I have mentioned the idea of schools working with MS/HS students to design and create a wellness app for their community. Schools could hire a company to do the work, but what a missed opportunity for real-world project-based learning for coding students.
To paint the picture a bit more, here is a mock-up of what the user interface of a wellness app might look like with this app prototype focusing on the H of PERMAH.
Photo by William Hook on Unsplash
I have mentioned having a school wellness app that students, teachers, and parents can tap into for goal-setting, strength spotting, background information learning of Positive Psychology, etc. It turns out that this “what if we” is happening, at least in the prototyping stage at my school. Two years ago, I worked with a high school student to build a wellness app framework.
While it is helpful to have a school wellness site, it is another to have an easily accessible app that one can use to personalize his/her learning about Positive Psychology and implement one’s personal and/or family wellness plan. An essential module of one’s wellness app should be a listing of the personal and/or family wellness plans with a documentation feature to upload images of efforts and a place to record reflections.
The same app approach can apply to student learning support. It can be helpful to have a resource website listing academic and behavioral support strategies, just as with wellness. A learning support app can provide teachers the functionality to search by learning and behavior needs for strategies and to save favorite instructional and support strategies, etc., to find helpful ways to meet each student’s need, whether in the moment and/or for in the long term. With the growth of artificial intelligence and voice commands with our devices, one could see the possibility of opening the learning support app to voice commands for a listing of support strategies.
The same app creation can also take place for students. One can start with the students receiving learning support by providing an app listing their academic subjects with individual menus of strategies to help them within subdomains for math, social studies, reading, etc. Math, for example, could have subdomains of fractions, multiplication, working word problems, etc., depending on the grade level curriculum. Sites such as Khan Academy provide tutorials across subject areas. I wonder if they have the plan to create an app that allows for voice searching. And as is so often the case, the support strategies we use for students facing learning struggles and/or presenting as gifted can also be helpful to the full spectrum of students.
It would be wonderful if a student information system (SIS) provider could make their database of student information accessible on any of these app possibilities so that teachers can automatically see a nicely designed dashboard and student profile interface listing all of their students when they open the apps. I bet some education database company does this.
Photo by William Hook on Unsplash
We hear a lot about the misuse of technology in how we let it invade our personal lives. The flip side is that we can have agency when interacting with technology to use it to better our lives- even with our personal health. How do you engage with and leverage technology to support your wellness?
Our new staff members probably are noticing that Apple has a prominent place on our campus. We are an Apple Distinguished School with many staff members carrying iPhones and wearing Apple watches. Apple continues to offer new health and physical fitness categories with its services. They do have some competition, though. This past week, a couple of competitors made giant leaps in their health and fitness offerings.
Fitbit Sense and Versa
Fitbit is a well-known fitness tracker provider but also has watches. This past week they introduced a new lineup of trackers and watches. Their giant leap in health and fitness services with their watches includes:
These new or improved sensor options provide more data than the usual steps and sleep cycles. To learn more about the possibilities, look at this article from Macworld. The EDA feature looks to open the door to offering biofeedback on emotional arousal, especially around stress. The Sense offers guided exercises to reduce anxiety when potential stress is measured. Here is an article that describes the process.
A new entry into the fitness tracker arena is Amazon. Who knew they had been working to find new ways to enter our lives? While talking about big data collection companies, did you know that Google now owns Fitbit? No commentary here but do apply your digital literacy and privacy awareness skills to read up on how Apple, Amazon, and Google handle the data they collect from their fitness devices. 😉
Amazon Halo
The Amazon tracker is called the Halo. Physically it stands out for not having a screen. Yes, you read that correctly. The casing with the sensors faces inwards from the band onto your wrist. One interacts with the sensor readings via an app. To learn more about the Halo, take a read at the write-up from The Verge.
Data collection through assessment is a major initiative at our school. The data drives how we design our instruction. The crossover to our personal wellness is the same. We can gather and track our dietary, fitness, and health data to better design how we manage our lives. The focus of this might seem to only be on the H in PERMAH, but there is a real carryover to
I have mentioned the possibility of schools designing and building their own school wellness app for students, staff, and parents. I could see under the PERMAH module’s H having a place to record information from one’s fitness wearable. 😉
Apple Watch
Note: I cross-posted this on my school’s wellness blog.
Do you, by chance, have a “Well-Being Dashboard“? One of my sons mentioned that he has a mental dashboard that he checks throughout the day. I like this self-care mental check-in and the idea of having a physical one, which makes me think of the meditation and wellness apps with check-in questionnaires and dashboards, especially around emotions. The MyLife meditation app is a good example. I also see other apps for physical health monitoring, especially for diabetics and folks using smartwatches that provide some of their vital signs and physical activity logging.
With the wellness umbrella covering the PERMAH categories, one can have a mental and physical dashboard. This connects to the efforts of a student programmer I worked with at my school to design a wellness app for our community. It uses the Positive Psychology PERMAH framework, including Character Strengths and goal-setting through the WOOP construct. The H in PERMAH includes mental and physical health, so we will need to see if there is a way to pull in information from those who wear the smartwatches. We are designing it for daily check-ins as in status markers within each PERMAH pillar to include the Character Strengths engaged within each pillar.
