The Physical Education curriculum is not just about the physical activities and involvement, it also covers knowledge and understanding of the body; musculoskeletal system, cardiovascular system etc. Office 365 functionality including OneNote and Microsoft Teams are an ideal way to help me structure content and lessons.
I've used PowerPoint with Office Mix to create interactive tutorials that I can then embed within OneNote. The tutorials have a quiz linked to them, created within Microsoft Forms, which is set to email me notifications of student achievements. In this way I get a quick notification of areas where students might be struggling and enables me to adapt the next lesson or provide additional support in specific areas. I use Sway to embed the quizzes and this allows the students to access them directly from their OneNote Class Notebook.
Within OneNote I have an embedded spreadsheet that I keep track of test scores and assessments and this helps me to feed this information back to students and helps them keep track of their own learning and progress.
PE is quite a visual subject and we do a lot of demonstration and analysis to help improve performance. I've always used video as a good way to capture student performance and review it with students as part of a discussion, however making this available digitally has always been a challenge. Many of the traditional video streaming services are blocked by school filtering software and I've had to find workarounds. Then I discovered Stream within Office 365 - a safe and secure way of creating an internal video channel for our video's that I can then link to both my OneNote and Microsoft Teams channel, with no filtering issues.
We've also recently started using Microsoft Teams and encouraging our GCSE students to use it. It's a great way to structure everything related to a course in one place - access to the course Class Notebook, files, video streams and Skooler Assignments and Assessments. It also enables us to have focussed online discussions around particular topics.
An example of how I've focussed the chat / conversations is by asking specific questions for students to respond to as a starter in lessons. The collaboration and online discussion is really powerful and I've noticed an increase in engagement. It removes the time constraints we have within our lessons and allows the students to give and receive feedback whenever they need it. Lots of teachers are "scared" about this aspect of the technology and many discuss "turning chat off". However, to do so misses the point of Teams - Chat is the point! There are ways for teachers to monitor and control the conversations, including silencing individual students or time limiting chat functionality. But don't be scared of your students chatting - embrace the technology and use it to your advantage. A good example of this is my recent GCSE PE lesson. I was away on a course and was able to use the functionality of Teams to support and teach my class remotely, much to the pleasure of the Headteacher who was covering the lesson.
If like Chris you would like to make more use of Office 365 in the classroom, the Skooler team are coming to a town near you. We offer FREE Office 365 teacher training.
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