In this episode of The PE Geek Podcast we explore the results from the 2016 World Technology in PE Audit. The data comprised from over 800 participants is a global snapshot of technology usage & recurring trends. You can use these results to generate discussion in your school or reaffirm the direction your taking related to technologies in PE.
Resources from this episode
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[00:00:30] Jarrod Robinson: Hello everyone and welcome to episode number 73 of the PE Geek Podcast and it’s an absolute pleasure to have you here. Now in this final episode for 2016 we’re going to be diving into the results of the recent Tech in Phys Ed survey which we completed as part of the website.
Now this is something that we’ve done before and we basically get a snapshot of the different things that people are doing with technology, things they value with technology in their practice, but we also get to find out
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some of the common challenges and issues that are faced around the globe.
Now we, at the website, get the chance to use this information to write better content if you’re having issues with certain things then you can get that that’s the sort of stuff that we’ll be writing about next year. But you as a listener get a chance to sort of see where everyone else is and in many cases you can use this data to help potentially advocate for some of the things that you’re potentially asking for
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as your school.
Now the last time we ran this in 2014 we had a lot of people who emailed us in the following year this data was useful to them to showcase to their administration just where they were trying to get things happening in their practice and the data was sort of a backing point for that to say well this is what other schools have let’s try and do the same thing. So we’re going to do that again. I’m also going to link back to some of the previous results
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from the previous survey so that we can see how things have changed. Now not all areas have changed but in some of them they’re a little bit of a sort of picture of how things are progressing and I want to dive into what I believe the trends that are coming from that. So let’s dive into the results.
Now the first thing I want to mention obviously is that this is not a scientific based study. We’ve posed a series of questions, many of
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them are questions that I see coming up a lot and trends that I see coming along. I wanted to just get some data around those. Now there’s no way to sort of identify where all the people are responding from and the implications of different countries on the data, but this is a snapshot of the people who are interested in responding and it comes from a truly global perspective.
Now we had around 800 people respond to the survey which is up around about 30%
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from the previous year, or the previous time that we ran the event and the first thing that immediately apparent to me is we had exactly the same number of female to male responses. We’ve got 51% of people who responded as females and 49% of people who responded were males. Now that’s exactly the same as two years ago when we had round about a third less people respond to this survey which I think is quite interesting.
Now in terms of the
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age ranges of the people who are involved in completing this activity. We have 30 to 35 age group as being the most popular, in fact almost with an identical draw in the 40 to 45 bracket. Each of those had 17% of the votes. The next category was the 16% bracket which has 35 to 40 age range. So you can see here that most of the people responding to this survey
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fit within 30 to 40 years of age.
Now compare that to the previous time that we ran this survey and the number one category was the 40 to 45 bracket, again the 35 to 40 was second and the 30 to 35 range was the next chunk. So this sort of really does indicate to me that that is the common theme, most of the people who are looking at using tech are within the 30 to 45 bracket based on our data.
In this year
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if you look down to the 23 to 25 range which we assume to be the technology minded group they only account for 4% of the data again the 26 to 30 age bracket that’s 10%. The 55 plus are 11% and the 50 to 55 group is 13%.
So this perception that you have to be young to use tech is really not being showcased inside of this survey here and it really does scream to this notion that I say a lot that I don’t
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believe digital natives exist and I think good teaching practice is the key to all of this stuff happening and if you look at the data there are people who’ve been around in the teaching professional probably a bit longer and as a result they’ve got better crafted skills potentially and therefore can start to look at how these things might be implemented.
Now if we move on to the next question we asked what year levels do you teach PE no surprising our number one group this year is the
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elementary and primary aged group with 52% of the audience. If we look at the next in line was the high school students with 40% of the audience and then because you could select more than one the data doesn’t match up to 100 because you could select more than one of the response but middle school we had 34%, we had kinder 24% of our kinder age students were represented in this student and then 2%
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for university.
Now this is exactly the same order that we had last time inside of this survey all be it with high school and elementary flipped. So last time we ran it the high school/secondary was the top spot and elementary was second, but now we’ve seen that change to elementary being much, much further ahead in terms of the number of people who responded to this survey around technology in phys ed. So that’s quite interesting and it sort of speaks to a lot of the stuff that I notice
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with people emailing me, they always seem to be some of the younger year levels.
Now this is where we dive into the tech based questions. So this question was what devices and technology do your students potentially have access to. Now that word is pretty important because I wanted to sort of make sure that it’s student use and not just teacher use if you’re talking about your own device maybe they don’t potentially have access to that, so the student use is the real focus here. For me it’s
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still no surprise iPad and the iPod in 2016 had 58% of the responses which is quite massive really, it’s contrasting that across that across all the other device type, it still seems to be quite the go-to device for a phys ed audience and I would say probably because of the fact of its portability. The second most of accessible device was mobile devices, mobile phones and that’s up from
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the previous time where it wasn’t in the top perspective or the top range.
