PULSE Rise of the Machines


Whether it’s the ‘Curse of the Playstation’ or ‘Rise of the iPad’, inactivity takes on many forms and is prevalent in the majority of children in all schools across the UK. Many of us would have grown up playing games outside our houses or staying down the park with friends until dark (climbing trees or some other vigorous activity) but unfortunately the children of today are doing this less.


Times have changed and so have people’s lifestyles. It wasn’t long ago we used to have to walk to a phone box if we wanted a private conversation with someone or we had to walk to our local shop to do our shopping. Nowadays not only can we ring people from our mobile phones wherever we want to, we can also keep in touch with family and friends via social media and let the world know what we are having for dinner via photos as well as videos. We can also order our weekly shopping online and have a small lorry turn up and deliver all of our favourite products and all we have to do is move from the couch to the front door!!


TV has recently gone from two channels to 900+ in only a few years and now there is a channel (let alone a programme) available to meet everybody’s needs. Whether you want to watch football all day and night, music videos or even worship, everything is now available at your fingertips, 24/7.


Is this all bad? Of course not. We can now keep in touch with our cousins or friends who we haven’t seen in years via Facebook or other social media, and we can even make phone calls to other countries where we can see our loved ones as well as hear them. Online


shopping allows us to access products from other countries and to access bargains (in most cases!!) from places like Ebay.


But what does this mean for children being more physically active?


iPads are now commonly used and embraced within classrooms and are a great tool for teaching children. Is it not time that we looked at how we can use this technology for PE?


I decided to investigate some of the best apps currently available for helping teach PE…..


Balance It  A task card resource for PE Teachers. This is a simple and very powerful way to provide the children with visual prompts and cues designed to help them develop Gymnastic skills. It features over 60 hand drawn images which can be projected onto a board to act as a visual prompt and to get the kids moving.


Video Tagger 


Hudl Technique  Hudl allows you to use your iPhone, iPod or iPad camera to record and break down your


Video Tagger is a very simple, yet powerful app that enables you to record footage and simultaneously tag what you see as it is taking place. You can customise the tags to suit the performance you desire to observe. For example, if you record a Handball session, you can set up tags ‘Good’ and ‘Improvement’. Whenever you see something that you feel is ‘Good’ you tap the iPad and the same when you see something that needs ‘Improvement’, you just tap on the screen in the designated section. Once the session is over, you can now choose to only watch the good parts or alternatively the parts that need improving. It automatically cuts the footage as you go along so saves a great deal of time later and is extremely impressive.


QR Readers 


There are numerous websites which have collections of PE


technique for instant feedback during a practice, race or game. It will allow you to analyse your pupil’s action in super slow motion and also allow you to compare their performance to a sporting hero (side-by-side and frame by frame) which is highly motivating and engaging for children.


related QR codes which are very engaging for pupils and are so simple to incorporate into your lessons. A way in which they can be used is by sticking them on walls as posters and the children have to scan them and then complete the exercise that shows on their iPad. You could make treasure hunts via them and so, so much more. If you are not already using QR codes, I highly recommend you download one ASAP and google PE related QR codes.


Explain Everything  ‘Explain Everything’ is an easy- to-use design, screen casting and interactive whiteboard tool that lets you annotate, animate, narrate, import and export almost anything to and from almost anywhere. In PE you can use this to have students highlight their understanding of just about anything. Some examples of this could be pupils recording their narration to a presentation or annotating images of themselves in action highlighting where they feel they could improve as well as so much more.


10 The Kent & Medway School Sports Magazine


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