Planbook.com - Online Lesson Planner

We all have different ways of writing lesson plans. Different grade levels have different needs. I used to be a handwritten lesson plan kind of gal. I had my cute lesson plan book and I used different colored pens - it was pretty fancy. Then I transitioned to a word document table kind of lesson plan similar to Jodi's at Fun in First Grade.  I just felt like it was all so much work writing out the standards and my learning targets and my accessing prior knowledge and bell work and... I could get on, but you got the idea, right?

Enter: Planbook.com

This has been my saving grace this year. You can develop your own custom schedule and everything is so user friendly on it. My school figured it out so that the more people that signed up, the better a deal we all got/the longer we got to use it for free. So try the free trial, if you like it, bribe all of your buddies to use it too!

Here's my week at a glance - ignore the sparse lesson plans. Sub day + early release = lame looking plans. To my defense, there is a lot you can't see because it's below the screen shot, like a lot. ;)

My categories on my lesson plans are Bell work, Learning Target, Preview of New Content/Identify Critical Information, Chunk Instructional Content, Record and Represent Knowledge, Group Process, Reflection, and Standards. Of course, you don't have to have all of those. That's the cool thing; you can add whatever you want to be in your lesson plans. If your school is anything like mine, we were basically told what we have to have in our lesson plans.

It's easy to backtrack and look at previous week's too. I picked this week to show you especially because you can merge your school calendar in with your plan book so it knows ahead of time when you have no school or early dismissals. I don't know about you, but it has happened to me on more than one occasion where I have lesson planned an awesome lesson that took me forever and then I realized, oh yeah, we have early release that day...

You can add standards so easily. They have everything! Common core, every state's content standards, you name it, they got it. I can easily pick out my science/social studies state standards while picking my ELA Common Core standards that I am supporting at the same time. Super easy!

My favorite buttons by far are the "Bump", "Bump Back", and "Extend" buttons (see above). We all have lessons that either go too long or we ended up having to do something different last minute and this makes it so easy! Before I used to have to copy and paste a bunch of stuff and then reformat it all, what a pain! Excuse me while I center myself from those bad memories.

Need to print them off or upload them to your school portal for your administrator? No problem? You can print them to PDF really easily.

Do you type your lesson plans on planbook.com? How do you write your lesson plans?