In looking at how to further your program you might want to think about promotion in terms of promoting your program to students, parents, to fellow teacher’s, and the administration and community. Some items will involve ideas that can be viewed by all of the above groups. Some ideas will be used predominantly by one group, but will be available to other groups, and some items may be restricted to just one group.

There are newsletters forms that are available as templates which give some basic information, and then you can add school specific information. In a newsletter it would be good to use pictures of classes in action. We want to make sure that we had permission, or that we understood the school’s policy and followed the policy for use of student pictures. We could check with our library and/or media coordinator to see if they have cameras available. We should be able use pictures of students if we avoid pictures of individual students, and identification of the students.

An online program calendar could be another promotional tool. This calendar would cover a description of our program, what homework or activity assignment students could do, or it could have skill development ideas. Gerry has a very nice example of an activity calendar on his webpage. A calendar would be a good place to post important dates throughout the year. It would remind parents of a variety of activities that are occurring in school.

As we’re preparing items for our webpage we could develop a series of links to areas such as the CDC, our state S. O. L’s, organizations such as the American Heart association, the American Cancer Society, or the American Diabetes Association. On a web page, in a newsletter, and in all materials we developed, it would be nice to have a way to show how our program aligns with state and national standards.

In promoting our program with other teachers, we might want to have links that relate our page to other areas within the school, or to other schools within the system, as a way of sharing our ideas. If we have reading that relates to sports, skills, or activities, we could show how these might relate to work in reading. If we had students doing calculations related to heart rate and exercise, time and distance covered, total and average weight lifted, we could share this with our math teachers. For science we could relate how the body moves, exercise and nutrition, the mechanics of the body and action, or the physics of motion.

For our administration we could share information on our program goals, our state test scores, and how our program aligns with state standards.

For promoting our program to the community the use of digital pictures of activities will work. If we have a local paper that accepts the digital format, this could be a way of keeping the public informed about what goes on in the schools.

We can feel misunderstood, or we can promote our program. We hold the key to our destiny.

Using CDs and DVD’s for storage

Today more people are using digital photography and MP3 file swapping programs. Optical disks provide a way of sharing images and audio files with others. CDs also provide a stable platform, with a high volume, that can make backup a much more convenient process. Most of us don’t think about backing up our files till about 30 seconds after we’ve lost what we need. CDs provide a backup source that will have a longer life than the magnetic media of floppy or zip disks. The finally advantage of CDs is that these are readily transportable from one PC to another.

When you’re purchasing a CD drive you want to make sure the drive is listed as RW. This means that drive can read and write on the same CD. When you’re ordering your CDs you want, if at all possible, get a CD – RW. If you get a CD – R, you can read and write to and from it, but to use that file you must open it as a' read only file' and then resave it as a another file named differently. These files could be stored on the same CD – R, but it is less convenient than if you were using a CD – RW. The read & write function on the CD allows you to open the file, edit the file, and then save it back to the same file location on the CD, with the existing file name. This would allow you to have only one version of a file available rather than having many files with a slightly different name all on one disk.

One of the uses of CDs could be to convert your old records, or tapes, to digital media for easy storage. Not only can you make copies, but you can create mixes that better fit your teaching needs.

Check out this school project that shows how fourth and fifth grade students integrated technology into physical education.

" The purpose of this project is to integrate content across the curriculum, by developing a unit where the integrated activities are facilitated by using an active server page which encourages students:

	to input scores from a personal fitness battery, into a database from a web page.
	to access information in the database.
	to explore relationships between the parameters contained in the database..
	to develop experiments and answer questions using information in the database."

A Beginner's Guide to Integrating Technology :
Six painless steps for integrating technology, plus Web sites and tips to motivate reluctant or fearful educators.

Computers and Phys Ed Do Mix!
Students and teachers in Hood River, Oregon, track their progress in physical fitness using a spreadsheet program. Student improvement in fitness in displayed by graphs and charts, as well as the display of areas needing work. A copy of the graphs and charts is included with the student report card.

Read the above article. Perhaps you may find ideas for your own phys ed program.

Create a School Newsletter with Word
- By Lorrie Jackson

Create Charts and Graphs With Excel
- By Lorrie Jackson

Smile! Digital Cameras Can Make Your Day
"Teachers across the country and around the world are discovering the many valuable uses for digital cameras; uses that both engage students and make their own professional lives easier. Included: More than a dozen easy activities for using digital cameras in the classroom."