A group of Year 11 students roll up their shirt sleeves and attach to their upper arms what looks suspiciously like doctors’ blood pressure cuffs. In another part of the room, teacher Mark Colman is pointing at a silver gizmo in a student’s hand. “If you enter these figures here, it should give you the systolic reading.” The student taps data into the hand-held device with a slim pen, nods assent and wanders off. Around 20 students are in the room and they are generating the sort of organised bedlam that’s invariably the sign of an interesting lesson.

In fact, Colman is taking a sport and recreation class at The Arnewood School in New Milton on the edge of the New Forest in Hampshire. It’s a light, airy room, with the buzz of engagement and enjoyment, and the accoutrements of modern learning. In one corner is a large television and a laptop safe. Opposite, is a PC connected to an interactive whiteboard displaying a crosssection of a blood vessel, above which is stated one of the lesson goals - to understand the terminology associated with blood pressure.

The students are working in groups, taking measurements from the blood-pressure monitor and a heart-monitor watch and entering them into Toshiba’s PDAs (personal digital assistants). Correlating the figures will give them an understanding of what us hypochondriacs already know - that the upper reading is systolic (blood pressure when the heart is contracting) and the lower reading is diastolic (blood pressure when the heart is relaxing).

If data is entered incorrectly the readings can be a cause for concern. Colman is approached by a student who looks decidedly worried, if not a little peaky. “Yes, John?” “I think I’ve got a dodgy reading, sir.” Teacher and student check the data, Colman makes a correction and John walks away relieved. He’s officially alive!

“ICT has helped in PE teaching tremendously, in key stage 3 and especially at KS4 and at A-level,” says Colman. “At A-level I’m using an interactive whiteboard which gives a good visual display and allows me to show interactive diagrams from CDs on the whiteboard. In KS3 and KS4 we tend to use heart-rate monitors. We also use video cameras so that we can analyse students’ performance and show how they can improve. These guys do a lot of sport and recreation as part of their KS4 and KS5.

“In KS3 we take video cameras into the PE lesson and take images of shape in gymnastics or football and then, after the lesson, I download the material and visually present it through our school intranet. From KS4 onwards, PE students need to back up their work with supplementary information.”

There is, Colman maintains, an appreciable difference when students can analyse their own performances. “If they can improve their performance they get more of an intrinsic reward and, as performers tend to make similar mistakes, pointing out these errors to one person can be as beneficial to the group as it is to that individual.”

As part of the next phase of ICT implementation, the PE department is purchasing more detailed analytical software that will, for example, break down a tennis serve into its component parts and allow it to be superimposed and compared with an exemplar serve from a tennis pro.

But what of reports in the national press that our children are becoming a tired tribe of couch potatoes and that parents will soon be outliving their children? “Pupils still need the health and physical education side of PE,” says Colman, emphasising that well designed technology augments, rather than supplants, physical exercise.

But the PE department is by no means a high-tech oasis. As befits an institution that has recently been granted specialist technology status, ICT is being implemented throughout The Arnewood School. Laptops were introduced 18 months ago and laptop learning has recently been incorporated into maths and modern languages.

Nigel Pressnell, technology college director and deputy head, says: “ICT has uses across the curriculum. One of the things that interests us as a technology college is the way in which technology can be used to enhance teaching and learning and to develop new styles of learning, particularly with special interest groups, such as under-achievement with boys”.

As well as a number of dedicated computer suites there is now a desktop computer in every classroom, which is used primarily for administrative purposes. “The idea being, to help with the teacher’s workload and to help with raising the ICT skills in terms of continuing professional development,” says Pressnell.

“One of the issues that we had to face was that peripatetic teachers obviously don’t have a fixed base and how do you allow, for example, PE teachers to have access to high-powered, modern computing equipment? The solution that we came up with was to use Toshiba PDAs.”

The PDAs have rapidly become indispensable and are not only used for data collecting and collating, but also for administrative tasks, such as taking the register and booking rooms. Used in conjunction with PARS (Portable Attendance Registration System) software, the data can alert senior management to specific patterns of non-attendance or lesson lateness by pupils.

Headteacher Chris Hummerstone believes that, as a specialist technology college, “The Arnewood School seeks to be at the forefront of using ICT to enhance student achievement. We believe that the partnership we have established gives our students the support they need to be able to access teaching resources at any time and in a manner that suits their preferred mode of learning.”

But if you want a longer-term perspective on how far technology has developed, speak to PE teacher Denny Broadwell, who has taught at Arnewood for 30 years: “One of the things that has inspired me most is that you are always learning ways to improve students’ skills. When I first started teaching we used an analogue watch, now I have students using digital watches to measure their pulses.

“In the early days of my career I used a Banda copier, now I show a media presentation via a data projector. One of my colleagues even remembers the days when teachers needed a certificate before they could use the cine projector.” That’s change for you.

RESOURCES

In the lesson observed at The Arnewood School, students used:

* free software called WeightCalc, which can be downloaded at www.mysporttraining.comindex.html. This site also has other interesting PDA software for monitoring performance and training. Most of it can be downloaded for a trial period.

* a heart-monitor watch, which is manufactured by Polar and was bought from a local sports shop. It has an infrared transmitter that allows data to be sent to a laptop. The software supplied with the watch allows the user to keep a training log www.polarusa.comindex.html

* a Mars blood pressure monitor (model number: MS-700).z an interactive CD-Rom series, called Interactive Physiology, published by adam.com and Benjamin Cummings www.eu15.co.uk

When choosing PDAs, staff at The Arnewood School took into account qualities such as robustness and durability. An impressive feature of the Toshiba models (E570) was the powerful backlight, which proved extremely useful in bright sunlight www.toshiba.co.uk.

Not one laptop or PDA has “gone missing” at the school. This can be attributed to sensible management procedures (each laptop is signed out) and good security. The laptops are housed in strong, lockable cabinets that double as battery chargers. The manufacturers are Lapsafewww.lapsafe.co.uk.

The Arnewood Schoolwww.arnewood.hants.sch.uk