[ARCHIVED] Has anyone helped a PE teacher or Ag-ed teacher design a course?

[mhenderson]

This week I'll be working with HS PE and Ag-ed teachers to get them started with Canvas.  What features should I focus on?  Does anyone have an example course they'd be willing to share with me?  Thanks for your help!

[kona]

I'm higher ed, but our physical fitness instructor and all welding instructors using Canvas! What they seem to really like is having quizzes in Canvas, so that way they can focus on the physical side of things in the classroom and do the book work online. They also seemed to like being able to add links to outside resources (like BMI calculator, eating healthy websites, etc - for physical fitness class) and handouts/class notes.

Overall I'd talk with the instructors about what they're doing right now with their courses and what they're handing out on paper and then go from there.

[mhenderson]

Kona - thank you! Yes - starting with replacing their paper is a great suggestion.  I appreciate you getting back to me!

[myerdon01]

Our welding instructors use it as well for testing and posting files for students. They spend less time in class giving quizzes and handing out paperwork.

[scottdennis]

When I worked at a community college, the welding program did the same thing.  They wanted to spend their face time with the students welding and then had the students go to a testing center to take quizzes via the LMS.

[Bobby2]

Yes, agreed  @kona see what their needs are then make Canvas work for them. Important conversation to have Marie. 

Our PE teacher made the most of the old LMS to notify the parent community about what was coming up with PE for the whole school and for each grade in particular. She's really looking forward to working with Canvas now.

[scottdennis]

In the past I worked with a personal fitness instructor who used the LMS to house videos and downloads as well as to collect exercise logs and field questions.  For what its worth in our example courses area there is personalized fitness course that you will find here: https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-3470#K12

I also had a similar experience as Kona when it came to welding instructors.

[mhenderson]

Scott - thank you so much for your reply. I will pass this along to my PE teachers. Have a great day!

[kmeeusen]

Hi  @mhenderson ‌

You might also want to check out Canvas Commons. The growth in numbers of courses in there has been phenomenal.

I just did a quick search and got bunches.

I hope this helps,

Kelley

[kbink]

I helped out a PE instructor a long time ago and one important set of features were around attendance.  Given that, you may want to brush up on the best ways to use Canvas attendance and suggest having a tablet available so that they can take attendance in class.  I know one of the tricky things was they they wanted the course grade to decrease by a percentage for each absence or tardy.  I think we set up two categories, one for learning stuff and one for attendance and weighted them.  Then I had one attendance assignment worth 100 points.  Then we just had to figure out how many points to remove for each absence to get a resulting percentage drop in points.  Finally I think you should explore the teacher app with them.  Often they also graded on skills performance so setting up those assignments beforehand and using the teacher app on a tablet to grade might be good. 

[scottdennis]

I love this thread, not because it includes complicated but powerful coding or in depth pedagogy discussions but it does involve people helping other people with how to best use Canvas to teach what they teach which exemplifies what the Canvas Community is all about in the first place.