Sunday, March 24, 2024

Technology in Physical Education: A Journal Article Critique.

    

    In 2020, Physical Educator published Grant M. Hill’s and Arturo Valdez-Garcia’s article “Perceptions of Physical Education Teachers Regarding the Use of Technology in Their Classrooms.” While I was on the hunt to find which recently peer reviewed article on technology in the classroom I was going to evaluate, I was not sure what I was going to find—but I did not expect to land on an article about physical education. Mostly, because apart from health class, and maybe a pedometer in gym class, I wasn’t sure how big of a factor technology in physical education was, or why it was as important as technology in a core classroom. So, because I was intrigued, I chose this article.

     To be honest, I was a little disappointed. I’m not sure what I was expecting to find . . . I guess I was expecting super revolutionary and important reasons for needing technology in physical education, and while there were reasons I hadn’t considered, I don’t know that I see value in investing in technology in physical education if those resources could be used in a core classroom. Be that as it may, let’s dive into what the article had to say about technology in physical education . . .

     The article claims that a large push for technology in physical education is to help students and teachers track progress and general health, such as calorie counting, heart rate, steps, etc. The blog mentions, to these kinds of trackers in particular, that these kinds of measuring and tracking tools can be downloaded to phones. While this is important, this kind of class participation would require all students to have smartphones with this capability. As our textbook and several of the journals we’ve read this week have already established, most older children do have their own phones, but not all students do. This kind of tracking for class also doesn’t account for students may be grounded from their phones, or have a broken phone, etc. So, I am a little hesitant to put too much reliance on students’ personal devices in the classroom. On the other hand, I am all for investing in technology for schools that students use during class time, such as pedometers, heart rate monitors, etc.

     Some other technologies that the article mentions are “[p]ortable Bluetooth sound system devices and portable projectors that present video or slides are additional technologies physical education teachers can use” (Hill and Valdez-Garcia, 2020, p. 30). I’m not exactly sure what these would be for, and the article doesn’t really go into detail on what these kinds of portable devices would be used to display to students. Music during workouts is often used to keep people motivated or at least distracted, but schools certainly don’t need to invest in sound systems for that. The other thing I’m thinking about is maybe videos showing students proper form—but I’m not sure why the teacher or coach couldn’t do that themselves. Again, I’m a little disappointed that the authors weren’t very thorough in explaining all the benefits and uses of technology from physical education. I’d also like to reiterate that I’m not talking about health classes where students are at their desks in a classroom—I took this article to mean technology with gym activity, since the technology mentioned is used for counting steps, heart rate, weight, etc.

     While I agree with the authors in that adding technology has numerous potential benefits to students, including but not limited to, “greater  potential  interest  in  the  activity,  more collaboration between students, a potentially greater number of trials, quicker feedback, and better connectivity of the learning activity to outside life. Consequently, it appears important that teachers correctly and flexibly use a variety of educational technologies to make their instruction more effective” (Hill and Valdez-Garcia, 2020, p. 30), again, I am confused by how exactly students in physical education would flourish greatly.

     This study tracked two school districts in the Southwestern U.S. and 201 educators agreed to participate in this survey / study, which is clearly a very limited pool.

     Overall, I’m not satisfied with the article’s reporting, and I wasn’t convinced as to why schools should be investing their funds for technology in physical education. I’m not opposed to it—I chose this article because I was curious in which ways technology can benefit these students. I just don’t feel like I was shown anything new or exciting that’s going to revolutionize that particular classroom.

 

Educational interest to me . . .

     I’ll start by saying I’m a little disappointed. I used our textbook to check out the apps and websites offered for English teachers and students, and I couldn’t locate them in the Appstore, or find websites that looked like they weren’t going to give my computer a virus. Since I struck out there, I just went with what my class recently used in our Creative Writing Class: Microsoft Teams. This was actually really beneficial because all of the students were added to the class, and we could all see each other’s poems and short stories. Teams was really great for peer reviewing because there are modes for editing and reviewing, and this was really important so that we could comment or make suggestions / corrections without changing what the author wrote, so that we could take the advice or not, and also so we could keep track of where we started. We could also make side notes to ask questions about things we were unsure of, or leave encouraging comments about the things we loved as readers and wanted more of, and so on. These would be displayed on the projector so that everyone could read along as we stood up and read aloud (because poetry is meant to be heard, as our professor reminded us nearly daily). And by the end of the semester when we had our completed portfolio of work bound together, we also included those original, untouched, rough drafts with our peers’ comments and all. For me, this was an excellent use of technology in the classroom that made our day-to-day lives so much easier and clearer.

 


 

References

Hill, Grant M., and Arturo Valdez-Garcia. “Perceptions of \

physical education teachers regarding the use of technology in their classrooms.” The Physical Educator, vol. 77, no. 1, 1 Jan. 2020, pp. 29–41, https://doi.org/10.18666/tpe-2020-v77-i1-9148.

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