Sherman's view on Nutricalc vs. Daily burn vs. Traineo

Nutricalc vs. Daily burn vs. Traineo:

Throughout the semester I have had the privilege to work with these three different programs. Each program was different, unique, and had many nice qualities. While their where also qualities of each program that I was personally not a fan of. Here are the opinions I had of all three programs when able to compare and contrast them.

Nutricalc-

I found this site to be extremely organized, easy to use, and chock full of information. This site is a student/teacher site, and you can only obtain your own profile on it if you have bought the code (part of nutrition textbook). Although it incorporates activities, and provides you with an activity summary of your selected days that is about it. There are no motivators, or groups to join like on daily burn or traineo. This is very focused on nutrition and eating, and gives you a great deal of information pertaining to that. It provides you with tools such as calorie assessments, single nutrient reports, comparisons, mypyramid, and much more. This is a sight that provides you with a lot of factual info on food. Unlike daily burn that gives you the options for favorite foods or grocery lists which may make the sight more fun and appealing for students. This is a great site, but I would recommend it for the health class exclusively and for the topic of nutrition.

Daily Burn

The daily burn program was definitely my favorite of them all. I found it to be easy to use, fun, and accessible. Like the Nutricalc it is easy to input foods and activities. Also very similar to Nutricalc, it was able to break apart each food for you, telling you how much of what was in which food. It even graphed it out in a nice pie graph so you can easily view your daily calories and where they come from. Although it doesn’t go into as much detail with the nutrients like finding all the vitamins and minerals, it did have a lot of other great aspects that the Nutricalc system did not. One of these great features is that it was very activity oriented. Unlike Nutricalc it had a lot great workout options. First off it was easy to input your workouts, than you could also find a training plan or exercises that worked for you. But that’s not all! You can find challenges, motivators, or groups. All different ways of getting you off the couch and on the move. Challenges create a goal for you or a group of people to attain, and motivators are groups or friends you can join up with, see each other’s progress, and work together. All these great workout options plus food options make it a great site to use. For food, you can even plan meals, grocery lists, recipes, etc. With all this going on, one might wish they could access it from let’s say their iphone. Well now you can, it is now also an app for the iphone, making this program more easily accessible than ever. With all these great features, I would definitely recommend this program for either a physical or health education class. If you are in need of some ideas for physical education, I have provided you with a lesson plan and block plan below which you are free to use.

Traineo

Out of all three programs, I would have to say this ranks last. It was more difficult to use then the other two. And upon entering the site it took my quite some time to find the area to log in my calories, and once I did find that, I had to pay for a monthly fee (there is a free trial for only a short amount of time). Besides that, when inputting the foods it would come up with weird suggestions, and inputting activities was strange as well. Although I personally did not like it, when compared to the Nutricalc and Daily Burn programs, there were some positives about the site. Alike the Daily Burn, I found that it did have an iphone app as well, so it is easily accessible. And like the other programs it has the ability to graph out your weight and activity progress. As well as break apart your foods into calories, sugar, fat, carbohydrates, fiber, etc. Some other features that were unique were the blogging. This program is very blog oriented, in fact that was the first thing I came upon once I entered the program. This can be a great tool for people to get ideas from each other, motivate each other, and know that they are not alone. They have a bunch of different blog categories such as diet, motivation, exercise, and off topic. While using this program, I found it to be geared specifically towards weight loss. The other two sites were more towards living a healthy lifestyle and maintaining a healthy weight. This is perfectly fine, but if using it in a PE or health classroom, I would give the students a choice of either the Daily Burn or Traineo, and explain that the Traineo is more geared specifically towards weight loss. Nutricalc I would save for health classes only, which is why it is not located in the lesson plans below.

Once again please feel free to look at and use the lesson plan and block plan below, to incorporate the Daily Burn and Traineo programs into your PE classrooms.

Lesson Plan

Block Plan

 

For a further look into traineo, please feel free to see my blog at shermanpe.blogspot.com