Sunday 5 May 2013

Week 14

Unfortunately I have been a bit slack in terms of writing a blog each week but I have still been to all but 1 or 2 lectures throughout the term and have found Keiths material and topics very engaging.
I Love that Keith is so enthusiastic about his topics and his stories about his experience in the field of coaching makes it that much easier for us as students to understand and engage with what he is talking about. I loved Keiths lemon story from the last lecture we had together in week 12. I think that in team sports, bonding as a team and as friends is crucial for success on and off the field. I believe that if you dont like your team mates and dont have anything in common then you will be less willing to play for them and you won't enjoy playing the sport. This also applies directly to a classroom environment. If a child in a classroom doesnt have any friends or people they like, it is likely they will feel extremely uncomfortable and not want to be there, this then leads to a drop in their grades, like in team sports which will lead to less chance of team success.
This semester I have found that each week at the lectures and tutorials I am constantly applying what Keith speaks about to my own life and my own experiences and what I want to achieve from my degree. As I have previously stated I am studying to be a PE teacher and I already have some experience in coaching netball and teaching swimming lessons. I find Keiths suggestions, advice and stories extremely useful for my own goals of becoming a PE teacher.
I love the idea of sharing information through technology in regards to coaching and teaching, there really is no limit to the information you can share and gain in your area of interest over the internet, and it's only going to get better from how I see it.

Thursday 21 March 2013

Week 7: Using Digital Media

So I've finally figured out this blogging business.... Now I understand I can just post in one blog as apposed to creating seperate blogs everytime!

Today in our lecture Keith spoke about the use of digital media in produsing resources. Sometimes I wonder how people survived without all the technology we have readily avaliable to us these days! I know I would struggle! It's truely amazing how easy it is for us to find and share all sorts of information with just the tip of our fingers. Keith spoke about plagerism and how produsing resources can be confused with plagerism, and I completely agree that sharing and produsing information using digital media should not be labeled as plagerising if you always reference and acknowledge where you get your information from.

I walked into the lecture late today and as I walked in Keith was talking about a man from Victoria known as the PE geek http://thepegeek.com/ I found this particularly interesting as I am studying to be a PE teacher. I knew that there is an Application for just about everything you could dream of these days, but I had never thought about applying these apps for teaching. I think its an amazing idea! I can definately see how useful certain apps could be for teaching and coaching. An example from my own personal experience was last year my netball coach had an App on his iPad to record match stats, and he would use this every game and then recall our stats the following week at training. It's amazing how simple and easy things like this can be now, gone are the days of coaching manually writing match stats and trying to keep up with the game play!

Monday 4 March 2013

Week 4 Lecture and Tutorial

This week (week 4) the main topic for our lecture and tutorials was the importance of observation in coaching.
In our tutorial I tried to apply this myself. To do this when we were practising I watched the other teams to see who their best shooters were (we played basketball) so that my team could shut down those players.
I also observed my team in the different set moves we tried and it was easy to see what worked well for us and what didn't work so well.

Being a swimming instructor myself, i need to observe my students constantly not only to work out how to help improve their swimming, but also to know that they are safe and to keep them safe.
I find that in being a swimming instructor I use observation constantly. To work out how to help improve a child, or adults stroke I need to watch every single little aspect of their current stroke to see what if anything needs to be changed or improved.
As well as being a swimming instructor I also work as a Lifeguard. Being a lifeguard it is my job to observe. It is amazing the things you can know about people just by watching them and seeing what they do and how they do it.

I think a good way to make training more 'athlete centred' AND 'athlete driven' is to film the athlete training or performing a certain skill and show it back to them. In doing this the athlete can learn to use observational techniques themselves and can also determine what they need to work on and improve themselves, with guidence from the coach.

For this unit I have been trying to apply all the topics we talk about in lectures and tutorials to my own experiences to gain a better understanding of what works as a coach and teacher. I've found that relating these ideas to my own experiences really helps to make sense of it all and I know that these techniques and ideas have helped me already :)