ISTE MODULE 3 – Research & Information Fluency

What are ways in which students can apply digital tools to gather, evaluate, and use information?

My Triggering Event Question: How could blended learning enhance students’ enjoyment and understanding of health and fitness curriculum?

Resource: A creative way to utilize social media to enhance fitness and health knowledge (Polsgrove and Frimming, 2013)

Link to article:

http://www.tandfonline.com.ezproxy.spu.edu/doi/full/10.1080/08924562.2013.764794

The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE)’s Standard 3 set forth the following learning targets for students: “1) Define information fluency, and explain why it is important for learning, 2) identify strategies for guiding inquiry, 3) learn how to locate, organize, analyze, evaluate, synthesize, and ethically use information from a variety of sources and media, 4) evaluate and select information sources and digital tools based on the appropriateness to specific tasks, 5) explain how technology can be used to help process data and report results, and 6) discuss research related to the effectiveness of technology when used to aid learning” (ISTE, 2007). For this blog, I will focus on learning targets 5 and 6.

         In my teaching experiences thus far at my internship, given the demographics of the school, I have observed that each of my students has access to a smart phone or computer outside of my class. This allows for me to implement a blended learning approach, as discussed by Wong (2014). Which is why I posed the question: How could blended learning enhance students’ enjoyment and understanding of health and fitness curriculum? I chose the following resource Polsgrove et al. (2013) for the exploration of my triggering event question, because it highlights students’ level of engagement with health and fitness curriculum through the use of social-based programming outside of the physical education classroom. Utilizing a social-based program (such as Facebook, Twitter, or Blogger), I can create a community of practice for my students. As students interact with the program I’ve set up, Polsgrove et al. (2013) suggests that students will have access to sharing and collecting health and fitness information in an informal setting and further apply the ideas of others in order to enhance their own performance in class. Through blended learning, “It could be thought that the establishment of a positive social network focused on increasing self-efficacy by exchanging and sharing fitness and health information could help increase a student's fitness and health knowledge. Students with an increased fitness and health knowledge may in turn be empowered to apply these ideas to their daily lifestyles” (Polsgrove et al., 2013). Allowing for me to conclude that through the use of blended learning (i.e. participation in physical fitness inside of class and in a social-based program outside of class), my students can gather, evaluate, and use information to enhance their enjoyment and understanding of the health and fitness curriculum.

References

International Society for Technology in Education. (2007). National educational technology standards for students. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/standards/standards/standards-for-students.

Polsgrove, M. J., & Frimming, R. E. (2013). A creative way to utilize social media to enhance fitness and health knowledge. Strategies, 26(2), 3-7.

Wong, W. (2014, April 1). How Technology Enables Blended Learning. Retrieved February 05, 2017, from http://www.edtechmagazine.com/k12/article/2014/04/how-technology-enables-blended-learning