Polar Electro (www.polar.com), the world leader in personal guidance for fitness, sport, and health, have announced that the Polar GoFit app is now compatible with Google Chromebook.
Polar GoFit enables physical education teachers to objectively evaluate students of all ages based on their individual efforts during PE class with real-time tracking and assessments.
Available as a free download from the Google Play Store, Polar GoFit and the personalized guidance it offers is now accessible to more than 50 million students and teachers already using Chromebook.
With Polar GoFit, teachers can view, analyse, and evaluate every student’s physical activity during and after lesson. By monitoring heart rate during training, teachers can gauge the effort a student is putting into a workout and monitor their progress. To measure heart rate, students are fitted with a Polar heart rate sensor during lesson, which can be monitored to ensure they are staying within their set target heart rate zone, rewarding them with badges when they reach their target. Using Polar GoFit on their Chromebook, teachers can read the data in real-time and continue to teach an entire class while coaching individual students along the way. After lesson, the data is safely uploaded and saved to polargofit.com where teachers can monitor progress of an individual student’s training profile over time.
“For over three decades, Polar has dedicated our education technology to PE programs around the world,” said Michael Valentino, Senior Director of Consumer & B2B Sales of Polar US. “It’s been incredibly rewarding to witness so many students and teachers positively impacted by access to their individual fitness data – and we are thrilled to be able to equip even more classrooms with Polar’s fitness tools through Chromebook compatibility.”
Polar GoFit highlights include:
• Before the lesson: Teachers can manage students, assign heart rate sensors, and set a target zone for the lesson.
• During the lesson: Teachers are able to follow students’ progress in real-time including current heart rate, time accumulated in the target zone, and badges collected.
• After the lesson: Teachers can analyse summary data from the whole class including average and maximum heart rate, time accumulated in the target zone, time spent in each heart rate zone, and badges collected.
• Additionally, with select Polar watches, students can continue recording data offline outside the range of the Chromebook. This new feature gives teachers the freedom to teach a class without worrying about students’ range.
Since the early 1990s, Polar has been the leader in equipping PE programs with tools and technology to quantify and evaluate students’ fitness. Collectively, Polar education technology is used in more than 10,000 K-12 PE programs across the United States, including Byron High School in Byron, Minnesota.
“Byron High School has been using PolarGoFit as a way of assessing students 9-12 in PE since 2013, and I can honestly say that has been a game changer for our school,” said Chad Rolandson, Physical Education Teacher, Byron Public Schools, MN. “It takes the guesswork out of gauging the kids’ efforts because we can see how they are actually doing.
“It’s also enabled us to monitor the kids individually, which we can then use to assign them to specific tiers – and by striving to reach higher tiers every two weeks, it really brings a sense of progress and achievement that was never there before. This is differentiated instruction at its finest.”
The Polar GoFit app can be downloaded from the Google Play Store for free. In order to track and save heart rate data, each student must wear a Polar heart rate sensor. The sensor can also be used with many other Polar products, both inside and outside of school. Heart rate sensors can be purchased in a special 10-unit bundle from Polar. Schools can also purchase an annual license to the polargofit.com web service, allowing teachers to securely store classroom training information and grade their students based on their individual efforts.
To discover more about Polar physical education products, visit: http://www.polar.com/en/b2b_products/physical_education
