Lil A

As I look ahead into my future teaching plans there are many goals that I want to achieve. One of the areas that concerns these goals is in the area of technology. Incorporating technology into physical education looks like it could be quite difficult. As a Physical Education teacher I plan on integrating technology into my curriculum as frequently as possible. There is not as much technology out there for this subject area as in others.

One of my goals is to incorporated technology as frequently as possible. There are some software programs that the students can use in their learning. I plan on buying these programs and teaching my students in this way. The biggest challenge will be incorporating computers into PE. Much of physical activity is learned kinesthetically and working with technology will not accomplish this goal. Using Excel will be very helpful for recording student’s times and scores. Printing these scores out for each activity will help the students know what time to beat and how much better they need to be performing in an activity.

To continue my learning I plan on taking classes that are offered through my school district that I will be teaching for. If the school district does not offer these courses then I will go else where to find classes to keep me up to date with technology. Hopefully PE will begin to use technology more in the near future.

If I was to just look at the website address of this site, , I would think that the site would be a trustful site since it ends in org. Once I started reading though I knew this site wasn’t trustworthy. The material that the site presented was absurd and completely irrelevant to what I’ve always known about MLK. The fact that the site posted rap lyrics seemed a little fishy, too. I started reading more and found out a group called the Kwanzaa had made the site. But all in all the site was just a fluke.

When I entered the words, “martin luther king”, into the google search engine this webpage appeared third on the list. How is a child to know that this site isn’t trustworthy when it appears third on the search engine and also had org. in the url?

Constructivism is an approach that could be used in physical education. Constructivism requires students to use prior knowledge to formulate and learn new concepts. This can be very useful in physical education because learning new motor skills requires students to build off of what they are already familar with and what they have gained so far in motor development. In motor development there are two types of skills: phylogenetic and ontogenetic. Phylogenetic are skills that we as humans naturally obtain by the process of maturation, and ontogenetic skills are those that must be learned for either practice or by another person showing them. Since everyone matures at a different rate, constructivism would be a great way for students to acquire motor development. Students would be learning on thier own and using thier prior experience to help develop these skills.

Constructivism seems as thought it would work great in a classroom, but there has been a debate as to whether students are still getting the same amount of physical activity time in the classroom. The following website conducted a study that addresses this debate http://aahperd.confex.com/aahperd/2005/preliminaryprogram/abstract_6976.htm
They found that students learning with the constructivism approach had the same amount of physical activity as those in a traditional setting. The students in the constructivisim classroom also gained more valuable knowledge than the other students.

I think that constructivism is a controversial issue in our society today. There are many different learning theories and there is not a single theory that will specifically cover every child’s needs. I think that this issue will continually be discussed in the on going future.

Technology and constructivism are interwoven to some degree. Technology can offer ways for the child to use thier pre-exisiting knowledge to learn more on thier own. Technology also provides many different perspecitives for the learner. A teacher could easily use technology in this type of classroom.