Now in terms of actual percentages compared to the rest of the data it’s actually we’ve seen it drop. So in 2014 69% of the people who responded had access to iPads and iPods as their potential tool that students could use and this time around the data’s 58%. So what’s probably started to happen and
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you’ll see in a moment what I believe is the case, is we’re starting to see other devices become even more accessible than they once were.
The real corner stone of this would be Chromebook devices, they’ve actually started to eat up globally much of what the iPad space used to have in terms of educational stake and the Chromebooks this time around, 22% of the audience responded that they have access to those and if you compare that
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to the previous time we ran this survey it was about 13%.
Now this would really echo much of what I’ve noticed along the emails I get, the work that I do with teachers where many of them are saying hey we’ve got Chromebooks what could we use these for, what could we do and if you look back through our blog posts throughout this year you’ve seen more of a focus around Chromebooks and Chrome devices and that will continue based on the data it’s pretty apparent.
Now some of the other trends that we’ve noticed there, in 2016
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the computer lab, 33% of people had access to that and if you compare that to the previous period of time it was like 46% of people had access to computer labs. Now what does that tell us? It tells us that many schools used to have those as the pinnacle of tech in their school and they’ve started to become fatigued and aged and they’ve transitioned from those into more portable devices such as Chromebooks and
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now therefore the PE departments etc. have an opportunity to leverage them.
Now one thing that’s not surprising is the small take up of Windows tablet devices this time around, it’s 3% of the audience and Android tablets about 6%. It’s not surprising there, they’re much more difficult, Android is much more difficult to facilitate in a school with the management of multiple devices and a Windows tablet not the hottest selling
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item in terms of cost as well compared to some of the other options that are around. So I think there’s some interesting data there to come from the devices and still in my mind the more mobile it is the better and that’s definitely still coming through as a trend.
Now for the people that said that they did have access to iPads they got to ask a supplementary question and that question was how many iPads do your students have access to during their PE class. Both times we’ve done this the number one response here has been
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just my personal iPad. So about quarter of the people who said they had access to iPads responded and said it’s a personal iPad.
The next question again in both years was that they access to a couple of iPads, so 22%, both times it’s been 22%. Then the follow on from that was that each student brings their own iPad and that equated to around about 18% in 2014 and this time it’s 15%. So we’ve seen a
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reduction in the amount of kids who are bringing their own iPads to a PE space. Now the forth option on this list was that we have a full class set. Now this is something I see a lot and comparing it to the previous time the figure is virtually the same. So of those sorts of schools that are rolling out a class set the figure really hasn’t changed. It’s quite interesting.
Now we move into the next
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lot of questions which aren’t specifically about devices as such but they’re about maybe some of the underlying infrastructure about those devices. The first question that we have is does your gymnasium or indoor practical space have reliable Wi-Fi connection. I use the word reliable as you can insure that it’s going to be there for you, it’s not spotty, you don’t have to stand in this special part of the room to get access.
Now in 2014 we saw that 78% of the people who
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responded had a reliable Wi-Fi connection and therefore 22% didn’t. This time around we’re at 82% with 18% of people who don’t. Now we’ve seen a growth, we’ve obviously even sampled more people this time around. We’ve seen this upward trend of a lot of practical indoor spaces being or having Wi-Fi available.
The follow on from this is does your outdoor practical spaces have reliable Wi-Fi
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connection. Now in my school that’s not the case, you couldn’t very venture out far at all and be in a space where Wi-Fi wasn’t present. Now in 2014 76% said that they did not have reliable Wi-Fi in outdoor spaces. This time around 705 of people said that they do not have reliable Wi-Fi in practical spaces which is interesting.
We’ve actually seen a reduction in the Wi-Fi
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that is available in some of these outdoor practical spaces. Now this isn’t obviously the exact science, different people responding in different years but it is sort of indicative of some trends and that one is sort of counter to what I would have expected to have taken place in the preceding last two years.
Now does your gymnasium or indoor practical place have some sort of projector or large screen display? Now this is a really big thing that I’ve seen lots of
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schools implementing and working with and in 2014 63% of people said yes, this time around 67% of people have said yes, they had some sort of projector or large display that’s there. Now I think the real important question is here is the next part. Now I’ve said would you describe the projector that is available to you as fixed or permanent, semi-permanent in that it can be moved or that it requires set up and pack up regularly. Now
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from the previous time we asked this question the number one response was that it requires set-up and pack-up regularly. Half the people said that they have projector but they have to set it up and pack it up regularly. Obviously that’s less desirable.
