Help Your Substitutes Survive!
If you have ever substitute taught before, you know that half the battle is identifying the students. If they think you don’t know who they are, discipline and order will be difficult. That’s why a pictorial seating chart would be very helpful in your sub folder. And it is actually easy to do.
The first step is to take digital pictures of all your students and download them to your computer (I use head and shoulder shots instead of full body). You don’t have to worry about pretty as long as it is natural.
Next open up Excel. Normally Excel will not tell you where the edges of the paper are, so do this: (1) Click “View” from the tool bar at the top of the page. (2)Click “Page Break Preview”. Your page will shrink to nothing, but don’t panic. (3) Click “View” and “Normal”. Voila! You have the normal page, but now there are dotted lines in certain places. These are the edges of the page, and you can ensure that all your notes fit onto one page.
If you are brave and want to draw some furniture into the room, Click “View”, “Toolbars”, “Draw Tools” (unless your toolbar is already open at the bottom of the screen, like my computer). The tools will draw lines, boxes and circles. If you are trying this part, draw your objects first because drawing them around your pictures will place them on top of the pictures. There is a fix for this, but let’s starrt simple.
Hopefully you have some experience inserting pictures into a documents (”Insert”, “Pictures”, “…from File”). You’ll notice that the pictures are too large. There are two ways to deal with this: (1) Click on the picture, grab a corner, and resize it manually. (2) Right click on the picture and click “Format Picture”. Click the “Size” tab and change the height of the picture (.5 to .75 is suitable). I like this method because I can ensure that all the pictures are the same size.
Now drag the pictures to the appropriate spots. Type the names in the boxes underneath the picture. If you had tried this in Word, placing the text would have been troublesome.
Be nice to your substitute; Give it a try!
Filed under: Curriculum and
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