Showing posts with label backgrounds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label backgrounds. Show all posts

Saturday, January 31, 2009

Maths backgrounds for worksheets and Powerpoint

As an upper school teacher, we sometimes ignore the requirements of appearance of our materials and focus on presenting quality content. This is evident in the material available on the web.

When I get a moment I like to (in the words of my wife) make things pretty and spend the time to ensure there is a background on worksheets, a powerpoint slide with a coloured background and the like.

One site I like to use is http://www.brainybetty.com/. There are some great free backgrounds there for Powerpoint. I really like the orange one and have used it a lot.

Here is a background I made for a recent certificate for the summer school using the MSWord 2003 equation editor.

Have no fear the image is bigger. Just click on it, right click the image and save it. Here's a simple way to make it a watermark in Word 2003.

  1. Open up a Word document.
  2. Go Format->Background->Printed Watermark
  3. Select the Picture Watermark option
  4. Click Select Picture
  5. Find where the background is saved and select it
  6. Change the scale to 200% (or to whatever works for your image unless you want a tiled image)
  7. Ensure the washout checkbox is selected
  8. Click apply

Voila. A professional background for your MSWord 2003 document.

Sometimes you will find the washout selection too light for your printer. In that case you need to insert the picture, send it to behind the text and increase the brightness of the picture to a printable level that doesn't interfere with the readability of the text. This is the way I usually do it as my printer is temperamental but it makes it a bit of a cow to work with the page.

Here's how it turned out.