Why Children Need Physical Education

Why Children Need Physical Education?

·         Physical education is an integral part of the total education of every child in Kindergarten through Grade 12. 

Quality physical education programs are needed to increase physical competence, health-related fitness, self-responsibility and enjoyment of physical activity for all students so that they can be physically active for a lifetime. Physical education programs can only provide these benefits if they are well-planned and well-implemented.

Improved Physical Fitness: Improves children's muscular strength, flexibility, muscular endurance, body composition, and cardiovascular endurance.

Skill Development: Develops motor skills, which allow for safe, successful and satisfying participation in physical activities.

Regular, Healthful Physical Activity: Provides a wide range of developmentally appropriate activities for all children.

Support of Other Subject Areas: Reinforces knowledge learned across the curriculum. Serves as a lab for application of content in science, math and social studies.

Self Discipline: Facilitates development of student responsibility for health and fitness.

Improved Judgment: Quality physical education can influence moral development. Students have the opportunity to assume leadership, cooperate with others; question actions and regulations and accept responsibility for their own behavior.

Stress Reduction: Physical activity becomes an outlet for releasing tension and anxiety, and facilitates emotional stability and resilience.

Strengthened Peer Relationships: Physical education can be a major force in helping children socialize with others successfully and provides opportunities to learn positive people skills. Especially during late childhood and adolescence, being able to participate in dances, games, and sports is an important part of peer culture.

Improved Self-confidence and Self-esteem: Physical education instills a stronger sense of self-worth in children based on their mastery of skills and concepts in physical activity. They can become more confident, assertive, independent and self-controlled.

Experience Setting Goals: Physical education provides children the opportunity to set and strive for personal, achievable goals.

Sociology

What is Sociology?

•  sociology is a social science that studies human societies, their interactions, and the processes that preserve and change them.
•  It does this by examining the dynamics of constituent parts of societies such as institutions, communities, populations, and gender, racial or age group.
• Sociology also studies social status or stratification, social movements, and social changes, as well as societal disorder in the form of crime, deviance and revolution.

Why study Sociology?

• Sociology can give you a new perspective on yourself and the world around you.

• It is called the sociological perspective.

• The sociological perspective helps us understand that people behavior is influenced by social factors and learned behaviors from those around us.

Sociological Perspective

The sociological perspective invites us to look at our familiar surroundings in a fresh way. It encourages us to take a new look at the world we have always taken for granted, to examine our social environment with the same curiosity that we might bring to an exotic foreign culture. 

 Functionalist perspective

The functionalist perspective is based largely on the works of Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons, and Robert Merton. According to functionalism, society is a system of interconnected parts that work together in harmony to maintain a state of balance and social equilibrium for the whole. 

Conflict perspective

The conflict perspective is a view of society that posits conflict as a normal feature of social life.

 Interactionist perspective

In sociology, interactionism is a theoretical perspective that derives social processes (such as conflict, cooperation, identity formation) from human interaction. It is the study of how individuals shape society and are shaped by society through meaning that arises in interactions. 

BASIC TERMS OF DIGITAL LITERACY

Digital Age:

The present time, when most information is in a digital form, especially when compared to the time when computers were not used.

The time period in which we live now where the Internet and email are available is an example of the digital age.

Information society:

An information society is a society where the creation, distribution, use, integration, and manipulation of information is a significant economic, political, and cultural activity.

Digital natives:

A person born or brought up during the age of digital technology and so familiar with computers and the Internet from an early age.

"The digital tools that are reshaping our economy make more sense to young digital natives than to members of older generations"

 Digital immigrants:

A person born or brought up before the widespread use of digital technology. The term digital immigrant may also apply to individuals who were born after the spread of digital technology and who were not exposed to it at an early age.

Digital Divide:

The digital divide is a term that refers to the gap between demographics and regions that have access to modern information and communications technology, and those that don't or have restricted access. This technology can include the telephone, television, personal computers and the Internet.

Digital Novice:

A person new to and inexperienced in information and communications technology.

Digital Literacy

1.   What is digital Literacy?

Digital literacy can be defined as: “The ability to locate, organize, understand, evaluate, and create information using digital technology.” Digitally literate people can communicate and work more efficiently, especially with those who possess the same knowledge and skills.

Digital literacy is the ability to understand and use digital technologies effectively for everyday tasks

2.  Why is digital literacy important?

Digital literacy is as important a right for children today as reading and writing skills were at the inception of the Education Act in 1850.

·       writing and reading have been the cornerstones of literacy since modern education began, increasingly, digital technologies are superseding the manual process of writing, and reading is increasingly an activity carried out using digital facilities rather than paper resources.

·       Digital literacy is key to teaching in order to provide the skills, knowledge and understanding for young people to enter the workplace, further education and higher education.

·       digital literacy is becoming the primary form of information transfer and communication, taking over from letters, phone calls and even face-to-face interaction

·       Creative, collaborative and recordable communications techniques are essential for the next generation to interact in social, cultural, economic and intellectual careers and life.

·       Digital literacy involves using emerging technologies to communicate meaningfully across technology, language, social, cultural and intellectual barriers.