But this time around 44% said that they had a fixed and permanent solution. Now that’s the thing that I advocate, last time around it was 37%. You’re going to use it if there permanent and you can use it, you don’t have to set it up and muck around with it, you’re going to
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actually implement the different things that you can make possible with it. So we’ve seen more schools get to that situation which I think is a really big opportunity for schools who are looking to leverage tech.
Now a follow-on from this question was does your outdoor practical spaces have some sort of projector or large screen display. This is really rare, the last time we ran this only 2% of schools had access to some sort of permanent outdoor space projector
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display and this time around it’s about 3%. So most people don’t. In fact the only cases I’ve ever seen this are in the rare exception of schools that have pretty much unlimited resources and can implement these, have a really strong sports culture outside of school to sort of justify the cost that it might have.
The question from here is would you describe the large screen display as permanent or requiring set up or fixed and
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semi-permanent situation and 45% said that it requires set up or pack up regularly. So they have the potential to have something outdoors but it requires set up and 25% of people said that they have a permanent fixed projector outside that they can access all the time, compare that to last time when 17% of people had a fixed permanent outdoor projector, one that didn’t require constant set up and so forth which I think is quite interesting.
Now from here we transition into
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questions about confidence related to technology. Again, it’s really difficult to contrast different years and so on because we had a different cohort of people answering. But in 2014 we had a scale of zero to ten with ten being maximum confidence and zero being not so confident and the average was 7.31. So we had 7.31 of our people saying that they were really confident with utilizing tech in their
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classroom.
Now if we break that into further detail last time around about 12% of the audience said that they were a ten, they were ultimately confident and 1% said that they were not confident at all. Most of the data on the average was 7.31. Now if we compare that to this time around there are some interesting things to observe. There are 11% of people who rated themselves as ten, so a little bit less
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than last time. There is 1% of people who rated themselves as one, so about the same as last time. But we’ve noticed that there is now an increase in the number of people who sort of think about themselves in that six, seven, eight bracket than previously which I think is good, that’s the bulk of people. Now the average is seven. So last time it was 7.31 This time it’s seven. But we’ve seen a slight shift in the number of people who are
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rating themselves in of feeling a little bit more confident than say a five or four.
The next series of questions that we asked was how supportive are your colleagues regarding the use of tech in your PE program. This is pretty important if you don’t have supportive colleagues or support network to help you or guide you or work with you then you feel like you’re on your own and you feel like you’re less likely to make a change that could lead to improvements in many areas and last
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time we did this only 2% of people said that they had 0% support from their department. This is the same this time around.
We’ve seen an improvement in the number of people who feel like they are supported which I think is great as many more people sort of become in tune with it and try things, the support networks grow there and I think that’s fantastic. So the average result here was 7.3 out of ten in terms of
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how well supported they feel up from 7 last time and again obviously we’ve had a bigger sample size so that’s quite good to know.
Now the following question to this was how receptive to innovation and change are your colleagues regarding the use of tech in PE. Now this can be quite a daunting thing and if you’re one of those people that is listening to this podcast you’re probably quite open to change and trying new things and seeing how they work. But there are others who maybe are not so. So while they might be supportive of you
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trying things they may not necessarily be so receptive to the change themselves.
So in 2014 the average was 6.9 for how supported people were and this time around we’re at 7.1 so we’re starting to see more people receptive to it and I guess that speaks to the work that lots of schools are doing around tech and a lot of great talented people in schools helping others in their department get some more progress and then therefore feel
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a little bit more comfortable about it and not so threatened.
Now I asked the question after this how often do you use tech in your PE classroom and sure this is open for interpretation but just what we were asking was how often does it find it’s place whether it is something as simple as you’re picking teams using it or you’re doing something far more elaborate than that. I wasn’t really looking for a difference, just how often does tech find its space into your practice.
Now the number one
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response here was about 38% use it multiple times per week. So not necessarily every single day or all the time but just a few times throughout the week it finds a place. That was the same the previous year and the data was virtually identical. But again if you move onto the next part every single day 22% of people said they use it every single day, compare that with last time where we had 25% who use it every single day and then the next one was three multiple
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times per month 16% of and the previous time it was 16% also. But if you look at the very last group which is surprising, I’ve never used technology in PE we’ve got 1% of people and again last time we did it we had 1%, once or twice per year 1%, previous time we did it we had two percent.
So if I’m gathering anything from this some of the stuff is that people are a little bit more
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open to trying some things and the average sort of time that it’s just a multiple times per week. I think that’s good there’s no real reason why it has to be in every single lesson, it just needs to fit the theme of what you’re doing and be of benefit and that is testament to multiple times per week model.
Now we added a question in here which was in what areas do you like technology assisting you with. Now this wasn’t something we
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had asked previously, so we don’t have any data around this, but we asked what other things do you value most about it essentially and we had assessment as the number one thing that people valued in that 82% of people put this down. Now they could tick as many things as they wanted, but of all the people who responded, 82% of those people had this down as at least one of their options.
