Kreider's Contemplations on Teaching & Technology

lifelong learner, teacher, and geek

Lesson Planning Online

How does a 21st Century teacher plan? In the cloud of course! How does a teacher in the year 2012 budget crisis plan? Using free or nearly free cloud-based tools! Although our district’s new student information system (SIS) will have a a web-based gradebook (finally!), we likely won’t have funds for the “deluxe” version with an integrated lesson planner. So, this week I went in search of an affordable solution. I was determined to avoid the paper-based planner and yet the idea of typing separate documents for each week did not appeal to me either – lacks flexibility, doesn’t provide a year-long perspective, and doesn’t offer easy parent access.

So, my team teacher and I started by mapping out subject timelines using a Google spreadsheet. We are still working on this of course, but feel free to take a look at our work in progress. If you’d like a copy to use, here’s a template.

Next, we started to discuss specific lessons and their details. I considered typing each one separately and linking to it in the spreadsheet, but that seemed tedious. So I set off on a quest for an online lesson planner. There are so many out there! But I had clear expectations in mind:

  1. Built-in standards, both state and Common Core.
  2. A week-at-a-glance view with the ability to view each lesson in greater detail.
  3. Ability to share lessons with colleagues.
  4. Ability to export lessons in the event I need to change systems in the future.
  5. A parent view so they can see the standards, objectives, and assignments for each lesson.

I have to say the lesson planner tool in eChalk, our online learning managment system, set the bar pretty high. We had this feature years ago but funds to maintain this feature expired. So I need a free or very low cost solution until my district can afford to offer a more comprehensive tool.

I researched several and settled on one that costs just $10 a year – www.planbook.com. Here are samples of the various views it creates, all exported to pdf for those who want a paper copy:

What I like about it:

  1. All lesson plans in one place rather than in multiple Word/Excel documents.
  2. Includes click to select list of California and Common Core standards and lets you add both to each lesson. (Other systems made you choose one or the other.)
  3. Week and day views (other systems had only one or the other done well).
  4. Can include events such as assemblies, minimum day, holidays, etc.
  5. Show/hide lesson homework, notes, and standards in both week and day view. So, the week view can show just the lesson objectives and standards (like the boxes in a typical planning book), and day view can be used to view the more detailed lesson notes such as planned questioning, differentiation, etc.
  6. Easily “bump” a lesson to the next day if you didn’t get to it or need to insert a reteach day – it auto-shifts subsequent lessons on calendar.
  7. Extend a lesson across multiple days, then modify each day’s lesson as needed to show what part of the unit will be done that day.
  8. Set a custom time for a lesson that starts/ends at a unique time (i.e. extended Science time). (No other system I reviewed had this feature.)
  9. Allows teachers to import lessons from fellow teachers – select subject and date range to import.
  10. Provides parent/student view.
  11. Quick and friendly technical support!

Shortcomings of this product:

  1. Can’t attach files – have to post them in Dropbox or Google Drive and hyperlink to them.
  2. When starting a new year, you can choose to copy the lessons into the new year, but then it auto-populates the calendar rather than keeping them in an archive for you to select from and schedule manually.
  3. Can’t delete or hide planning boxes you are not using on a particular day, such as minimum days or days when another lesson extends into that time slot. (No product does this that I can find.)
  4. Doesn’t provide a standards report showing frequency and dates of standards taught and a list of those not taught. You can export your lessons and do this analysis in Excel (with some work).
  5. Is NOT tied to a gradebook program. (I don’t need this feature since our SIS will have one.)
  6. Importing events from a text file crashes the planbook – it can only import a file created from planbook. (I have a list of events exported from our school calendar that I wanted to import.) However, their wonderful tech support has offered to import my event list for me!

Despite these shortcomings, it seems to be the best product out there for a price an individual teacher can afford. Click the Tutorials link at www.planbook.com to see videos of how the system works.

I won’t lengthen this post with a list of the ones I reviewed and why I dismissed them in favor of this one, but feel free to comment with suggestions of others and I’ll share my thoughts on them. Happy summer planning!

Comments Off on Lesson Planning Online

Summer Blogstitute

I will be returning to the classroom in August after 16 years of teaching teachers to integrate technology in their classroom. I am so excited about returning to my first love – teaching students – but there is so much I wish I had had time to share with others. So I’m going to try to purge this regret by holding a summer blogstitute. At least once a week I will post on various topics I think every teacher should know.  So far, the topics I’m considering are:

  1. Tools for managing your electronic work and resources – Diigo, Dropbox, Evernote
  2. Student publishing including blogs, VoiceThread, and more.
  3. Teaching research, including the new InstaGrok and SideVibe
  4. Presentation tools and tricks, including how to make custom backgrounds in PowerPoint (even though we are forced to use 2003 in our district, your work doesn’t have to look like it), and using web-based presentation tools such as Google Docs, Prezi and SlideRocket.

Please comment on this post to indicate your interest in any of the above so I can prioritize them. Or, request another topic. And for all you “lurkers” out there who read lots of things online but never comment, please post a short comment so I know you are there – it will help me maintain my enthusiasm for this project through the summer!

1 Comment »

Skip to toolbar