GCE PE Study Trip to UK - Day 5 @ Eaton Bank

Last night, we were brought by Jon Proctor, the E-Learning Consultant to the Cheshire County Council for a fabulous dinner at the Lock 57 Bar and Grill. During the dinner, it was a good time to meet up again with the entire delegation of UK teachers who visited Singapore during their TIPD attachment in Feb. I had a great time catching up with Jon, Rebecca and Lorraine as we only met briefly during their time in Singapore. We discovered that we shared quite a bit in common with each other: from our love of sci-fi, comics, to popular culture. Indeed it was a good time to catch up and reminiscence.

We spent another eventful day at Eaton Bank. Today, we were shown how the PE Dept incorporates IT in their PE lessons. They use a program called Swinger which is a motion capture software that is able to do a multitude tasks: It can playback video capture at various speeds, flip the image so that left-handed students copy the movements shown by right-handed demonstrators, extract frame-by-frame still images of video captures

Here we see Stewart showing us the Deja Vu feature of the Swinger software. What this does is cache the video input from the camera into the Laptops harddisk and play back the footage on a pre-determined cycle. So basically you can shoot yourself doing a gymnastics routine, come back immediately 20sec later and see the same 20sec footage played back in a loop.

This gives athletes real-time feedback on your performance and allows you to make instant refinements to your technique and see where you went wrong.

As we were heading back to the staff room, we chanced upon a group of students prancing about on the outdoor picnic tables- we wondered what it was all about and discovered that it was an outdoor dance lesson!

It was good to see the students interacting with the school environment and using the facilities so creatively.

During lunch time, we had the opportunity to meet up with Paul Roberts, the Head Teacher and Ann Web, the Assistant Head Teacher.

What is interesting is that here during lunch, a teacher is rostered to watch over students, maintain order and discipline, and also to interact with them. It was really heart warming to see Paul Roberts the Head Teacher being rostered for duty. We followed him as he did his lunch time duty stint at the canteen. I am sure that having the Head Teacher visible during lunch and being rostered on the lunch time duty roll makes an impact to both staff and students as well.


Tonight, we will be joining the staff and students for their Year 11 Prom. It promises to be an interesting event.