Tuesday, June 19, 2007

The Kind of Blogging that Makes you Sweat

The other day I posted about Cathy Wille, a Phys Ed teacher in our high school. She's been really pushing her professional development this year, and after a year of looking at the direction of her teaching, the curriculum, and the technology available to her, she has taken the first, and most important step: she has a blog.

The first thing I do when I tell people about blogging is to bring up a statement that I heard from Will Richardson, and I know I have echoed before: this is the best professional development available. I have learned more from blogging and interacting than I could have anywhere else. It's about access to wicked smart people whenever you need it, and I love wicked smart people.

Cathy is still feeling out what she should do with the blog site: whether it should be for driving her class or building a new platform for Physical Education and Health teachers to move to. Often times, that department of schools is the least likely to bring technology into their practices, if only because of the lack of portability in the past. A cursory blog search turns up a few hits, like PE Central, which serves more to aggregate news stories concerning developments in PE. That is essential, but can we do more for this discipline?

Is it possible to gather a slew of resources for Health and PE teachers to use if they choose to? If you have any, we could pass them on to Cathy's blog. If you can, go visit her at HyPE 2.0. I'll start:

  • g-maps pedometer- mashup that allows users to plot and store their running, cycling, or walking routes on a Google Map. I use this one all of the time.
  • NationMaster and it's partner-site StateMaster- provides great statistics for health units, including the always elusive STD's.

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