> Anyone can fire-up a word processor and produce interesting looking documents and flyers. Actually, even this is harder than it seems. Having worked as a tea

> Anyone can fire-up a word processor and produce interesting looking documents and flyers. Actually, even this is harder than it seems. Having worked as a teacher, I saw many teacher create their own materials. They created handouts, pamphlets, worksheets, exams, short instructional materials, and some even whole text books. Compared to profession stuff from publishers, these self-made artifacts were often awful. The artifacts worked, of course, but typesetting, layout, illustrations, printing, and editing were almost always sub-par. The most common example of this was trying to fit a worksheet or exam on one sheet A4, printed on both sides. As a result, my colleagues and I chose to use smaller fonts, smaller margins, decreased image size, less whitespace, and so on. Over-all, we ignored the intended readers (also known as our students), and focused on secondary matters such as ease of distribution. On the other hand, where these instructional artifacts did shine was with respect to their practical applicability and usefulness because they were custom made (by the teacher) to fit a very specific situation (their classroom). Which is why readily available computers, software, and printers are such a powerful and awesome tool for a teacher.