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I have been teaching this summer in my elementary school as we cannot leave Vietnam and return later in the summer. This experience has been positive and fruitful on many levels. It really offers me the opportunity to step into the shoes of our teachers and students. My main takeaway is the fragmented and frenetic pacing of the day. I have heard about this over the years but have not experienced it in my non-homeroom roles in elementary schools.
Extended class periods offer more opportunities for in-depth learning and applying new skills and concepts. In discussing this with a colleague, we wondered if it might be possible to use more of a block scheduling approach from our high school teaching experiences. My colleague used the term “modular classes,” which I guess is the current term for block scheduling. As always, I am just offering an idea, wondering if there are elementary schools that have more extended class periods with fewer transitions during the day.
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With the transition to and from our elementary school’s music, drama, art, PE, Vietnamese, and library, the 45 minutes designated for teaching time drops with getting students settled and then ready to leave at the end of the period. Another idea we discussed is the fragmentation of learning by taking a smattering of specialist classes each week. I suspect the specialist teachers struggle to build on previous lessons when they only see students once or sometimes twice a week.
My colleague and I chatted about the possibility of making a more middle school exploratory approach with students possibly only taking one or two specialist classes a quarter. There are scheduling difficulties for specialists, and teachers need coverage for grade-level team planning times. But who knows, perhaps some schools found a way to give students more in-depth time each quarter to drill down into their learning in specialist classes.
On a related note, our EC/K art teacher is moving into the pod of EC/K classes this coming year which will hugely cut down on transition time and open the door to even more art integration into the units of study as well as possibly giving students more opportunity to have some control over time and place as they personalize their engagement with art. 🙂
Photo by Marek Szturc on Unsplash
I have previously written about various learning delivery systems (LMSs, portfolios, blogs, WebQuests, etc.). Today, as I wrap my brain around how we will eventually weave our wellness program into the curriculum and fabric of my school, another delivery system comes to mind- the student planner.
As I have not been a classroom teacher for quite some time, I am unfamiliar with what present-day student planners look like and how schools use them beyond the conventional use of writing down assignments.
I searched for digital examples of planners but did not find much more than calendars with to-do lists and some goal-setting sections. When I searched for images, I came up with more. For example, the following image captures my ideas of embedding study skills into the planner.
The photo below gives another idea of helping students with their self-understanding. The inclusion of learning instruments infers the idea of students having a learning toolkit that connects to my Personal Learning System(PLS) blog posts and the PLS section of Web Resources for Learning.
I don’t want to embarrass myself too much with my lack of knowledge around planners with you, the reader, saying, “David, your ideas have been in use for 20 years!”. Thus, I will offer a few broad ideas, followed by further research on how schools support learning with student planners. I would love to have readers use the comment tool to post how their schools use planners beyond calendars, to-do lists, and homework recordings. 🙂
So my big, and I am sure the old idea, is to put on a designer cap to use the planner to support learning school-wide or divisional initiatives and programs. Examples are the school mission and values, life skills (i.e., wellness, SEL, Habits of Mind, etc.), study skills, Information and Communication Literacies (ICL), field trip support, etc. With many schools providing student portfolios, one may leave the traditional curriculum scaffolding to the portfolios and the LMS. This could provide the usual structure of question prompts for learning reflection, learning goals, resource links, whole units as learning modules, WebQuests, etc.
A second big and probably not doable idea would be to make the planners personal- to give students some choice in the design and content. Form a design team to outline the sections of the planner with clear connections to the initiatives, programs, themes, skills, etc., that the staff wants to promote. The next step would be to differentiate by giving students a choice over design features such as color, theme, layout, and other format aspects. The customization continues around the themes, skills, etc., where students can have their interests (talk about personalized learning!) and guide them through adding more content pages on topics that interest them in their learning.
An example could be the Character Lab strengths and overall wellness, with students having a basic FYI for each strength with a choice to add more in-depth content with more pages. Health outside of school, regarding diet, sleep, getting outdoors, physical activities, etc., would be high on my list to help students build routines and healthy habits. There also could be a planner section dedicated to learning outside of school with listings on how to volunteer, apply for a job, design family outings, etc.
I have been working with a high school student to design a wellness app with modules for PERMAH, Character Strengths, goal-setting, etc. You will need to differentiate between your wellness app and the wellness aspect of your planner if your school does both. 🙂
Yes, one reason for the improbability of this endeavor is the time, knowledge, and money it would take. This is where I wonder if any companies make student planners who are already or thinking about going into the growing personalization market. If you can go online to customize your sneakers, a company can work with a school to create a website with the desired format and content choices for students to log into and design their planners. This sort of gets at my idea of teachers hiring an “information broker” to gather content, lesson ideas, and resources to design their units of study.
The education market can be lucrative, with companies like SeeSaw for portfolios and SchoolBuddy for afterschool activity management finding their niches. So there may be companies out there moving into the personal planner market. Adding to the customization would be offering both a paper and app version of the planner for further individualization.
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