Cloning myself for visual prompts in Physical Education

I am just one man.

During my jump rope unit, students ask me, repeatedly, what each skill is. I only have so much patience. Not only was this exhausting for me, it also was not effective pedagogy, as the pace of learning is restricted to the rate at which I could demonstrate jump rope skills to each individual student. There had to be a better way.

I know that individual feedback is tremendously valuable, but I see 250 students a day. I am often outnumbered by these monsters 30:1 in my gymnasium and they are strapped with jump ropes, hockey sticks, & Gator balls. How can I scale the differentiation techniques that work in other educational settings to benefit my students in physical education?

I started by creating a collection of jump roping GIFs, featuring my students, to serve as a visual prompt for each skill, gave each student a task card to record their progress, and unleashed them to explore and record.

Replicate the process:

- Grab Jarrod Robinson's Loop it! app to loop GIFs of students demonstrating the jump rope skills.

- Copy this task card that aligned with each jump rope skill

- Create a Google Presentation Slide Deck and Inserted 3 GIFs per slide

- Publish the slide deck to web and auto advanced every 5 seconds.

- Change the visual display settings on my Chromebook to not go to sleep.

- Turn up the brightness on my projector.

- Turn off the lights on 1/2 the gym.

My reflection:

Part of the value of this process is that it builds student autonomy, they need keep track of their progress. I found that it kept each learner in their zone of proximal development. The more accomplished jumpers were motivated to compete against their top scores and less proficient jumpers were able to focus on the fundamental skills. Throughout the unit any learner could always improve on any score. A secondary benefit was that it freed me up to provide a layer of scaffolding to a small group of students that have difficulty jumping. Throughout the unit, and year, the task card and GIFs served as a great, low-prep, instant exercise upon entry into my classroom.

Going forward I want to replicate the process to teach juggling. I have a chronological progression in mind, but its difficult... because I am only one man.