·       A variety of devices, platforms and web standards need to be incorporated into the educational experience to ensure pupils are fully literate in digital technology (not simply familiar or proficient.)

3.Situations where students would use digital literacy skill, at school and at home

Teaching pupils to use Photoshop is a worthwhile industry-standard skill which is not only useful for cross-curricular IT skills, but also for job and career prospects. In school, they may use digital literacy skills to make a presentation, etc. At home, they may use these digital literacy skills to enhance their own photos, websites, and social media profile pictures.

4.  Why is digital literacy important to teachers?

Ø Expanding Conceptions of the Digital World

While students may be adept at using digital tools, their understanding of what these tools can do is often limited.

For example, students use Instagram to post photos but don’t think to use the platform for art or history projects. They record themselves with a voice memo app but do not realize those apps could also be used for journalism projects or a historical narrative piece. Digitally literate teachers know how to inspire students to use today's technology as a powerful toolset to expand their learning opportunities. 

Ø Enabling Differentiation

Differentiation in the classroom is essential to meeting the needs of all learners, but it is time-consuming, especially for new teachers. Technology, when used creatively and correctly, can be used to mitigate those differences, such as in one-to-one classrooms. Teachers can lead the class through a lecture, while visual learners follow along with illustrations on their tablets and audio learners record the lecture for later review. Technology like this enables teachers to give their students choice in the kind of work they create for projects, such as a video, podcast or written story. Digital literacy is required in order to set the standards and boundaries for this kind of differentiation.

Digitally literate teachers also understand that it is less about the technology itself than it is about the tailored experience the technology can provide to each student. This is what drives differentiation and can make it powerful and highly targeted to students' individual needs.

ICT and SEN

Introduction

Technology has made human life comfortable by providing services, information on a click, at the same time has it has made life simpler for people with disability. Technology product ranging from the motorized wheelchair to a cell phone for deaf people to communicate has been making the life of People with Disability simpler and convenient.

 Types of Disability and people’s requirement

Visual impairment

People with visual disabilities are individuals who are blind, have low vision or have color blindness. People who are blind need text equivalents for the images used on the Web page, because neither they nor the assistive screen reader technology can obtain information from an image. A person who has a visual disability will not find the mouse useful because it requires hand and eye coordination. People with color blindness or those with low vision need good contrasting colors to be used in the design or an alternate attribute of information being presented.

Mobility impairment

People with mobility disabilities have physical impairments that substantially limit movement and fine motor controls, such as lifting, walking, and typing. Mobility impaired individuals experience difficulties in using the computer's input devices and in handling storage media. Such people need devices for mobility, control and manipulation and alternate input devices on Computers.

Hearing impairment

People who are deaf or hard of hearing require visual representations of auditory information that a Web can site provides. Solutions for these disabilities include closed captioning, blinking error messages, and transcripts of the spoken audio. The primary concern is to ensure that audio output information is provided in a redundant equivalent visual form.

Learning disability

People with cognitive or learning disabilities, such as dyslexia and short-term memory deficit, need more general solutions, which include providing a consistent design and using simplified language. For example, by using a template, a Web developer can reuse the same layout and design for each page, so a person with a cognitive disability can more easily navigate through a Web site. People with cognitive or learning disabilities can also benefit from redundant input, such as providing both an audio file and a transcript of a video. By simultaneously viewing the text and hearing it read aloud, they can take advantage of both auditory and visual skills to comprehend the material better.

Assistive technology

Assistive technology is a piece of equipment or a software product that is used to increase, maintain, or assist the functional capabilities of individuals with disabilities.

Quali-world	Software for accessing a computer without conventional keyboard and mouse.
Qualikey, Lookkeys , Adaptive keyboard	Virtual keyboard, Intel keys, head/mouth stick keys
Frog-pad	Keyboard for persons with one hand, 15 keys, with three different level overlays
Foot pedal KB	Programmable 3 key Keyboard
Quali-click software	Programmable mouse click
Eye-tracking software	On-screen, the cursor is controlled by simple body movement. A standard USB Webcam captures user movement and software translate it into mouse movement
Speech recognition	Allows operation of any application and full control over Computer/device
Magnification S/W	1.1x to 36x, bull's eye for aiming, screen split, large print key-board, change in background colors, inversion of color for persons with –ve vision, the network-based system is available
WYNN/Kurzweil300 0	for persons with dyslexia, provide audio and visual support for learning
Braille Embossers	Hardware device used for printing computer-generated text in Braille format.
JAWS	The most popular screen reader worldwide, JAWS® for Windows® works with your PC to provide access to today’s software applications and the Internet. Supports 17 Languages

Conclusion

There are varying viewpoints concerning the needs of SEN students. In the mainstream school environment, teaching has not always been modified in line with the needs of students, with assistive technology commonly implemented by learners in private environments. So as to ensure the use of ICT is more wide-ranging, there is the need to ensure the equipment, knowledge and time available to teaching staff are fulfilled, with teachers’ and teacher educators’ implications including that teachers need to be better educated in regard to ICT for SEN, with special education teachers needing to be viewed as teachers’ supervisors.