{"id":12115,"date":"2012-08-28T13:07:48","date_gmt":"2012-08-28T17:07:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/?p=12115"},"modified":"2012-09-07T14:52:17","modified_gmt":"2012-09-07T18:52:17","slug":"how-students-take-physical-education-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/2012\/08\/28\/how-students-take-physical-education-online\/","title":{"rendered":"How Students Take Physical Education Online"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Sarah Gonzalez \/ StateImpact Florida<\/p>

High school senior Vanessa Richter has taken PE online for the past two summers. She says the online course is not as easy as you might expect.<\/p><\/div>\n

Yesterday we told you Florida’s fastest growing public school district is… online.<\/a><\/p>\n

About 148,000 students sucessfully completed 303,000 half-credit Florida Virtual School courses this past school year.<\/p>\n

And PE — as in physical education — is a popular class, according to students.<\/p>\n

So how do you take PE virtually?<\/p>\n

There are two half-credit courses: Personal Fitness and Fitness Lifestyle and Design.<\/p>\n

“They make you run, they make you do reps of crunches and you’re supposed to record it,” says student Vanessa Richter, a senior at\u00a0Terra Environmental Research Institute in Miami.<\/p>\n

Students are asked to record their heart rate before and after they exercise — its supposed to serve as proof that students did in fact complete the assignment.<\/p>\n

But there’s a big loophole.<\/p>\n

“There’s a lot of things online,” Richter says.<\/p>\n

“All your test and quiz answers you can Google them and find in like 5 seconds.<\/p>\n

Try it.<\/p>\n

You can find the normal heart rate for your age online, and your normal heart rate after exercise.<\/p>\n

Richter says she doesn’t like to search online for answers because sometimes its not very accurate.<\/p>\n

“But many people have gotten by the class doing that,” she says.<\/p>\n

For students trying to cheat the system, FLVS put another barrier in place.<\/p>\n

Parents need to sign the chart to confirm their children did all the required\u00a0exercises.<\/p>\n

More Than Just a Run Around the Block<\/strong><\/p>\n

Richter says many students start the online course thinking it’ll be an easy class to pass.<\/p>\n

But she says online PE is more than just a run around the block — or a Google search.<\/p>\n

“There are written essays of different parts of the body and how the body works and on different exercises like flexibility and strength,” she says.<\/p>\n

“So you do learn a little physiology and anatomy and stuff like that.”<\/p>\n

She’s taken PE online for the last two summers to make room in her class schedule for electives like art or Spanish.<\/p>\n

Other students take PE online for different reasons, Richter says.<\/p>\n

“Some kids who aren’t very physically active or they’re embarrassed to take PE [at school], they just do it online instead.”<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday we told you Florida’s fastest growing public school district is… online. About 148,000 students sucessfully completed 303,000 half-credit Florida Virtual School courses this past school year. And PE — as in physical education — is a popular class, according to students. So how do you take PE virtually? There are two half-credit courses: Personal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":12374,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15],"tags":[1125,657],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12115"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12115"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12384,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12115\/revisions\/12384"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}