Digital Fluency Intensive - Using digital tools to improve sports at Pt England School

DIGITAL FLUENCY INTENSIVE

Digital technology to improve sports education at Pt England School

An area that I greatly desire to improve in, is to become more digitally savvy, particularly in my role where communication is key to how sports can run more efficiently at Pt England.  For 9 weeks, I will be a part of the 25th Cohort to complete the Digital Fluency Intensive Course (DFI) that is facilitated by the staff from the Manaiakalani Education Programme.

The topics we covered today:

• Overview of the course
• Manaiakalani origins
• Streamlining communication
• Chrome
• Drive
• Explore - Chrome extensions
• Google Docs
• Skills list
• Add-ons and Extensions
• Create visual media

Key learnings and tools that I would use from today's session:

1. Group Email Communications
This is an alternative to creating groups from your contact list.  It is creating one email address e.g. teachers@ptengland.school.nz where messages are sent to every teacher under a topic and every response goes out to everyone.  This is one way to keep information and communication about a topic in one space.  With the permission of our senior management team at school, I would like to create group emails for

• netball coaching staff
• rugby coaching staff
• house captains & their teachers

2. Drive / Work Spaces

• organise my drive folders into subjects e.g. AIMS, Tamaki Cluster, Rugby, Staff meetings etc into different work spaces
• colour code and look at numbering folders 
• make all folders visible
• file folders under years e.g. 2020, 2019, 2018

3. Web Forum

• explore this space to discuss and create lessons to critically analyse current events, articles, use for research studies

4. Voice Typing

• your voice automatically records what you say.  A useful tool I could use to records reflections of a tournament, highlights of a game.
• to save typing lots of information, this can record what I say.  I would need some time to train myself on how to do this

5. Google Documents

• heading titles
• Explore tool - very useful to tag and connect research material to key words, quotes, facts etc - it automatically creates a footnote with reference to the source

6. Visual Graphics

• remove.bg website - great to use to remove the background of an image and re-use the clean image for visual work
• using tables in google documents to create visual documents

I am looking forward to the next session.  In the meantime, I will endeavour to try a few things that I have learnt today.

Face to face chats + texting = increased participation

March 2016 Intermediate girls softball team at the
Auckland Inter-Zone tournament, Rosedale Park, Albany

How do you get more children playing sport?  How do you get whanau support?  How do you find good volunteers?

There are a couple of ways that have been effective so far:

1. Face to face chats
2. Texting

In this digital day and age of multiple social media networks, it's the face to face conversation with someone, that is still engaging and effective.  Texting a volunteer or whanau directly, is what I also find is successful.

I'm fortunate, that in my role, I'm able to walk around and be available to chat with students, families and the local community.  My office is located in a handy place that's near the main school and hall entrance, the toilets and the office reception area.  It's the central location of our school where I see lots of students and whanau - it's the opportunity to 'catch up' with them.

Face to face chats with students is basically having a chat with individuals to see if they'd be interested in playing a sport, what sport etc.  I listen and try to 'read' their reactions, their body language and what they're trying to say.  Then I offer options that they'd possibly be interested in or offer solutions to what hinders them from playing.  I chat to them about the benefits for them, encourage them to 'have a go' and invite them to 'join in' anytime.  I leave the conversation to say that I'm available to chat more about it, to go away and think about it and to contact me anytime (whether I'm out at a practice on the field somewhere or by leaving a note in my office mail box or by email).

The texting form of communication is so good too.  There's always someone who has forgotten to give their parents the newsletter or they'd missed watching P.E.N.N, or they'd forgotten what the coach had said or they can't even remember what day it was today...

By texting a parent or whanau member directly, they'd receive the most recent news, given friendly reminders and are informed about any changes.  By being accessible by mobile phone (99.8% of adults I imagine, have one) is very helpful for parents so they get answers straight from the adult in charge.  It's also a good way to gage what support is needed, an opportunity to be encouraging and positive in all circumstances and most importantly, a favourable time to share how great their kid is.

It would be interesting to see how much more we can engage our students and community when the sport site is updated...

Google Apps for Sports Admin

A few people call me, the queen of google spreadsheets and I agree, I basically use google sheets all the time!

I spend a lot of time in Google Drive, updating documents regularly - there's a lot of information and lots of children and adults that I work with daily, so that in order to remember everything, I make the time to put the details in the docs to refer to at any time.  I've also learned over the past few years, to consolidate what's needed and what's useful.

It's important that I document this information for:

• Board of Trustees reports (usually once a term)
• an annual review at the end of the year
• budget purposes
• prizegiving awards
• to track our progress with physical education and sport 
• make improvements for the following year
• evidence to report back to the child, teachers, parents & the ERO (Education Review Office)
• provide feedback to sports organisations
• share our history to current teams, parents & clubs

I'm so thankful that I'm able to store all of this 'in the cloud' that I can access from any device, anytime - with the peace of mind, knowing that even if my laptop crashes, the information is still kept safely in the school's google domain.  Phew!!

Here's a list below of the google docs, google sheets and google slides that I use to record what we do with sports and with anything to do with physical education at our school.

Google Sheets for 

• Sports Teams (includes Player of the Day / short report of the game/tournament)
• Kiwisport (timetables, class lists/numbers, overview, evaluations)
• Swimming (timetables, instructors hours)
• Netball (team lists, fixtures & results, fees, uniforms, dates, meetings, player info)
• Basketball (team lists, fixtures & results)
• Cricket (team lists, fixtures & results, player information)
• Rugby & League (team lists - weight, position, club team)
• Sports Monitors (timetable, list of things to do, issues, general notes on gear/students)
• Beep Test (class lists with weights, levels to achieve, info, other fitness tests)
• Sports Budget (term costs)
• Sports Uniforms (list of all uniforms & storage gear at school)
• Athletics (plans for school athletics day, includes PMI Evaluation)
• Athletics Y7-8 Records
• Cross Country (plans for school cross country day, includes PMI Evaluation)
• Coaches & Managers (list of coaches/managers/helpers for teams, each term)
• Commonwealth / Olympic Games (plans for school day, includes PMI Evaluation)
• Sports Expo (list of local clubs & RSO - Regional Sports Organisations)
• Netball Prizegiving (list of awards, programme)
• Sports Prizegiving Awards (list of awards)
• Sports Representatives (all codes, trial dates, list of kids who trialled/made the team)
• Class Lists - Boys & Girls
• Sports Fixtures (weekly document with the trainings, games for the week)
• T1 Team Sports, T2 Team Sports, T3 Team Sports, T4 Team Sports
• Sports Photo Schedule
• Staff Meetings / PD
• NZ P.E & Health Curriculum

Google Docs for

• Sports Gear (for teachers to record what gear to borrow)
• Board of Trustees Sports Reports (created once a term)
• Newsletters (for each code)
• Coaches & Managers Meetings 
• Annual Sports Review 

Google Slides for 

• PES Coaches & Managers
• Coaches & Managers - Netball
• Swimming Progressions

Also in Google Drive for

• Sports Movies
• Sports Photos
• Folders (to file docs, sheets, slides)