A Sporting Future for Everyone

Welcome

The Xoolon Sports and Fitness Academy encourages pupils from year 6 to 11 to be fit and healthy by participating in the sports they enjoy.

The Xoolon Academy provides an online Sporting Portal for your own school’s PE department — an interactive website you can edit yourself, networked to other schools and sports clubs.

Through online activities and a series of physical tests, pupils explore their individual strengths and weaknesses. Xoolon matches the sporting profile of all pupils, regardless of their ability, to their most suited sports.

The data provides teachers and parents with progress reports of attitude and ability over a six year period making talented and gifted individuals easy to identify.

Martin's Musings

Martin Spence is Xoolon's founder. He has worked in the e-learning industry for ten years and has held a long term belief in the benefits of sport in educational development.

Martin says: "I believe that we are witnessing the start of a new era in sporting achievement, and I am passionate that Xoolon, along,with its partners, will allow both students and teachers to develop and nuture talent for todays and tomorrows athletes. Lets release the competitive spirit"

Read more and share your comments on Martin's Musings.

Find out more

For a virtual ‘walk through’, more information or a log-in to see a virtual pupil’s view of the system, for more information contact us.

Technology

Xoolon and Virtual Learning Environments.

The Xoolon Sports and Fitness Academy has been designed to integrate into the ten virtual learning environments that meet the BECTA requirements for schools to have an integrated learning and management system by 2010. These are: Assuri Communications Ltd; Etech Group (StudyWiz); Fronter; Netmedia Education; Pearson Education Ltd; Ramesys; RM Education plc; Serco Learning Solutions (Serco Ltd); UniServity; Viglen Ltd.

More information from Becta.

Xoolon Sports and Fitness Academy: Official Launch

Following over three years of research and development, the Xoolon Sports and Fitness Academy officially launched in July 2007.

Over 100 pupils from early adopter, Downend School in Bristol, took part in an open morning on 12 July to showcase the system. Representatives from the local authority, local and national media received press packs and photographs from the day’s activities.

Year 7 pupils undertook physical tests and entered their details into the system to get feedback on which sports best suit each child’s sporting abilities.

Downend School Showcases Xoolon

PE departments are not generally known for their pioneering use of ICT but Downend School in Bristol is an exception to the rule. The school is using the Xoolon Sports and Fitness Academy website in combination with a virtual learning environment from elearning experts StudyWiz to form the school’s Sport and Fitness module.

Part of the Kingswood Partnership cluster of six schools, including Downend, and three other clusters around the country are early adopters of the Xoolon system and Downend is using it as an intrinsic part of PE. It has already become integrated with the whole school curriculum: the ICT department uses the data from pupils’ sporting tests for developing graphs, pie charts and databases. Maths uses the data for statistical work; food technology when considering elements such as diet; science for links to respiratory and circulatory needs.

Xoolon: The Snapshot

The Xoolon Sports and Fitness Academy is a unique and revolutionary sports website designed to improve children’s sporting prowess and aid better focused teaching. PE staff use Xoolon to evaluate pupils’ key mental and physical strengths allowing them to pinpoint the sports most suitable. These are linked to a comprehensive database of local clubs.

An all-round appraisal through a series of physical and mental tests entered onto online Xoolometers identifies to which sports children are best suited, making PE fun for everyone and allowing teachers to gain better knowledge of their students’ abilities. Pupils love to enter sporting results on their Xoolog, a personal section of the portal. They find it highly motivating to view their statistics graphically and can aim to beat their own personal bests as well as measure themselves against school and national results.

When run with Year 6 classes on their secondary school ‘tester days’, PE teachers can ensure that the term gets off to a flying start by early identification of children who are gifted or need additional help. The sports psychology or ‘mental toughness’ test developed with Sheffield Hallam University is completed by pupils and mentors and identifies mental strengths and weaknesses, areas of development and to which sports or positions (e.g. attacker or goal keeper) children are best suited. The total Xooscore collates each child’s mental and physical competencies allowing teachers to record results accurately against national curriculum standards.

Teachers' Viewpoint

“The children find core immensely motivating. They love to be able to show their certificates to their parents, and to look online at the results they achieved in tests.” - Joanne Atkinson, school sports coordinator, King Ecgbert Secondary School, Sheffield.

She adds, “Our senior management team is immensely supportive of the Sport-ID initiative and our Deputy Head even takes part in all the activities on the testing days. They are so enthusiastic that we are hoping they will grant additional lesson time for sport for Key Stage 4 pupils to ensure that they have at least five hours of PE per week".

Read the latest government announcement

“Xoolon and StudyWiz forms a great teaching aid and allows PE to become part of the whole school curriculum.” - Dave Beesley, Active for Life coordinator, Downend School.

Join the Bandwagon

Join the Xoolon Sports and Fitness Academy, an online, interactive community for all secondary schools in the UK for a one off set-up fee.

The fee provides free access to the primary schools within partnerships and provides a personal Xoolog and individual login for all pupils, encouraging the sharing and exchange of ideas and experiences across the country.

For a small per-seat annual sum the Xoolon Academy can be integrated into schools' existing Virtual Learning Environments, which supports the National Curriculum and Learning Platform targets that DfES has set for every school. This requires them to have an integrated learning and management system by 2010. For full details and features contact us.

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