A very good place to start...

Just a quick musing: It's quite astounding how much class time can be wasted due to a badly written worksheet.
I'm wary, now, of using worksheets with examples on them for lower level classes, particularly where they have to come up with their own work.

Example: An Entry 2 IT class was learning to use e-mail, and had to write a message telling a friend what they had done at the weekend. I got tired very quickly of repeating "That's good English but [insert student name here], did you go to Brighton to visit your family? No. So you need to write what you did at the weekend, not what it says there."

Then there was the endless fun of the example filled-in Outlook dialogue box with a fake student number- it took the students as long to get the program set up on their computers as it did for them to do the rest of the exercise, or so it seemed.

I think perhaps it may also be down to the vocabulary we think to teach classes. After the experiences of the last couple of weeks of IT, I feel that pre-teaching 'example' and 'copy' (and 'don't') would be a very helpful precaution to take. As a developing professional, working out what a class needs to know before they start work is very important. I'm still learning. Of course this doesn't get past the fact that students of particular cultural backgrounds will not be used to reading a worksheet with a normal UK layout (not that I mean that the UK layout should be the norm, or that it's the only one that IS normal, I mean a layout that you find everywhere in the UK, right or wrong), will start in the wrong place etc.

Also there's the whole issue of getting the students to read the instructions in the first place. This is not a comprehension problem, this is a problem of the student assuming they know what the activity is, and failing to see the instructions that tell them to do something else, for example the students who ignored the instruction that said to carry out an activity in Microsoft Word. Intervention from me would solve this, but to an extent I want the students, in IT at least, to get used to reading instructions carefully for themselves. This of course may be something I change my mind about later on. Smartboard* demonstrations are all well and good, but they don't help everyone.

In my other classes, the way of working is different- there are no worksheets with long sets of instructions on how to do something.

And speaking of Smartboards, for all they are useful, they cause me untold problems, as my feedback techniques often involve students- more than one student a lot of the time- coming up and writing on the board, as a method of achieving inclusive feedback which also gives me an extra way to monitor the students' spelling, grammar and punctuation. How am I supposed to do this when
a) You can't use more than one pen at a time on the Smartboard.
b) You can't rest your hand on the board when you write, and most students are used to doing this.
c) You can't actually see what you're writing unless you know where to stand and how, and again, most students (quite understandably) have no idea about this.

I'm all for E-learning and feel it can be very valuable, but it's not long since I learned my whiteboard techniques, and I'm just not willing to let them go quite yet. Clearly I need to find new ones that I can use with the new hi-tech equipment.