Episode 23 – 2014 World Tech & PE Survey Results

In this episode of The PE Geek of we explore the results & my insights from the 2014 World Technology & PE Survey. All in all we had over 500 responses from PE Teachers across the globe.

The survey came to life following one of my favourite parts of The PE Geek Workshops, where I find out exactly what devices, and access to Technology PE Teachers all around the globe have.

I ask these questions and use the information to cater the workshop to the participants in the best possible way, ensuring they walk away with the most actionable content possible, realistic of their situations.

So with this in mind, I wanted to take these questions to a whole new scale and find out exactly what you, the readers of this blog have access to in your PE classroom. How do you rate your use of Technology in Physical Education? How supportive is your school and your colleagues? All of these questions will be answered, and the results will be shared with all those who participate, allowing us to create a global snapshot of Technology & Physical Education Integration. You can then use these results to generate discussion in your school or reaffirm the direction your taking.

You can download a full transcript here

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00:29 Jarrod Robinson: Hello everyone, welcome to Episode 23 of the PE Geek Podcast. And as always, an absolute pleasure to be here. Today’s episode is a little bit different, in that we’re going to be exploring the results from the World Tech & PE Survey. Now, towards the end of 2014, I put out a blog post and sent out to my email list, letting them know about a world survey that I would be conducting. And in that survey, I was asking a whole hoop of questions related to the use of the technology in the PE world. Now, the whole point of that was to get a bit of an idea about what people had access to, and then be able to share this with you guys, so that you can use it to advocate for your particular program or showcase it with your administration, or do whatever you feel necessary, using that information. The other reason I did it was it’s a great way to actually sort of identify yourself and gauge how you’re going in comparison to other people.

01:37 JR: So for example, when we get into the questions related to access, you’ll be able to gauge how that relates to yourself. And it puts you into context about yourself, and all the other schools that have responded to the survey. Now, all up we had over 500 people who responded to the survey, which gives us a really good sample of data across the entire planet to explore some really pressing questions. And I myself found it really interesting to browse through and find out information that’s certainly going to help me write blog posts, do podcasts that are most tightly related to the people who are visiting the website, so let’s dive into the responses. Now, I’m gonna be reading through the actual list of results, and if you’re interested in actually following along, you can go to thepegeek.com/results. And right there, you’ll see a list of all the responses that have been conducted and the percentages, and the amounts, and totals, and averages, and all that sort of stuff.

02:42 JR: So, really looking forward to diving into this, and hopefully you can get something out of it. Now, I have done a blog post related to the World Tech & PE survey, but I thought it would make a perfect podcast episode as well, so that you can listen to these results while you’re doing anything else, exercising, doing chores, whatever it may be, the wonders of podcasts certainly work in this case as well. Now, before we dive into the individual results from questions, I thought it would be worthwhile giving you a little bit of background about the numbers of people that flow to the PE Geek site. The reason I’m doing this is it actually helps put into the context some of the responses that we’ll see, and depending on whether someone is coming from a country like the United States then that might lead towards particular responses in certain areas.

03:37 JR: So, the number one most frequently visited country towards the PE Geek blog is the United States, and they actually done it with almost double the amount of visitors compared to the second most trafficked country, which is Australia, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and then Spain, India, Singapore, United Arab Emirates and Hong Kong. Now, that rounds out the top 10 countries, I’m pretty certain, based on the responses so far, that we’ve had responses from a much, much greater spectrum of physical education than just those top 10. However, the responses are certainly going to be pointed towards that particular direction. With the United States having almost double the visitors of anywhere else, it’s likely that it’s probably got double the amount of people who’ve responded to this survey.

04:36 JR: Across the rest of the countries throughout the world, it’s been really interesting to see that we have had pretty much… We’ve had visits from everywhere, really, throughout the course of the last 365 days. There have been some countries that they have only had one visit that’s actually occurred, countries like Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, they’ve actually visited the PE Geek Blog, which I think is fascinating and just so powerful. The internet is an amazing place, but it’s likely that most of the responses have come from those top 10 spaces. And that just helps frame what responses we were likely to get from the audience.

