I am not yet overwhelmed because I know that as the coach my main job is to make sure everyone on the team learns, stays engaged, and has fun. These are some of the things I do best ;).
Clubs and teams are a great place to leverage technology to improve communication, as we usually have less face to face time with clubs than classes and students may be more engaged and motivated with the learning goals of clubs. I want to share with you a couple of my favorite tools to support clubs and teams.
Livebinders I love using livebinders to put all of the links I need for the club in the same place. I can also upload forms needed for the club or team directly to the binder. The binder I have linked here is just getting started. By the end of the season is will be full of directions to competitions, links to news stories about the team, links to the kids project pages and a link to the team blog. Most of these things only exist in my mind right now, but the address for the livebinder won't change, I can just keep adding things to it.
Remind Even though I am sure all of my Lego team parents will have my cell phone number, I like to use Remind to send out team updates. I have used this before for cross country as well as English classes. Remind is a messaging service that allows your team to subscribe to a list. From the coaches end I text out a reminder or an update or even a link to a web page and it arrives as a text on my team members' (or their parents') phone. This is REALLY handy when we are on the way to a location and we find out the address was wrong. If there is one thing I have learned it is that more communication is better than not enough.
Video As you prepare to be a coach, think about the power of video to extend and support your instructional time. My best experiences with "flipped" tools have been with a club. Here is a video I made for our puppet club.
The club setting is a good match for "watch this at home and do it" because the students have a high level of motivation and a low penalty for not getting it right.
Also consider shooting video of your team in action to review and share. There are apps like Coaches Eye that are designed to shoot video from your tablet and allow you to annotate and share the video. I found this really helpful when I was trying to convince my cross country team that they were not standing up straight when they ran.
I am sure I will be using more tools as I go, but here at the beginning of the season, these are the first tools I am setting up.
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