As a teacher — and as former student yourself — you know the general rule of student behavior: When the teacher is watching, students are intent on the lesson at hand. But when the teacher's away, the students will play.

Seasoned teachers know that to engage their students' attention and keep it, they've got to work the crowd. So you need to keep your students within several feet of you at all times. Generally, this means walking around the room while teaching and observing students' work. To make this movement easier, you're going to want to set up your classroom to allow easy pathways between desks or tables. And, you're going to want to keep track of which students work well together, which ones don't, who has special needs, and how the arrangement is working in general.

Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 can help. PowerPoint isn't just for presentations — it's also an excellent tool for creating seating arrangements. Using PowerPoint, you can easily move around desk shapes on a slide, experimenting with various arrangements and pathways for movement. After you've created a seating arrangement design that works for you, you can add to the PowerPoint slide student names, comments detailing student behaviors and needs, and suggested changes to your classroom arrangement for next school quarter.

The expert advice and tools that follow will show you how to create a classroom arrangement that encourages attention and learning from your students.

• Set up an effective room arrangement (Article)
  Learn about tips on keeping students in your "zone of proximity" from classroom management expert and clinical psychologist Dr. Fred Jones.
• Seating chart (Template)
  Experiment with several possible seating arrangements by using this PowerPoint template.
• Use comments in PowerPoint (Article)
  Learn from Jim Boyce, author of Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 Inside Out, as he outlines how to insert useful notes and comments in your seating chart.
• Track changes in PowerPoint (Article)
  Know which seating arrangements you've tried in the past by tracking changes in your file.