05:16 JR: Alright, so the first question that we asked the people when they arrived on this survey was whether they’re male of female. Now, this was just to help create some data sets related to the different thoughts about whether males are more technology-minded, or females. And from our results, we would basically say that it’s neither here nor there, 52% of the people who responded were females, 48% were males. So, based on that, it’s sort of impossible to tell who was the most active in that space. In terms of age group though, the most popular age group across the respondees was the 40 to 45 age group, and they had… 21% of the people participating in the survey were between that age group.

06:09 JR: I find that really interesting, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are the people who are using technology the best and the most and so on but it does certainly surprise me that my audience was made mostly of people in that particular age group. Second on the list was 35 to 40 with 18%, we had 30 to 35 category with 17, we had the 45 to 50 category with 12% and then my category, the 26 to 30-year-old category is fifth with 12% of the audience. Now, you’ll probably would be surprised in thinking that the younger you are, the more likely you are to be using technology and so forth, well from these results, it probably doesn’t really showcase that. I mean, the 18 to 22-year-old demographic had 1% of the audience, however there’s less teachers at that age who are actually out in the classrooms and working, I didn’t get into a classroom until I was 22, so that’s probably one of the reasons why there’s less people at that age. The 23 to 25-year-old demographic had 3% of the total responders and the 55 plus demographic had 6%. So the most popular, 40 to 45-year-old with 21%.

07:30 JR: Now as we move down into what year levels do you teach, this is actually really interesting. Now remember in this response, people can respond to more than one, so if they teach in high school and primary school settings, they could’ve ticked both boxes. So the percentage doesn’t add up to 100. In the high school and secondary school setting, we had 48% of people belonging to that particular area so that was the number one area that people taught in on the side, however it was closely followed by the elementary and primary aged section with 47%, so almost identical to the above. Third on the list, we had the middle school age group which was 37% of respondees, remember people can respond to more than one, that’s why their percentages don’t add up. We had 21% of people landing on the site with kinder aged students. Now, I find that really interesting because it will actually definitely influence the sort of work that I do in that area next year. We’ve got 21% of people turning up to that site and I actually have a number of kinder age appropriate activities and resources coming out through out 2015.

08:45 JR: And the fifth most popular response was the university sector with 5% of the audience. And these are the questions that I was really looking forward to finding out more information about, “What devices and technology do your students potentially have access to in your gymnasium, practical space et cetera?” Now, the number one, it’s no surprise the number one response in this particular area was an iPad or an iPod, with 69% of respondees actually selecting this. Now, like before the previous question, people could tick multiple options, so if they had iPads and mobile phones, then they could select both because in some cases, it’s not one, it’s quite a few that they have access to. Now, a second option on the list was a computer lab room, now 46% have access to that in their space, and that doesn’t mean that the only thing they have access to but it is interesting it does show that, that sort of model, the lab room isn’t really suited to PE in practical settings that is. I mean you can’t take your practical class to a lab room, so there still are a lot of teachers who that’s the only thing they have access to and that is limiting when it comes to being able to use technology and being able to use it well.

10:10 JR: Third on the list was one to one laptop. So that was 43% of people said they had access to that, meaning that people, students can bring in their own laptop devices and use them and all that sort of stuff. Fourth on the list was mobile phones, so 41% of people said that their students can bring a mobile phone into the PE classroom for use. The next one which was very much like myself when I first started using this was my device, and what that question meant was, the only device that people have access to is mine. And 41% of people said that, that was them. We also had bookable laptop carts 25%, Chromebooks, 13%, now I’m really looking forward to asking this question again next year ’cause I think it will absolutely increase. Chromebooks is set to become even more useful and Vidalyze, my tool that I built, was designed purely around Chromebooks and I’m starting to see that there’s more and more programs looking at and purchasing these.

11:14 JR: Eighth on the list was android tablets with 10%, now compare that to iPads or iPods that had almost 70%, there’s a big difference there, there’s a real reason behind that as well, just in terms to access to apps and so on. We had 7% of people who have access to nothing, so there’s not anything that they can bring in, they don’t have their own device, mobile devices, et cetera. This survey is just as valuable for them in that they can possibly use it and the response is to advocate to their own colleagues and so on about what it is that they could do to increase learning potentially in their school. And the tenth most popular device was a windows tablet with 5% of the respondees.

