The role of TPCK in physical education Luke E. Kelly

The inclusion of technology in Physical Education presents more challenges. Although not stated it would seem that, like Arts Education, Physical Education would face some of the same challenges. In the budget cutting process Physical Education is discussed as a possible area for cutting; an educational extra. With national attention on the obesity crisis it seems less likely for P.E. to fall to the budget cutting ax than programs for the Arts though. Also like the Arts, Physical Education has standards for students to master and instructors have little class time to accomplish them. With this time crunch, as well as with the active nature of Physical Education, adding technology presents an additional challenge.

As stated in the text, not only does the learner need to understand the skill being taught and how it can be used in games and sports, but the learner needs to needs to be able to perform it to an acceptable level of proficiency and they need to do this in public, repeatedly, as they learn skill acquisition. Early learners need to be able to do this especially at a time when this may not be developmentally appropriate. I hadn’t really thought about this before but as I think back about my own experiences I think about how visible I was in P.E.class and how embarrassing that was.

When I was involved with the S.E.E.D. Developer Awards we listened to each other’s presentations. One was by a P.E. teacher who was using iMovie to create step-by-step how to videos, for basketball free-throwing, for her students. This is one way that technology could be used to scaffold learning in this content area.

Significant cost was mentioned as one of the challenges for inclusion of technology in P.E. Heart monitors were used to illustrate this. While motivational and able to give immediate feedback the cost and maintenance is unreasonable in public education.

Data management seemed to be focused on as the greatest use for technology in Physical Education. Technology to collect, manage, analyze, and report student performance data and training in using tools such as PDAs as collection instruments is needed. P.E. educators need to be able to learn how to analyze student performance data to evaluate their instruction and guide their planning and teaching.

This chapter seemed to recommend technology as teacher support tools more than as tools to support student learning.