Travel

create your own personalized map of the USA

I came across this website for the second time this year, and thought I would add it to my blog. I know it is not Health and PE related, but I think a great part of learning occurs when you are able to travel. I believe when you travel you see so many things including people, nature, and cultures. You learn by listening to different people, dialects, stories, and the history in the area. The experience gained by traveling is something that is difficult to match in a classroom, and therefore, I wanted to recognize this aspect. Above are the states that I have visited, I hope to get to them all someday, and revisit so many that I have already been to. I have been fortunate enough to travel to 34 out of the 50 states and I believe being able to travel has helped me expand my knowledge and education in so many different ways. Traveling reminds me that we are all connected in some way.

Smoking PSA

I just wanted to follow up on my last blog regarding Public Service Announcements or PSA's. I just completed my first project last night, and wanted to put it up on my blog. It is longer than I would have liked (1:34 seconds), but would love to hear any input on the video.
My plan is to have my students' create their own PSA's during their Health marking period, and have them post them to my wiki page. I will keep all posted as to how this goes.
The following PSA is on Smoking:

Public Service Announcements

I have been taking a Professional Development Class with David Gorecki, called Digital Storytelling. David, our school districts' Elementary Technology Teacher, has helped me design a project in the class that I am going to have my students also do in their upcoming third marking period Health classes. The students are going to create a Public Service Announcement (PSA). Each student will select a provided topic, such as, drugs, alcohol, high blood pressure, or cardiovascular disease, to name a few. They will then use a program called Photostory 3 to create their one-minute PSA. The process to create this project has been really fun to do, and can drive a point home using visual media. Each of the students will then present their PSA to the class once completed.
The class has taught me a great way to bring a different type of technology into my classroom, and I am very excited to see how my students' projects turn out.

Keep it Beating

I just wanted to add to the topic that Angela Delucia-Davis had talked about in her blog from last week. Angela, welcomed my idea of putting heart-rate monitors on students during a stressful situation i.e. a test. We put this offer to task last Thursday.

Ten of her students showed up in my office at 7 am to put on their heart-rate monitors. They were excited to start their day, and their heart-rates' demonstrated this. I gave the students a sheet to record their heart-rates during their English test and to record throughout the day. I had them record two times during each period. Jim Jarrell, Angela and I are going to compile the data, and Jim's AP calculus class is going to analyze the data and give us some feedback on the the heart-rate information collected.

The really cool part about this experiment is throughout the day other students' got "wind" of what we were doing and wanted to be a part of it. So, Miss. April Wisniewski's, third period Intermediate Algebra class gladly volunteered to wear the monitors for their test they were taking on Friday. After their test they wanted to then wear them the rest of the day also. The students were equally as excited to be a part of the experiment. As the students turned in their monitors at the end of the day, they each told me how it made their day more interesting and they were really into monitoring their heart-rates. Some of the students' recorded their beats per minute many more times than I had requested, and really liked to see the recovery of their heart-rate after walking from class to class, or how it dropped or raised during an exciting moment in class.

For me as a Health and PE teacher, it was really fun to do a cross-curriculum lesson with Angela, and April. It added a really exciting part to my day and to our students' days. It was very motivating to watch the students throughout the day as they wore their monitors, and see their interest level perk-up when it came to the beats of their heart.