12:00 JR: Now, this next question depended on how the previous question was answered, so if someone said they had access to an iPad, whether it was their device or a cart or some sort, they were flowed into this question. If they didn’t ask or respond that they had access to an iPad, they weren’t asked it. So, how many iPads do your students have access to in their PE classes? 26%, the most popular response said that they had access to just their personal iPad. That’s how I started this whole PE Geek journey related to iPad use as well. I had my own personal iPad, which I bought and thought, “You know what, this could be really useful in PE.” And I would bring it in and use some apps in that capacity. The second most popular option was that they have a couple of iPads that can be used, 21%. Now, I see this a lot when I work in schools, they might have access to two or three iPads that can be used. They’re from the PE department. Then maybe all the teachers pool their iPads together and they loan them out to individual classes when they need them.

13:06 JR: The third most popular response was that each student brings their own iPad. That was 18%. So there’s a number of one-to-one programs and that would certainly be really powerful in a PE setting. Fourth, was that we have a full class set of iPads. 14% of people said that. So, there are a number of schools that I’ve worked in, this is particularly mine as well, where there’s almost like a bookable trolley that people can book out and use in the class when they need to. And then rounding out the last few percentages, we had 8% of people who have a ratio of one iPad to every three students. We had 7% who had a one to two ratio and we had another 7% who have a one to five ratio. So, some really interesting result there definitely related to iPad usage.

13:57 JR: Now, this next question was fantastic to see because it’s definitely changed in the years that I’ve been asking it at the PE Geek workshops and it’s great to have some data beyond just the workshops that I teach. So, “Does your gymnasium or indoor practical space have a reliable WiFi connection?” And I actually justified “reliable” as you can use it all the time. It’s accessible. It doesn’t drop out. That sort of thing. You can stream video with it. Now, the most popular response was yes, with 78% of the responses saying that they did have reliable WiFi in their gymnasium or indoor practical spaces.

14:41 JR: Obviously, 22% said that they don’t. Now, the flip side of that was, “Does your outdoor practical space have reliable WiFi connection?” Now, this is where the results basically flip completely. They’re almost inverted. So, 76% of people don’t have access to reliable WiFi in their outdoor spaces. I know myself, personally, my school, the one that I work in, we can’t get WiFi unless you’re sort of really close to a building, which is unrealistic when you’re trying to play games and activities on the oval and the other outdoor spaces. And this is definitely the case in most schools that I’ve been to. The sort of exception is schools that have maybe access to an outdoor space that is surrounded by buildings that tends to have high WiFi capacity. I have yet been to a school where they have made a concerted effort to put WiFi outside and away from any sort of buildings that are there, the school main area, et cetera.

15:46 JR: That leaves 24% of people who don’t have access to reliable WiFi in their outdoor spaces. Now, the next question that flows on from this was, “Does your gymnasium or indoor practical space have some sort of projector or large screen display?” I’m seeing this happen a lot, a lot of schools, putting it in into their schools so that they can project images and videos and so on, and 63% of people do have access to a large screen display or projector, 33% of people do. Now, those people who said yes were asked this next question. So, “Would you describe the projector or large screen display as requiring set up or pack up? Was it fixed or permanent or semi-permanent, but can be moved?” So, the most popular response was that it requires set up and pack up regularly. So, obviously people had a projector. They have to go and set it up before class and they have to pack it up because the gym might be used by other particular situations. So, 49% of people said that that was basically what they had.

16:57 JR: Me, personally, I’m lucky to be in a school that has a fixed and permanent projector. You can’t pack it up. It’s there and it’s protected, and it’s available 24/7 for whether it’s a community group or whether it’s other teachers. And you can go and check that out at bigscreenpe.com if you wanna see what that it is and how it works. And finally, we had 15% of people who have a semi-permanent sort of solution. It’s there most of the time. They have to pack it up occasionally when certain events dictate it. And I followed on with a question just out of interest. “Does your outdoor practical space have some sort of projector or large screen display?” Overwhelmingly, 98% of people said no, that they didn’t have access to some sort of projector or large screen display. However, 2% did, which represents 11 people who have access to some sort of large screen or projector or so on when they’re working in outdoor spaces, which I think is really impressive, and I would love to have access to that when teaching outside, for sure.

