From the day I began teaching, everything I did was organized on my computer. Lessons and handouts were written in Word and then Pages, grades were computed using Gradekeeper, and e-mails were used for communication. Everything except my lesson plan book, that is.
Enter Planbook:
After a few years of wishing for a better tool, I set out in the summer of 2006 to write a full-fledged application that would not only replace the traditional planbook, but also improve upon it. After countless hours of development and testing as well as indispensible feedback from users, I believe that Planbook is this tool.Planbook allows you to organize your plans in an interface familiar to anyone who has used either a paper planbook or a computer calendar such as iCal or Outlook. Planbook works with your schedule to save you time and keep you organized.
Plan With Your Schedule:
Planbook lets you enter your schedule- from the simplest 6 period school day to 2-week rotations, adjust for holidays and cancelled school days (snow days!) with a single click, add lessons on Saturdays and Sundays, quickly modify plans for those times when things just don't go as planned
Keep exploring all that Planbook offers using the tabs above. At only 30 dollars (with site-licensing available at very reasonable costs) you'll be wishing you'd had this software years ago.
There are almost as many types of schedules as there are schools. Saturday classes? Different classes each day? Advisory on Wednesday? Evening review groups? Planbook can handle them all and makes it incredibly easy to setup both simple and complicated schedules.
Create Your Schedule:
- Enter your classes: add up to 20 courses that you're going to be teaching. Courses can be named what ever you choose.
- Choose the start and end dates for your Planbook. Planbook is fast enough to work with whole school years (or more) in a single file.
- Choose the days that you teach- Teachers can make a schedule that matches their work week and can plan out the time that they spend working on days off!
- Select your type of schedule from a variety of options (same classes every day, weekly repeat, A/B block, 3-14 day rotation).
- If you don't teach the same courses each day, you'll be asked to assign classes (up to 12) to each type of day in your schedule.
- Planbook will then, in seconds, build your book and you can start planning with an intuitive, powerful tool.
Non-School Days
After creating your school year, you can add holidays right into your planbook. Instantly rotate your schedule if necessary to account for non-school days. Plan around vacations. Instantly adjust your entire planbook to deal with unplanned days off. Never rip a page of paper again erasing hand-written plans.
Entering lesson data is as simple as clicking on the lesson you want to edit and starting to type. Planbook offers 7 different text areas to enter information. Keeping different parts of your lessons separate helps keep you organized and saves time when you need to make a quick change. Four fields are standard:
- Title: A quick overview of what's on tap for the day.
- Teacher Information: Enter your basic plan here.
- Homework: Reference the work you'd like your students to complete at home.
- Student/Public Information: Sometimes you'd like your students to see a different version of your plans (when printing or publishing, for example). Enter what you'd like the world to see here.
Planbook also provides three user-definable 'custom' entry fields. Use these to track what ever you'd like- standards, lab supplies needed, guest speakers, essential questions, lesson objectives, etc. Changing these fields is as easy as clicking on their names and entering an appropriate caption.
All of the planbook text fields support text formatting. Simply ctrl-click (or right click for those of you with two button mice) and format to your heart's content. Colors, different fonts and typefaces, underline- they're all there.
For those among us for whom spelling isn't a top priority, Planbook will even check to make sure your lesson plans look professional by checking your spelling as you type and offering helpful reminders when you've mispelled a word.
The Paper Jungle:
Every teacher battles with countless papers- assignments, handouts, forms from the office, oversized catalogs and passes to name a few. Planbook lets you store and access your most important papers with a few simple mouse clicks- saving you from spending precious minutes looking for that handout for 3rd period you put on your desk but can't find. And, they're right where you left them next year when you teach a lesson again.
Attach files with ease:
With a single click, Planbook brings up a dialog allowing you to attach a file to a lesson. This file can be anything- a Word document, Pages document, Keynote file, mp3, picture file- any file you create with a computer. Planbook even lets you describe how this file is used. Files can also be published to the web with your lesson plans. Of course, there are some handouts (test and answer keys, for example) that you might not want to post on the web so Planbook lets you keep files private with a single click.