The second one was
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instruction and then we had measurement and data capture which would be things like tracking heart rates and measurements of different fitness tests, whatever it may be. Student physical activity, so people who use increase physical activity. Video feedback, they’re all 73%. Communication was 55%, reflection was 50%, collaboration was 49% so about half the people who responded said that that was something that they valued it
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for. Then there was portfolio curation and only 31% people said that they valued tech for that purpose which probably speaks more to the fact that not many schools really have this idea of ongoing portfolio style documentation of what people are achieving rather than that technology isn’t useful for that because the people that are using it for portfolio curation probably really are finding it be such a powerful tool.
Now assessment
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is the number reason from this list of why people use or value tech. So in the upcoming year we’re going to be doing quite a lot of work around different ways that you can use tech for assessment purposes.
Now back to the results that we had in the previous year, how willing are you to work towards improving your use of meaningful tech in phys ed. Now this question here is interesting because if they’re on the PE Geek email list which are the people that responded they’re probably very much likely to be involved in
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wanting to improve themselves and that sort shines through in the data. So last time we did it 9.23 was the average. If zero was I don’t want to do any work to improve myself and ten was the most then the average was 9.23 and this time around it was exactly the same 9.22 which I think is great. It means that people are open just to even trying things so they can have better understanding of how it works and then make a decision whether it finds a way into their practice.
Now,
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of the things that you could potentially take away what issues do you or your school face with adding tech to your PE classroom? 58% of people said money or funding and that’s up from last time around where it was 54% of people who said that. Loss of activity time, 15% of people say that’s the culprit. That’s down from 16% last time which I think is good, there are a number of ways that tech can be the opposite of what we think around activity. Access to training 9% of people said that and
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11% said it previously. So hopefully our role helps with these things. 6% of people last time said no issues, they don’t have any at all and 5% this time said they have no issues. Technology breaking, 5% of people said that they worry about the tech that breaks and that was 4% last time. Lack of admin support was 4% and last time it was 5%. So a little bit of a change there.
Now if we move onto the next question this is purely for me
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as well but you might find it interesting because you may have found it a different way. But how did you discover the PE Geek website? The number one option in 2014 was Twitter in that 30% of people had found the website through Twitter and obviously connected with it. Second was Google search. This time around they’re flipped, 26% of people found it through a Google search and this 20% of people found it through Twitter.
Now I would say many of the reasons behind that is that Twitter is
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certainly changing how it’s algorithm works so that less people get seen and therefore less people can be discovered unless you pay to be promoted in those platform. So they’ve definitely moved to more of a pay to play type scenario. The third option was I attended your workshop and that’s up from the previous time around where about 13% of people. Now obviously that’s a good thing because we’re two years down the track more people have been to the workshops and probably discovered us from there.
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Now the next question was how long have you followed the website. Again this is really interesting for us but for you it might put yours into context too. The number one question is about the last time we ran it was about six to twelve months, 27% of the audience had followed for that long. Now assuming that those people enjoyed it they’ve now flowed into the next bracket which is about two years and that’s the number one from this time around. The second
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is six to twelve months and then a third we had a three to six month range and that’s all exactly the same as the previous time that we did that data just with a minor shift at the top. Last time we did there were 1% of the audience who have been following for five years plus and this time around there are actually are 5% of the people who responded that have followed for five years plus and that’s pretty much the entirety of the time that we’ve spent curating the website
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which I think is really quite cool.
Now that brings us the end of the analysis of the results from the recent audit. Now I did mention obviously this isn’t a scientific study, there’s no way to track the cohorts and see how each of those have changed from year to year but it does give us a bit of an overview, an opportunity to discuss some of the results that have appeared.
There are a couple of trends that I’ve observed and one of them is that schools seem to be investing more so in infrastructure
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that it is supportive to the use of tech such as Wi-Fi and large screens. That would absolutely be one of the things that I take away and that’s something that I have seen and observed quite readily over the last few years. The other thing that I would observe is the role that Chromebooks are starting to have in a phys ed space. Now, there’s a couple of reasons behind that, they’re really affordable, they are quite portable, they have great battery lives, they’re cloud connected and all of these different assets are starting to roll together into becoming the default choice for many situations.
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So we as the website here are definitely putting in more work behind developing tools for those as well as different software that you can use in your PE practice around the Chrome space. Now there are obviously other things that we’ll pick up and observe throughout the period coming along. If you want to get a deeper look at this data then you can head along to the pegeek.com/results where you can have a look at these results yourselves and print out a copy and do whatever you like.
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Hopefully it’s been useful for you. I look forward to returning in 2017 with some more material with you and hopefully we can answer some of the questions that have appeared as part of this audit. Speak soon.
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