[IWB] Tomorrow Sport - competition for Primary and Secondary students - invitation to participate

[Paul Wright]

Greetings.

I am writing to let you know about a project we at VITTA are developing called Tomorrow Sport.  I hope that you or someone at your school will be interested in participating in the pilot we will be running with this project in Term 1 next year.

The following is a little about our Tomorrow Sport project.

Tomorrow Sport is an interactive web 2.0 based site developed by the Victorian Information Technology Teachers Association (VITTA) as part of the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD) FUSE (Find, Use, Share, Explore) website. The FUSE site is intended to change the way teachers use technology and engage students in topics that excite them.   

Tomorrow Sport is a teams-based competition with sport as the inspiration and source material.  There is a competition for Years 7 and 8 students and another one for Years 5 and 6 students.

Teams of students complete a Challenge each week for six weeks.  While each Challenge is based on a topic related to sport, each activity involves collecting information, collaborating and producing a response, such as a graph of a slide show or making a recording. It is intended that each Challenge activity would take about one class per week.    

Teams of students are joined into the competition by their teacher. Teams will compete for the highest placing on a score ladder. 

The competition promotes sports-related activities and these activities promote the development of numeracy, literacy, social and personal development, citizenship, collaborative and cooperative learning.  Each Challenge involves planning, conducting an activity, collecting data, preparing a response and uploading to the Tomorrow Sport web site. As well teams will also be required to review the work of their peers and further points will be won.  A leader board will be created each week and competition winners will eventually be announced.  We hope to have great prizes for the winning teams.

The first version of Tomorrow Sport is based on Australian Rules Football, but after the prototype we will be extending the competition to include netball, soccer, cricket and hockey.  We will then run a competition in three terms each year.

We have been in discussions with and will be working with other organisations including the Australian Football League, SportZstats, the National Sports Museum and ACHPER.  

We have teams of teachers/writers preparing Challenges and resource materials.  As well, they have prepared materials linking to Curriculum Standards and provided rubrics so you can use this work in as part of your teaching, learning and assessment program.  

If you are interested, then please get back to me as soon as possible.  If you have a colleague who may be interested, then please pass this message on.

We would like to hear from as many teachers in Primary and Secondary schools as possible.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you.

Paul Wright
VITTA - Project Office
T: +61 3 9495 6836
F: +61 3 9495 6834
E: paulw at vitta.org.au
W: www.vitta.org.au
Suite 209, 134-136 Cambridge St,
Collingwood, VIC, 3066, Australia

Engaging Generation Now
Learning and Teaching in the Digital Age
Caulfield Racecourse 29th - 30th 2010
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www.vitta.org.au/conferenceinfo