Why Technology Can Be Your Friend--Reason #1

You don't have to lug a plan book back and forth between home and school.

Since I am generally broke, I don’t like to recommend anything that’s going to cost you money to use it, but this is one of very few exceptions that I am going to make.
Last year, I had checked out the plan book available at www.planbook.com, and quite honestly, I wasn’t overly impressed. But a year has passed, the program has been updated, and now I am completely in love with it.
Planbook.com offers an online lesson plan book. Besides the fact that you can access it anywhere, there are many other benefits to this program.
• It can be set up to work on our six day cycle, and you can put your specials in at the time that you have them, even if the time is different every day.
• There are templates that can be added, so if you want to put things that you do every day in that subject, you don’t have to constantly retype it.
• It has a spot available in each subject for the lesson, homework, notes, and standards, if you want to use them. I use the notes section for a list of materials I need for that class. Each of these can also be hidden if you don’t want to see them for some reason. I hid everything but the notes section one day when I had a huge amount of science materials that I needed to have available, so when I printed the plan, all I saw was the materials lists.
• You can print them if you want. I’m just saving mine as PDF files and saving them in a folder with all the plans, so if admin wants to see them, there they are!
• The Pennsylvania standards are pre-loaded into the program. All you have to do is click on the one you want and hit apply.
• MY FAVORITE FEATURE… Bump! Bump is a way of moving all the lessons forward if you can’t teach the lesson you had planned for that day. You can bump them up anywhere from one to ten days! The same goes for extending a lesson if you don’t get it done. No more erasing and moving things around.

Here’s what it looks like with some lessons in.

The site gives you a 30 day free trial, and if you decide to buy it, it is only $9.95 for the year! That's less than a regular plan book costs and saves your erasers!