Week Three: Desktop Publishing

As a classroom teacher, I use both word processing and desktop publishing programs frequently.  Although I use both programs, I definitely feel most comfortable with word processing programs such as Microsoft Word, probably because of its simplicity.  Before I taught kindergarten, I was a fourth grade teacher and became VERY familiar with Microsoft Word through portfolio writing!  Our students used this program to type their pieces.  I loved how easy it was for them to check spelling and the built in thesaurus was a great resource for the students.  Now that I am in the kindergarten world, my students do not use these programs as often themselves, but I use them frequently, especially to communicate with parents.
All of the letters I send home (field trip reminders, requests for volunteers, snack day reminders, parent-teacher conference notes, etc) are created using Microsoft Word. Most of our weekly newsletters are created using desktop publishing programs because of the many options they offer. 

As I took a closer look at a recent newsletter, I noticed that there were definitely some aspects that were visually distracting.  Out newsletter contains a lot of information on a small amount of space.  For each "section" of the newsletter, we used different fonts to differentiate between information.  We thought this would make it easier to read, however, it may have made it seem to busy.  To correct this, I drew boxes around each section to clearly distunguish one from the other.  It made it much easier to read.  I left some fonts different, but tried to make them all more similar.  We also thought that having graphics for every section of the newsletter made it more interesting, however, I feel it created more of a distraction from the information we were trying to convey.  Because I do think that images can be very visually appealing, I left several of these, but removed the ones that made the document seem busy and crowded.  The color images make for good contrast in the document, however, most parents receive a black and white copy.  I have a few parents who prefer to receive the newsletter through email, and for those, the color images make it more appealing and interesting.
After this week's reading, I feel I will be better prepared to create more professional, visually appealing documents to use in the future.