Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Anu Hyrkkänen: PE teacher participating Blended Learning course

I teach Physical Education in Viikki Teacher Training school. Most of my pupils are 13-16 years old boys and girls.  
In this Blended learning course I participated to the Google Apps For Education -group. First face-to-face -meeting we had in January 2015. I had used before a bit Edmodo platform but after joining this GAFE-group I got good information about GAFE and which tools could be useful for me.
We made in first meeting plans for our own projects what are we going to do during the spring time. Between face-to-face -meetings we had one online meeting about copyrights. It was very interesting lesson. When we were working with our own projects during the spring our tutor answered our questions and that was a great help.
In my project I used Edmodo and GAFE. We had a group in Edmodo and we started with a planning lesson in classroom. I used with pupils Edmodo’s poll-tool. During first lesson we made together with pupils our course program using Google sheets. This tool worked very well. If I made some changes in program pupils could see them right away.
I had planned to use Edmodo as a information channel but that didn’t worked out with this group. That’s a thing what I have to do better next year when I start lessons with new groups. Although this didn’t work out so well, I will continue using Edmodo in the future.
In subject like PE our main goal is of course to get pupils out of classroom and do some exercise. That’s why GAFE and Edmodo are rather for me tools to plan and organize my lessons and keep in touch with pupils. Edmodo could be useful information channel between teacher and pupils, also parents can have their own code and they can join the group.
When participating this course I think I succeed in finding new tools to my work. Because of our patient and encouraging tutors I realised which tools and platforms are most useful in my subject at this time. In this project I used from Google Apps For Education: Docs, Sheets, Forms and Slides. I’ve got also useful information and good tips of these applications for my other teaching subject Health Education.
Anu Hyrkkänen
Teacher PE and Health Education
Viikki Teacher Training School

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