18:07 JR: Now, the next sort of questions relate to people’s thoughts and feelings related to their confidence and how supportive their own colleagues are, related to the use of technology and physical education. So the first question was, “How confident are you with using technology in your physical education classroom?” Now of this, the average result was 7.3 out of 10. So the more confident you were, the higher you picked. There was 26% of people who… Sorry, 12% of people who picked 10 in that they were really confident, obviously the most confident they could be related to using technology. The number one category was eight out of 10, with 26% of the audience saying that that applied to them. We had 1% of the audience saying that they were not confident with using technology in PE.

19:02 JR: However, across all of the values, the most popular was or the average, sorry, was 7.3, which means that people are sort of quite happy and quite confident with playing around using tech, trying something out and if it doesn’t work not necessarily never using tech again, launching back into something else, and that’s great. That’s the sort of learning that we expect in our students, and it’s great to see that people are willing to give things a go even if they’re not entirely confident with how it may work out.

19:35 JR: Now the next question was, “How supportive are your colleagues regarding the use of technology in PE?” Now, this was again out of 10, and the average result was seven, which means that there is at least a level of support across colleagues and people using it to sort of improve their efficiency, and so forth. And I mean in terms of support, that means that other teachers jump on board with your ideas, and your vision, and share in your enthusiasm related to technology in PE, and so on. Now, we had 2% of the respondees say that their colleagues were one star in that they obviously get no support whatsoever. So that would be a hard press to try and sell it to their colleagues, and move learning forward. The number one response was 22% of the audience who said that they were between sort of seven and eight stars, in terms of support from their colleagues, and yeah, great to see lots of opportunities there for colleagues to really support and move their profession forward.

20:49 JR: Now flowing on from that question, it says, how… The question is, “How receptive to innovation and change are your colleagues regarding the use of technology in PE?” They’re sort of very similar questions, but just asked in a slightly different way. So I mean, people can be supportive regarding the use of technology, but not necessarily receptive to the change when it applies to them. So expectedly, we see a slight decrease in the average result to 6.93 out of 10. So it’s, I mean, it’s almost seven. I guess, it needs to be looked at in that context. The number one response was 22% of people who said that they had about between a seven and eight in terms of how receptive to change their colleagues were. And then if we get right down to one, there was only 1% of the audience who stated that their colleagues simply are not receptive at all.

21:47 JR: Now, if you wanna look at this in more detail and look at the exact figures, remember you can head to the pegeek.com/results where you’ll be able to scan through basically what I’m looking at now, and get a good picture of each of the things that maybe we haven’t spoken about. Now the next question, we’re pretty close to the end in terms of all the questions, but the next one was, “How often would you use technology in your PE classroom?” The most popular result was multiple times per week, 37% of respondees said that, every single day was the second response with 25%, multiple times per month was the next one with 16%, once per week was 13%, once a month was 4%, once every few months was 3%, and once or twice a year was 2%, and we actually had no one say that they’ve never used technology in PE, which is interesting. I mean, that’s probably expected because people are coming to the PE Geek blog when they’re interested in technology in PE. So in terms of enough scope surrounding technology, it’s obviously heavily biased towards those people that do use it, and that would be evident by the responses that we’ve got.

23:06 JR: And the next question, “How willing are you to work towards improving your use of meaningful technology in PE?” Now, this particular response is the one that I’m most interested in. It’s the thing that actually motivates me to blog, and post content, and spend as many hours as I do, generating stuff for people who are listening. So the average response was 9.24 out of 10, which represents an overwhelming trend towards those people who are actually willing to learn new things, try stuff and work with their colleagues to improve their skills, and that sort of thing. That is immense, and that sort of stuff is what gets me up, and what makes me wanna continue to post content. The second… Well, we obviously had nine with 16% of people saying that, that’s how they rate themselves, 63% of people gave themselves a 10 in terms of being absolutely gung ho about trying to improve their own area. We had 1% of the audience who put themselves in the middle, at sort of a five, and then there wasn’t anyone who rated themselves at one, two, three or four, or zero for that matter.

