Did you know that important historical documents can now be read in Microsoft® Reader, which allows students to take notes, add text drawings, highlight important information, and add bookmarks? That they can even load these documents onto their Pocket PC handhelds?  With Microsoft® Reader, students can now download texts, such as the Declaration of Independence, Constitution of the United States, Gettysburg Address, etc., directly onto their Pocket PCs. Downloading these historical documents onto a handheld allows the student to take the document with them and refer to it at any place at any time.  Consider these project ideas: Ask students to take the document home on their handheld, read it, discuss it with their parents, siblings or grandparents, and jot notes of the conversation in the margin using Microsoft® Reader.  When traveling to a field trip in which the students may be learning more about a specific time period or historical documents in general, use the handheld version of the document to review on the bus during the trip and to motivate students academically toward the topic of the field trip.

The first thing you should do is find the documents you would like to convert. There are many historical documents available for free download and free from copyright restriction from http://www.gutenberg.org and http://www.archives.gov/index.html.
Here are a few documents that you might be interested in:

• The Declaration of Independence
• The Gettysburg Address
• The Bill of Rights
• I Have a Dream
• JFK’s Inaugural Address

Download the Full Text (.txt) file of any one of these historical documents. Or, find one of your own choosing.  Make sure you download the (.txt) form of the document. Some files on the Project Gutenberg site have already been converted to the Microsoft® Reader format.  You can download these when available and cut out the conversion process.  You can identify that a document is already in Microsoft® Reader format by finding the (.lit) extension at the end of the file name.

After only a few short steps, students and teachers are ready to read or do many other tasks with the document.

Once you have downloaded the text that you would like to convert to the Microsoft® Reader format, you will need to download and install the Read in Microsoft® Reader conversion add-on for Microsoft® Word. (You must have Microsoft® Word 2002 or newer installed on your computer to convert documents into e-books.)             

Once you have downloaded and installed the Read in Microsoft® Reader program, open the full text document you downloaded in your Microsoft® Word application.   (Remember, you must have Microsoft® Word 2002 or newer installed on your computer to convert documents into e-books.

Once the document is opened in Word, press the Microsoft® Reader iconin the toolbar.

Once the document is converted, a Save dialog box should appear.  You can add a title, author, and other information at this point.  Once you have done this, Save your document.

Finally, if you have not already done so, you will need to download the Microsoft® Reader for Pocket PC program and install it.

This is not only great for the classroom, but also anywhere the student goes.  They can take their copy of the Constitution or Gettysburg address anywhere that their Pocket PC goes.  It is also a great way to take what may be a boring aspect of the history of the United States, and make it exciting.

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