ADAPTEDPHYSICAL ACTIVITY TEACHING RESOURCES ON THE WEB
Barry Lavay and Emyr Williams
CSU, Long Beach
The purpose of this presentation will be to share web sites in adapted physical activity (APA) that would enhance Adapted Physical Education Specialists' instruction to children with disabilities and their ability to collaborate with other professionals. The first part of the session will be a brief overview of how to explore the World Wide Web and how to locate APA web sites of interest. This will be followed by an overview of selected APA web sites for enhancing instruction.
Using the world wide web
APA web sites can be used to heighten instruction in a variety of ways;
- to enhance the APE Specialist's delivery service (i.e., teaching, consultation),
- to learn more about and help collaborate with other professionals (i.e., OT, PT),
- to provide resources to assist the regular physical education teacher to effectively include students with special needs into their classes, and
- to serve as a resource to parents and children.
Accessing information on the worldwide web
To access information on a specific topic area (i.e. adapted physical activity) you need to use a search engine. A search engine is a website that enables you to search for information related to a topic or subject of interest. A number of search engines exist and include Yahoo, Excite, Info seek, and Lycos etc. The challenge of searching for information is that you typically end up with too many hits (hits are the number of web sites with terms related to your search). To limit the number of hits, you can refine your search by using the more advanced features of search engines.
Although accessing information using a search engine is a good starting point, it has been our experience that searching for specific sites using search engines can be frustrating, tedious and time consuming. An alternative method to locating appropriate sites is to examine the descriptions of the first 10-20 sites in your search. Next determine the sites that appear to be most relevant to your particular search. Many of these sites will have links to other similar sites that may be more relevant to your search. To a large extent examining APA specific sites may be the quickest way to locate the types of resources you need. Professionals in Adapted Physical Activity have created a number of excellent sites, many of which are listed towards the end of this paper. When you come across a good site "bookmark" it.
Searching for Resources in Education
In addition to search engines that access web based information there are web sites that can access research information. The ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) is a national system designed to provide information on education related topics. To search the ERIC data base go to the
This site will enable you to locate educational documents and journal articles from 1966 to about 3 months back from the search date. For example, an APE specialist working with a regular physical educator may need to locate information on including children with disabilities into the general physical education program.
The APE specialist could search for information on the topic of inclusion by using the following three key terms; physical-education, inclusion, and disability. Using the key terms resulted in locating 45 documents. Of these 45 documents some were journal articles and others were ERIC documents. Examples of these documents follow.
ED400655. Hammond, Joy. Developing and Implementing a Physical Education Program That Improves the Physical Education Service to Students with Disabilities at an Elementary School through Inclusion. .
ED407794. Achieving a Balance: Proceedings of the National Conference on Adapted Physical Activity (5th, Macomb, Illinois, April 3-5, 1997). .
EJ509239. Block, Martin E.; And Others. Using Class wide Peer Tutoring to Facilitate Inclusion of Students with Disabilities in Regular Physical Education. Physical Educator; v52 n1 p47-56Win 1995. 1995
APA Websites
During the presentation an overview of designated web sites presented will include the URL address of the site along with a video tour highlighting the presenters' (insight) into the content. Each web site tour will include: author and/or organization, an overview of how to navigate the site, and presenters' reactions(content and design) as to how the site can be used by the APA specialist. A list of additional APA web sites follow in this paper and can also be accessed through the CSULB APA web site at:
http://www.csulb.edu/programs/apa/
The address of this paper is: http://www.csulb.edu/programs/apa/PAEI99.html
The highlighted web site list is categorized as follows; APE programs, disability issues, professional associations, medical information, disability sport organizations, equipment companies, book companies and journals, and search engines.
Page Authors: Barry LavayPh.D., & Emyr Williams Ph.D.
http//www.csulb.edu/programs/apa/PAEI99.html
Last modified 03/19/02