24:19 JR: “What issues do you or your school face with adding technology in your PE classroom?” was our next question. And no surprise, 54% of the audience said that money or funding was the number one area here. Now based on these responses, I have decided to set up the fundmype.com website, where I will be funding and making a platform possible for people to receive funding as much as possible through the particular website. So if you wanna learn more about what Fund My PE is, then head over to fundmype.com, and that website will be going live on my birthday, on February the 3rd. Basically, it’s a crowdfunding website for people to generate revenue and funding for their program. So, I’m really excited to bring that out.

25:13 JR: The second most… The second biggest difficulty that people faced when adding technology to their PE is the loss of activity time. Now I think this is one of the most important reasons. I should point out that people were only able to pick one, people would probably have picked all of them, but I wanted to get a real flavour of what the biggest problems were related to this particular area. Loss of activity time represents 16% of the responses, and I think it’s really important. We don’t want people to be less active because they’re using technology, we want them to be probably more active and I think there’s many reasons how that’s possible. If you listen to the last episode you would have seen how that is absolutely something that we can achieve. So, yeah that’s definitely a priority whenever we’re using anything.

26:00 JR: Number three was access to training, so 11% of people said that that’s the biggest hurdle and that’s inspiring to me, because I want to try and bring out as much training as possible for this area and it just makes me sort of go in that direction of producing more and more. Few people said there was no issues, they just don’t have any issues at all. They’re able to use it, add technology to their PE classroom, that was 6% of the audience. And we actually rounded off with 5% of people saying that their lack of admin support, and 4% said the technology breaks, and 5% said that it was another reason that wasn’t listed on the list.

26:44 JR: Now finally, just because we’re here and I think this might be useful for you guys as well, because obviously, you stumbled across the PE Geek website at some stage. But I did wanna know where most people came from to get to the PE Geek site and the question was, “How did you discover the PE Geek website?” 30% said Twitter, 22% said a Google search, which is great. Google is still the number one place people go to search for things, 15% said a friend, so if you’re a friend and have represented… Recommended this site, thank you I appreciate it, 13% said they attended a workshop, 12% said an other reason, 5% said Facebook, and 4% said email.

27:26 JR: And I thought well if they had visited the site before it would be interesting to know how long they’ve been visiting, and the most popular response was about two years, 27% of people said that. Six to 12 months was 27%, three to six months was 12%, and we had a few people that were less than a month at 10%, and we actually had 1% of the audience that have been here the entire time that I have, which is five years plus. We got about 9% that’ve been here three years plus, which I think is great, thank you for that.

28:02 JR: Now the last question I asked people was, “Can you give me a rating out of five in terms of the content that I put out?” This sort of wasn’t a mandatory question, but most people did give me a rating, and it was out of five stars. And I certainly take this seriously and this is essential to the reason behind why I bring out content, and if I’m not getting a good rating then I need to lift my game and bring out better content for people. But it was nice to see that the average rating was 4.58 out of five, so made up of mostly fours and fives. We had one or two people that gave me a two, and yeah I’d love to know if they’re listening what I can do to improve, and that goes to anyone. If you gave me a five and if you have anything that I can do to make content more valuable for you let me know, and even if you rated me a 10, even though that wasn’t possible, what can I do to get better? Because ultimately that’s what it’s all about for me is improving.

28:59 JR: Now hopefully, you found this survey and the results useful. I know I personally have, because it means that I can speak with some sort of averages and numbers related to the various things that we’ve done. And all in all, it makes for a very interesting experience related to the use of technology in PE. So, if you’re interested in downloading the results go to the pegeek.com/results, where you can get access to them, and use them, and print them out, and share them with anyone who might be interested. Let me know if you would like to have any questions related to what I asked, and how I asked it and all those sorts of things, and yeah if you’ve got any questions you might like me to ask in the 2015 version of the World Tech & PE Survey, then send those through. But other than that, that brings us to the end of this special episode of the PE Geek Podcast. As always thanks for tuning in and if you have any questions that you would like addressed on the podcast, then you can head to thepegeek.com/voicemail and leave them, and you never know, you may get featured on the show. Alright. Thanks, guys. Bye.

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