Project #3 is done!

CHALLENGE:

The challenge I identified in my classroom has to do with calories burned during exercise. We have all had to do a physical fitness log, or something like that at one point in our high school or junior high career. The challenge is to find out how many calories you burned doing a specific activity or exercise. Everyone has a different body type so you can't say that everyone burns 100 calories running one mile. That is an estimate, and what if you are doing other exercises besides running?

This is a problem I have ran into when trying to teach about physical fitness and nutrition. A lot of those lessons deal with talking about calories, eating more or less, or staying the same. If you need to lose weight you have to consume fewer calories than you take in. This is hard to track when it comes to nutrition and exercise. So I decided to find a tool that lets you calculate your calories burned in a simple and easy way.

TECHNOLOGY SOLUTION:

The technology that I found is called the "Fit-O-Meter" on WebMD. It is a great tool and easily accessible. All you do is type in your activity. It gives you a list of activities that are related or the exact one you typed in. You choose your activity, type in your weight, the duration you participated in the exercise, and it calculates calories burned.

http://www.webmd.com/diet/healthtool-fitness-calorie-counter

Type activity into the search bar, and press enter.

Example: kick boxing

Click on the correct activity. In this example only one shows up. If you type in running it will have multiple options based on intensity. 

Type in your weight and duration (hours and minutes) and click calculate. The program will generate the amount of calories your burned during that exercise. 

REFLECTION:

This is an excellent program, and was easy to find and use. Such a simple tool like this makes a big difference and can make the material more understandable and concrete. Instead of rambling on about calories now the students can see and calculate their own. I am using this program now as I exercise in my daily life. It is interesting for me to find out how many calories I am burning, my activity level, and have everything easy to access with the click of a button. 

I have always been interested in how many calories I burn with all the different activities I like to do. I wanted to find an easy way to calculate that. Many programs that I found online only had a few activities you could choose from, or they were personalized based on weight and duration. This program does both! It was fun to see what was out there in terms of technology programs for my class, and I am glad I found this one. 

Lesson #10

I use technology everyday and in a lot of different ways. I think the way I use it the most, in contributing to my knowledge, is by researching topics in health that I am interested. This could  be through blogs, videos, or organization websites such as webMD and the CDC.

I have used different types of technology to collaborate with classmates. I have used G-Chat, Skype, email, and of course google docs. I really like google docs because it allows you to work on a paper on one project all at the same time. You don't have to meet in person but can simply log on and add you part to the paper or project. It is simple to add people and post documents, very easy to use, and it can be extremely helpful.

I would definitely use videos, websites, and I want to make a class website for when I have my own class. These different technologies can add to content and can be extremely helpful in letting kids have one portal where they can check when things are due, grades, upcoming assignments, etc. for class. I think that is a great tool.

I was very skeptical of this class. But once I started learning how to explore and learn for myself how things work it was great. I loved our projects that we did: the blog, website, and movie, and I can see how they would benefit a classroom. I had no idea how to make a movie or a website upon entering this class. Now I do know how, and I am excited about it and proud of what I learned.

I will definitely be more willing to try and learn new technologies, you never know what you can find and use in the class. As I stated before I will definitely be using movies and a class website. Those are great and fun things.

Project #3

I am planning on doing my project #3 with a solution to finding out how many calories are burned based on your activity. We all had fitness logs for Health or PE documenting what physical activity we participated in and for how long. I think it would be more effective for students to see how much good physical activity is doing for them. In order to lose weight, maintain weight, or gain weight, calories are important. They should be able to see how many calories they are burning based on what they choose to participate in.

I have always been interested in how many calories I am burning when I go work out. I found this great tool on Web MD that lets you calculate how many calories you burn based on the activity,  intensity, duration, and weight of the individual. It is great! and has a huge database of activities to choose from. That is what I am planning on doing for Project #3!

Internet Safety

Teaching about internet safety is extremely important. With the ease we can access information with a click of the button it can seem at times that the internet is completely safe, when there are no consequences for clicking on whatever you want. Especially with social networking sites it is important to know what you should and should not share. 

Make sure that they know that nothing is truly lost on the internet. Be careful what you say to other people and what pictures you post. Make sure you never put up personal information, especially your number and address. I think it is really important to avoid chat rooms. I have watched far too many episodes of To Catch a Predator to know that not everything/everyone online is as it seems. They should be vary wary because it is extremely easy to pretend you are someone you aren't. 

I am more worried about the false sense of security that social networks give to young people and they think they can just post and say whatever they want with no consequences. The internet is a great tool but make sure you are smart when you are using it. 

Project #2 Hallelujah!

Ok after dreading this project I actually quite enjoyed it. So here is my video, enjoy!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVPLXghMgpU




Here is a copy of the assignment that I made to go along with this video project in my classroom.

Video Chat

I do not know why the screenshot is so little but oh well?! Using Skype is very easy and really convenient. I actually use it all the time to talk to my brother and sister who live in Texas and North Carolina so I am familiar with video chatting with people. The quality was pretty good. I know that it does randomly cut you off sometimes which is frustrating or the picture freezes up, but mostly it goes well.

I would probably not use this in my classroom. But it would be cool to have an outside resource such as the Health Department or a doctor, or other health professional come to class that day (over video) and answer questions. You could use it to have guest lectures but the lecturer could just do it over video chat. It would be a fun and different teaching strategy you could use.

Download Video

I chose to download a video about underage drinking, since that is what I am doing my video on for Project #2. The video I chose is called "Binge Drinking: Girl's Night Out."

In this video it shows how a drunk underage girl would stereotypically look after a night out of drinking. But instead of it being the end of the night it is the beginning. The catch phrase at the end is "You wouldn't start the night looking like this, so why end the night looking like this?" It really gets the point across that drinking is not a glamorous thing, but leads to poor choices, and disgusting habits.

Under fair use I could use this in my classroom for teaching purposes, which is great, since this is address one of the core standards for understanding media messages and addressing alcohol use. A good website I found for downloading these videos is Keepvid.com. It downloads the video for you really quick and easy, I definitely recommend it.