Poolside Portfolio Showcase

Today I attended the Portfolio showcase held by the upperclassmen of SUNY Cortland's Physical Education program. This gave me an opportunity to view other Phys.Ed students portfolio's, it was a great tool for sparking ideas for my own In my Ped 201 class we have started our professional portfolio, this will track my progress through the Physical education teacher program. The portfolio will be a collection of artifacts that highlight my teaching competencies and to demonstrate my readiness to teach. After I complete my student teaching i will be able to use my portfolio in a job interview to highlight my skills and abilities to be a physical educator.

New generation of positive gaming

Today I was fortunate enough to be invited to a workshop about this new gaming system that promotes a healthy alternative to gaming. It is called Idance, going into this I had a little knowledge about the system, but all i really thought it was a modified version of Dance Dance Revolution. Boy was I wrong this program truly is the future of gaming. First of all you can play up to 32 players at once, that is a whole class in most instances . Everyone can be on the same skill level this works best when you have a class of beginners or you can modify each individual mats difficulty level as the Idancer becomes more confident. In having this many players play at once you are almost guaranteed to have positive competition among the students because after every song you get a detailed description of your steps. After every song it provides a graph analysis, where you stand in comparison to the rest of the class, how many combos in a row and other features that can help to make students more physically fit. From the teaching aspects of the system you can control all features of the game from one remote. If a group of students is having trouble and are stuck between two levels a instructor can go ahead and add bells, bumps, or claps at every note to stimulate the auditory sensory rather than just the visual sense. This is a great tool that helps the students drastically. There is more; to get the whole class involved you can join all the mats together to form a square and everyone can play in unison as well as switch mats in a circular rotation it really is fun to watch as well as be apart of. The possibilities are endless with the system and I am looking forward to gaining more knowledge about the future of gaming.

A light snow fall brings christmas spirit to St. Mary's

This week's lab concluded our experience at St. Mary's elementary school. The theme of the day was Christmas in order to get the the kids in the spirit of the holidays we made a game up that had the children be Santa's helpers because santa's had become sick. So he needed the kids help. Half the kids were elves and the others were reindeer who pulled the elves from house to house dropping off presents for Santa. As they dropped of presents they had to do different activities. The kids loved pulling each other around on the scooters, as well as bringing lots of cookies to santa to get him better. After the kids made it to all of the house they had to go tell santa all bout their journeys and what movements they had to make in order to make it to the next house. They kids enjoyed talking about their different travels and sharing with each other. Most of all they enjoyed helping Santa out when he needed them. This lab was our last time with the St.Mary's kids, I have learned alot from these kids and i am thankful for having the opportunity to teach them as well as learn from them.