Productivity Software
I. Integration Strategy
Staying with the theme of health, productivity software for this unit may involve a number of applications in order to continue gathering information, as well as the organization of that information. For example, related to healthy eating is a free application called Easy Recipes, which contains 27 videos showing how to prepare healthy entrées, soups and desserts.
Step 1: Ask students to watch at least three recipe videos. Then choose one or two recipes of interest, for which they may create a shopping list using the application Remember the Milk, a to-do list application, with which users can create different categories.
Moving onto exercise, Fitness Buddy FREE : 300+ Exercise Workout Journal is a free, highly-rated iPhone and iPad app that contains over 300 exercises with detailed descriptions, animations and workouts. The paid version has more than 1700 exercises, HD videos, biometrics tracking, email support and other customization features.
Step 1: Have set up the application on their iPads, and then choose 3 to 5 exercises which they feel that they can do at home. Students may then keep a journal charting their exercise progress. For the journal, students may use the next application below.
Calorie Counter by MyNetDiary is a free app that contains over 400,000 foods in a database, with 308,000 popular foods contributed by members and updated daily. This app allows users to quickly search calorie and serving information, detailed food labels, food scores, create customized menus, as well as over 500 activities and exercises that can be calculated against individual calorie intake and expenditure based on a target weight. There is also an online community where users can create private and family groups.
Step 1: Students may use this application to begin tracking their eating habits. This is a particularly useful application for Emirati students given that many students at the University, and Emiratis in general, do not have healthy eating habits. This application will allow them to more carefully reflect on what they eat, an important first step to a more healthy lifestyle.
This free iPad/iPhone app Restaurant Nutrition contains more than 60,000 food items from more than 250 restaurants. Users can accurately calculate calories, carbohydrates, protein, fat, and so on. This app also allows users to create a food journal, create profiles, set food allergy filters, upload images, rate/review menu items, and search restaurants by filters using a mapping feature, among other features.
While most of the restaurants featured in this app are based in the United States and, as such, not as relevant for Emiratis, all of the major fast food chains are represented in the application, which is of great use to Emirati students given that there are a large number of US fast food franchises operating in the UAE. It is overindulgence in these fast food restaurants that has contributed to a soaring diabetes rate in the UAE.
For more specific information relating to fast food, Fast Food Calories is a free app that contains a database of over 20,000 menu items from 108 fast food restaurants. Entries include nutritional information, such as calories, saturated fat, carbohydrates, cholesterol, sodium, fiber, sugars and proteins. Users can create an ongoing food journal, search according to serving size and restaurant menus.
Step 1: Encourage students to begin recording their dietary intake at fast food restaurants. This information may be recorded in the application itself, as well as transferred to Evernote.
II. Relative Advantage
There are a number of relative advantages to using applications such as those above. First of all, while it is technically possible to gather information on things such as calorie content of various food items, the reality is that students would be less motivated to do this if they have to search for this information in books and record information by hand. Emirati students in particular, do not like to write by hand; they prefer typing on a keyboard.
Secondly, while it is also possible to gather information on exercise, as with the food data, gathering this information from numerous sources would be a laborious process, whereas these types of all-in-one applications allow users to not only rapidly gather the information, but also organize and store it all in one convenient, digital location that may be shared with others, another important relative advantage of these technologies - the ability to share, a hallmark of technology used today.
III. Expected Outcome
Students will be more motivated to perform activities such as improving their diet and exercising more when they have easy to use digital technology to aid in the process. Furthermore, students will retain both the informational content and associated language when they are actively using it, as opposed to passive perception and/or basic regurgitation.
IV. Additional Resources
