Virtual Classes for PE?

As I've been struggling with budget cut decisions, I always come back to what can we do virtually either through shared classes with other districts through creatively making local courses virtual and more accessible to our students in a very tight schedule.  One that I never thought of until reading an article in The Journal was virtual PE classes.  This article presents a clear story of success for such a wild idea.  Taken from the perspective of the non-athletic, out of shape student,  this provides a new perspective of the concept.

Typically these non-theltic students will avoid PE at all costs due to the potential embarrassment or perceived embarrassment of the locker room and the comparisons of their physicalinabilities to those more gifted who are in the same class.  Given a proper amount of accoutnability through journalling and feedback, coupled with pre and post tests with specific goals for increasing their fitness, it appears that a virtual PE class can be BETTER than the alternative.

If thats true, than could we better provide fitness activities for our students who need to meet the Healthy Kids Act minimum minutes of activity by providing such a virtual experience?  We've talked of writing contracts for physical activity that only requires a parent signature to hold students accountable.   With a virtual experience available, we definately do better than that.

The Other LSHawkBlog
I've received a few messages from some of you who have found some of these articles of interest.  Actually I've been requiring teachers to respond to some of my ramblings since the beginning of the school year.  Those posts and comments are placed on an Edublogs site.  the link above will take you there.  I changed to Blogger simply as an ease of use effort, plus any of our teachers who are starting blogs in their classrooms are using Blogger, so we believe its important to provide consistancy.