Using Your Personal Digital Assistant to Store Lesson Plans. (Technology Tips)

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You may already use your Palm Pilot or Handspring Visor to take attendance and store student contact information, but you can also use your personal digital assistant (PDA) to store instructional information, such as lesson plans or skill-drill outlines. This article outlines how to convert lesson plans created using Microsoft Word into basic web pages that can be uploaded to the Internet and then downloaded to your PDA. If you already know how to create web pages, you can skip the information on creating HTML files and go directly to the information about AvantGo that appears later in the article. (For general information about PDAs, see "Implementing Handheld Computing Technology in Physical Education;' on page 43 of this issue.)

There are a variety of ways to develop lesson plans (Siedentop, Mand, & Taggart, 1986; Siedentop & Tannehill, 2000).The purpose of this article is not to describe how to write a lesson plan. Physical education lesson plans typically include the teacher's name, date, lesson topic, unit, equipment, safety precautions, and behavioral objectives at the start of the plan, followed by a description of the progression of tasks included in the lesson from warm-up to closure. The section of the lesson plan devoted to the progression of tasks usually appears in a table format consisting of a number of rows and three or more columns. Using a table format for the lesson plan works well on paper (in Microsoft Word), but transferring these lesson-plan tables from the web to your PDA will cause the graphic elements of the table to disappear, although the information will remain in the same order. …