick a ‘beta’ group have them use and share with PLN see how it works for you..if it comes from the teachers….(Source: Tweet from Liz “@TechCoachBoyd” Boyd)

The best approach to increasing LMS usage isn’t to find the most expensive one. It’s not about threatening teachers or cajoling them. Rather, it’s about getting an LMS in place that is designed for learners AND teachers.

Microsoft Teams supports integration of various Office 365 tools. That’s expected. Microsoft’s push has also been to allow easy access from third party tools. Choosing popular integrations (e.g. Flipgrid, ThingLink) makes selecting Teams an easy choice. The easier these tools are to use, the more that students will use them.

Three Ways a New LMS Succeeds

Wondering how your own learning management system stacks up? Whether it’s Microsoft Teams, Google Classroom, or Instructure’s Canvas, choices abound. What are three points to keep in mind when choosing an LMS?

Here are my top three criteria:

Easy to open gates: Most resembling walled gardens, traditional LMSs limit access. They limit the ability of learners and teachers to share out and bring content in. I’m more inclined to choose an LMS that makes adding third-party content easier. Even better, the LMS makes sharing outside of itself easier.
Turnkey account management and support: Make simple, powerful solutions. These solutions should not demand a teacher wait on someone else. If a teacher doesn’t have to rely on an over-worked technology department to get the job done, then we all win.
Mobile and cross-platform: An LMS must be mobile and device agnostic. From Chromebooks to iOS/Android smartphones and tablets, an LMS must be mobile. For students, it has to be easy to submit content (e.g. video, audio, text, and web links). For teachers, grading and assignment creation/management are essential.

What are your top criteria for LMS selection? And how do you stop yourself from selecting an LMS for each grade range?

References

Infographic

February 15, 2019 0 comments

CTO/CIO Learning Management System (LMS)

12 Key Criteria to Consider When Deciding on a New Learning Management System

by Guest Blogger October 8, 2017

written by Guest Blogger

Engaging K-12 students while ensuring that lessons properly align with state standards can be a monumental undertaking in today’s classroom. Over the last few years, using a learning management system (LMS) to document, track, report, and deliver curriculum is one thing that is making that easier. At the same time, they’re also giving pupils voice and choice, enabling personalization, and encouraging collaboration.

The question is, though, how does a district go about conducting an effective learning management system analysis to find a platform that meets (and exceeds) the individual needs and expectations?

Finding the Right Rubric

The first step is to consider adopting a rubric. After evaluating several sources for rubrics, we decided to use Criteria for the Evaluation of Learning Management Systems to review the numerous solutions we looked at. These included, but were not limited to, comprehensive solutions like itslearning as well as free versions like Canvas, Edmodo, and Piazza. We adapted the rubric accordingly and picked numerous platforms to review based on our familiarity with them and the variety of paid and free options offered by each.

Beyond the rubric, talk to schools and districts currently using the LMS solutions under consideration and gather informed feedback on how each platform performs. Finally, don’t forget to request demo accounts so that stakeholders can “try before they buy.” And while the basics obviously include seeing what products are out there, reviewing what each product will do, and then choosing the best product for your environment, there are actually several additional steps that every district should take before making a final selection. I’ve outlined my 12 key points to consider when selecting an LMS below.

1. Pedagogical Design

Knowing that the LMS’s main charge would be providing content and tools for engaging students and conducting interactive learning, we sought out a platform that integrates well with interactive tools and that allows us to routinely add new pedagogical tools to the system.

2. Design and Layout

We knew that a functional interface with a decent layout would do an “okay” job, but one that allowed for easy navigation with minimal training would be even better. During our research, we set our sights on finding an LMS that had a simple, intuitive interface with minimal clicks to access materials, with little or no training needed to get started.

3. Course Export

Does the LMS allow users to export course structure and content, as well as selected sub-elements of a course, using an industry-standard such as IMS Content Packaging? This important question was on our minds as we reviewed our LMS options, knowing that the solution would be most effective when serving as a fully-integrated solution for our district.

4. Archives

A good LMS has strong archival tools that support backup of completed courses with student submissions and discussions intact. An excellent match includes archive tools that support automatic backup of completed courses with student submissions and discussions intact. With the latter, instructors have full access and control of completed courses.

5. Communication

We wanted a platform that included both asynchronous (email) and synchronous communication tools and that provides a high level of flexibility for the use of email (asynchronous by roster, individual, or group) as well as instant messaging, chat, and threaded discussions.

6. File Exchange

In today’s collaborative educational environment, simple file exchange is a must-have. We sought out an LMS that provides secure drop-boxes and shared folders for file exchange among students as well as instructors—and that also allows for bulk downloads of attached files.

7. Sections and Groups

The platform had to allow instructors to define sub-groups of students within the class roster for purposes of communication and collaborative work, but we also needed a hierarchy of support sections within a single course (i.e., so that course content could be shared among sections).