Websites, too:
As more of our teaching utilizes the web, Planbook becomes an essential resource for managing all those websites that you use in class. Never ask "what did I use this site for?" again because each site is directly linked to the lesson it was used for. When publishing, share interesting links with your students. Of course, like files, you can hide certain sites from the public when publishing.Using Attachments
Many teachers utilize digital projectors in their classrooms. By keeping your Planbook open on the computer feeding the projector, you can have access to any file you need for a lesson with a single double click. All attached files and web links can be opened in their default application with a quick double click. With Planbook you can transition seamlessly from document to document and then to the web. Keep your students attention by minimizing downtime.The Real World:
While I wish that printed plans were never necessary, in the real world adminstrators want hard copies of lessons, students need to be reminded of what's been done in class, other departments like to be kept informed about the goings-on in my classroom and backups must be made. Planbook has you covered here, too, by letting you print a variety of nicely formatted reports.
The Lesson Plan Report:
Planbook lets you choose the range of lesson dates you'd like to print, the courses to include and which lesson information blocks you want to see. A nicely formatted report is instantly generated and can be printed, exported to a PDF file for e-mailing or even copied and pasted into your favorite text editor (pages?). You even have the option of creating a formatted header for the report to indicate what information is present.
The Weekly Print Report:
Teachers and administrators commonly want to see a week's worth of lessons at once. Planbook makes it simple (one click simple!) to geneate a weekly report showing the courses you want and the text you choose. Reports can be colored to match the colors you have chosen and a custom header can be added as needed. The Weekly Print Report menu item in the Reports menu offers the most options, but by right clicking on the course name off on the left you can instantly generate a weekly report for the class(es) you want.
A Bonus:
Now, your Planbook can also be your students', parents' and administrators' Planbook. I used to use a mish-mash of blogging software, including running my own WordPress server to keep my students informed and up-to-date. Now I click a single button and the lesson plans (and handouts!) I already wrote in Planbook are instantly transfered onto a web server for use by my students and their parents.
Planbook offers three ways to publish:
- Local Folder: The simplest publish is to a folder on your hard drive (or on an attached network drive). This folder could be one that you upload to your server manually or a networked folder that stores your web page.
- FTP Server: If you have access to an FTP server, Planbook can publish directly to it. Most often, FTP is used to publish directly to the web folder that your ISP or web host provides. Planbook files published to an FTP server can be made available to web browsers.
- .Mac: If you subscribe to .Mac, Planbook can publish directly to your iDisk Sites folder that is accessible to the world via a web browser.
In addition to publishing lots of lessons at once, Planbook can publish single lessons (or a whole day) with a single click. By ctrl-clicking (or right clicking) on a lesson, you can publish it directly to your FTP server or .Mac without going through any dialog boxes. You can post your plans and attachments in mere seconds.
Customizing your Published Planbook:
Planbook publishes three types of pages when uploading lesson plans- a main index, monthly index and the actual lesson plan. Each of these pages can be customized with personal information and you can, of course, choose which parts of your lessons to publish. Additionally, your published output is easily themed with .CSS files. Planbook utilizes WebKit to show you a live preview of your published output so you know exactly what your students and parents will see when visiting your website.
Tagging and Keywords
A paper planbook organizes one way- by week. At first glance, your software Planbook works the same way. Until, that is, you start to use the power of keywords. Now, Planbook allows you to organize in a limitless number of ways. You can create keywords for each content standard you need to address and tag lessons appropriately to ensure breadth in your curriculum. You can easily track inquiry or lab based lessons. Grouping lessons by unit becomes a trivial task. The real power of this feature comes when you print lessons containing particular keywords.
Creating and Using Keywords:
In Planbook, keywords can be organized by grouping them into folders. Planbook makes it simple to add keywords by selecting the 'parent' keyword and then typing a new name into a text box. Lessons can be tagged with a particular keyword by checking the appropriate box. You can tag a lesson with as many keywords you'd like, and Planbook supports as many keywords as you have time to enter.Should you want to change your organizational strategy later, you can resort your Keywords by simply dragging them where they belong.
Running Reports with Keywords:
Planbook allows you to see, print, export or copy all of the lesson information for lessons tagged with a particular keyword. You can quickly print all of your lessons for a particular unit, standard or other organizational strategy. You can also get statistics about the percentage of lessons tagged with a particular keyword.
Search:
Never spend more than seconds looking for a particular lesson with a built in search function that lets you jump to a lesson with a single click. Looking for a handout? Find it in seconds.
Text Snippets:
Built in text snippets let you use shortcuts to save keystrokes when typing common phrases. TSWBAT becomes The student will be able to. Define your own snippets and save precious time. Snippets can even contain formatting and fonts if you like.
Export and Import:
Migrate lessons from one year to the next with a simple export and import feature. Export the lessons you want to file and then import them, in order, into the courses you'd like in your new planbook. If you teach the same courses each year, you may never need to plan again!