Desktop Publishing

When I hand out materials to my students and parents, my materials need to be formatted differently than most anyway.  I work with the English Language Learner population and we try to make our materials more visually appealing and self explanatory through pictures.  Along with adding pictures to the document to help explain the message we use different font styles and highlighting to help parents understand where they might need to sign, even if they can't understand what each word would mean.  There is no way we can translate each of our documents to suite each language we cater to, so we try to try to be as fair as we can across the board.

In the flyer about our class field trip, it was originally created in a word processor.  There were very few pictures, colors, or textures.  This was quite a boring document and we had a hard time getting the students excited about this trip and make sure the parents received the flyer.  However, now that the file is recreated to be more visually appealing, the kids love the pictures of the bugs and all of the different colors and pictures.  While we loved this new document and would love to pass this document on to our families, our school cannot justify spending the resources to print sixty five flyers in color.  We have decided that we will print the flyer in black and white, but we will also email this document our to the parents that have provided an email address.  At least several parents will be able to see this visually attractive document that their children are very excited about.

The original message did not appeal to anyone because it was very bland.  It was on a white page with small, plain font.  On the second page of the document we had the parent permission slip and we did not receive many completed forms.  However, we are confident that now that the document is "pretty" we will receive completed forms back.  On the parent portion of the document, we have the required fields highlighted so they stand out so that the parents will not have to search for the parts they need to fill out.  The kids were very excited to take these pages home to show their parents.  Little did the parents know that this document did not take an extreme amount of time to create.