ABSTRACT
Sport Education (SE) is a student-centred physical education model that in its essence seeks to provide students with an authentic and holistic sport experience (Siedentop, Van der Mars, Hastie, 2011). Hence, students should not only play the sport, but also officiate, organise a tournament, be affiliated to a single team and participate in the excitement that all these elements may bring. Having a concern to provide an authentic sport experience, SE may consider the use of social media in current sport events. In the past few years, official sport events have extended the sport experience through social media as millions of people have accessed and shared updates, pictures and videos. This trend appears to be gaining more interest, for example, in the London 2012 Olympic Games 1.1 million people joined the Facebook page, while more recently, in the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, 14.6 million people joined the Facebook page. Hence, in order to provide an authentic (and current) sport experience, social media are proposed as supportive learning tools that may enhance students’ experiences. This chapter presents practical implementations of the SE season while using social media, such as wikis and Facebook. The use of social media seeks to enrich all six key features of the SE model (season, competition, team affiliation, festivity, score keeping and culminating event) as well as reaching the three learning outcomes proposed by the model: competent, literate and enthusiastic sportsperson. The chapter provides a description on how these technologies can be integrated in the teaching of the SE season while seeking to extend the students experience beyond gym time. These descriptions were built upon several implementations that have been conducted and it seeks to provide guidelines for physical education teachers that wish to use social media as a vehicle to enhance students experience and learning.
