students

Doug Hallberg’s students show off their IHT Zone heart rate monitors during a break in class Tuesday.

“I was able to show with a touch of a couple of buttons, that my kids spent 57 percent of the time that they are with me in or above their target heart rate, and I have that rate set pretty high. My kids have burned about 1.6 million calories in my classes from Sept. 1. I think it’s something like 122,000 minutes . Those are real numbers I can talk to kids about, that I can talk to parents about, that I can talk to my administration about. This is real data.” – Doug Hallberg, PE teacher at Draper Middle School, Mohonasen (N.Y.) school district

“The data works for the kids. We can talk to them all day about lots of different things, about how it’s important to be healthy. But them being able to see it, and see results, makes a big difference. We talk about data a lot as teachers – we’ve got to have data – but the kids actually having the data means a world of difference. It allows them to take ownership of their health for themselves. Once they get that ownership and become responsible for it, it makes my job so much easier.” – Kelly McClennon, PE teacher at A. Maceo Smith New Tech High School, Dallas (Texas) ISD

John Kruse (center)

John Kruse (center)

“The value of the IHT system to us is the ease of use for fitness center staff and program participants, the ability to retrieve the results remotely through the database, and the report generator.” – Kevin Short, Ph.D., Associate Professor, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center

“It’s difficult for a PE teacher to give the quantity of exercise a student needs in class alone, so they need to learn that they need to be active outside of class as well. Class is typically 51 minutes every day, but 16 minutes is spent in the locker room. I envision, because the IHT software gives an estimate of caloric expenditure, they can compare what they’re getting in PE class to what’s recommended and do something about it.” – John Kruse, PE teacher at Nobel Charter (Calif.) Middle School, Los Angeles Unified School District

“You can look at the data and see if you really did push yourself. It’s really huge.” – Kelly McClennon, PE teacher at A. Maceo Smith New Tech High School, Dallas (Texas) ISD

“There’s not a lot of objective data to share with parents. Well, now I finally had that in the heart-rate data to share with each parent of each individual kid. Plus, I had all of the fitness data too. Literally, with a laptop computer in front of me and four or five minutes, I can show these people some clear-cut data about what their kid is doing in class and they were blown away by it.” – John Dunlop, PE teacher at Portage Central (Mich.) Middle School

IDEA curriculum director Eren Kirksey (right) with IHT's Jen Ohlson

Jen Ohlson with Eren Kirskey

“ we can track all physical movement. We can track walking up and down stairs – most of our campuses have two-story buildings, simple recess outside of PE, making their way to and from transitioning classes. We can get a truly accurate, data-driven picture of what these kids are and aren’t doing and hopefully help us build some direct correlations from the top down so they understand how important physical activity is to increasing their learning abilities in the classroom.” – Eren Kirksey, curriculum manager at IDEA Public Schools (Texas)

“I used the average highest peak heart rate of each activity, the average calories burned and the average time in the heart rate zone. The IHT graph for each participant over the time that it was worn. That’s what I used to help support my findings.” – Justin Lehmkuhler, Woodford (Ky.) County Middle School 8th grader

“I’ve had several messages from both students and parents about how the students were excited about achieving the zone for the day. Students were sharing with parents at home and parents could see at home via e-mail how their students were doing.” – Betsy Luck, PE Teacher at Oskaloosa (Iowa) Middle School

John Dunlop

John Dunlop

“Regarding our fitness assessment data, our kids performed off the chart, for instance 82% of our 7th graders were in or above the healthy fitness zone for the mile run and 70% for push ups. This is a drastic improvement for our students. Kids were far more motivated using them since they couldn’t ‘hide.’ Normally when we do a type of warm up run, a number of kids would walk but the frequency of that went way down. Our upper body strength scores and student performance increased quite a bit.” – John Dunlop, PE teacher at Portage Central (Mich.) Middle School