8. E-portfolios

We wanted a platform that included an integrated, full-featured e-portfolio tool that would make it possible to gather, review, and present work products to support any portfolio strategy (e.g., résumé, learning, tenure, etc).

9. Discussion Tools

To streamline communications, our LMS needed to include extremely fast and highly-functional discussion tools complete with featured user profiles or pictures, file attachments, and HTML interface.

10. Testing and Assessment Tools

Our new LMS had to go beyond just simple test generation and provide user-friendly tools for creating assessments with multimedia, learning games, and other interactive tools (such as polls). Going a step further, the new platform would be able to provide immediate feedback with tips for remediation.

11. Grade Book and Student Tracking

The platform had to include a highly-functional grade book that was easy to use and that allowed grades to be exported to a spreadsheet or student information system (SIS). Through the platform, teachers could access student tracking tools to learn, for example, which pages the student has viewed and what tasks have been completed. From there, the student receives an email when his or her participation is substandard.

12. Learning Analytics

In today’s analytics-centric learning environment, we wanted an LMS that could provide in-depth data gathering and reporting on learning outcomes based on configurable rubrics, and that would also allow for longitudinal analysis of cohorts as well as individuals (including e-portfolios).

Find the LMS That’s Right for You

The other key points that we factored in while reviewing our options included calendar and selective release (i.e., a collaborative calendar with pop-up announcements); integration with library resources (to allow faculty to find and reference both public and licensed library materials, including full texts); the use of open standards; and the availability and delivery of training materials and technical support.

When exploring your own options, be sure to incorporate the key points from this rubric—and your district’s individual wants and needs—into your final decision. There are hundreds of LMS options out there on the market today, so it pays to take the time and do your own research to find the right one.

This is a guest blog by Michael Cummings, who is the Technology Learning Coach in the Division of Technology at the Fort Worth Independent School District.

October 8, 2017 0 comments

Students engaged with Chromebooks and Canvas

Chromebooks Learning Management System (LMS)

Chromebooks and Canvas Open New Doors

by Guest Blogger June 13, 2017

written by Guest Blogger

Cleburne Independent School District had its first Chromebook deployment to secondary students January 2017. In preparation for this, teachers were trained during the summer of 2016. This training continued monthly during the 2016-2017 school year. A large component of the technology training was centered around Canvas, a Learning Management System (LMS). The usage of Canvas has become very popular. Currently, it is second worldwide only to Blackboard.

Why Canvas?

One of the key features within Canvas, which is added as an LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability), is Grade Passback. It allows teachers to send grades from Canvas straight to the SIS (Student Information System) with just the click of a button. As an instructional technologist, I knew this would be an important factor that would promote the usage of Canvas. During our technology training sessions, I would regularly ask teachers if they were using Grade Passback and to share their experiences about it. Tres White, one of the high school PE coaches, raised his hand during a training session to talk about what he had encountered. His testimony encouraged me and validated that the efforts invested into the technology training were paying off.

After speaking to Tres more, it was evident to me that he had taken the implementation of technology, specifically Canvas, to another dimension. Find out next why he chose to take hold of this new way of teaching within a subject area, PE, that is largely kinesthetic.

Using Canvas and Chromebooks with PE Students

Technology surrounds us. Wearable technology, such as fitness trackers and smartwatches, are very popular. Many of these devices have a personal health app pre-installed that can track steps, distance, and a person’s heart rate. I asked myself, “Why not incorporate the technology that students already have in their hands into my PE classes to keep them engaged?” With so many free fitness apps available, I can reach a wide range of fitness and interest levels.

Coach uses Canvas and Chromebooks in physical education

Coach Tres White

This school year, the students on my campus received Chromebooks. This provided even more opportunities to integrate technology. Since students were using technology in their other classes, it was easy to incorporate this into PE. Canvas, an online classroom, is the program most teachers were using to facilitate their instruction and track student progress. This program allows me to assign work to my students, which they can complete and submit online. Canvas has been easy to use, and I can customize it to fit the needs of my students. I can create quizzes and post notes and handouts for the current sport or activity. Students can even collaborate with each other on projects outside of the school day.

Canvas also allows me to have a paperless classroom, which is nice since I am either in the gym or outside. The PE environment does not consist of the things normally found within a traditional classroom; therefore, Canvas makes learning more convenient for me and my students.

Lastly, for those who are not proficient or interested in traditional sports, PE can be a source of anxiety. Integrating technology might be the method to make physical fitness more appealing. I am excited about the positive responses I have received from my students and look forward to what is next. I am confident this partnership of the virtual and physical world will help young people look at personal fitness in a new way.

This is a guest blog from Tracy Perez Shea and Coach Tres White. Shea is the secondary instructional technology and district multimedia specialist at Cleburne ISD , and Tres White serves as a physical education teacher and assistant basketball and track coach at Cleburne High School.

June 13, 2017 0 comments

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