Hello all! For my project, I am writing a tutorial for a very useful website to which Sean pointed me, planboardapp.com. It's a lesson planning platform and teachers are pretty much its sole intended audience/consumer. Planboard looks like any other online calendar, but it has a few other very simple features that make it much more aligned with our needs. For one, you put in your class schedule (and start and end dates for the semester) and then Planboard breaks up your days by section rather than by hour. You can also upload any lesson plan template you want to your planner one time and then it will be there for you to fill in each day. I love this because it's customizable, you don't have to use whatever their format is. And possibly the coolest part is that you can pick a set of standards (or, I believe upload your own) which then turn into a formidable checklist. As you add standards to your individual lesson plans, they are marked as "taught" on your list, which is rad.
My guess is it will take 20-40 minutes to get started with Planboard--create an account, set up your class schedule for the semester, and familiarize yourself with the website. I found the interface to be weirdly user-friendly and counter-intuitive at the same time, so give yourself a chance to explore it. Fortunately, though, there's not as much to explore as I was anticipating. I thought there would be a million features, but it's just your calendar and standards list. I appreciate this simplicity, because I often get overwhelmed by too many options and, also, because I can't think of anything else we would need for planning. This website is essentially supposed to take the place of your paper planner, and it really doesn't try to do anything fancy aside from allowing an entire lesson plan template, should that be your style, and keeping track of standards for you. I'll discuss these and other affordances after I run through the tutorial.
1.) Go to planboardapp.com
2.) Sign up!
When I tried copying and pasting my template, though, the results were less thrilling:
I think to get the most out of this site, it's worth it to take the time to create one awesome template with less text and more boxes, either in the text box here or in word, so it's ready for painless daily use after. Here's a video of my second attempt:
That's pretty much it for getting set up with Planboard! Their help section has lots of answers to more specific questions, and according to users they're also great with responding to questions--they even have live support.
Another thing all the teachers I know do is keep planners from bygone years. By having your lesson plans online, you can stop being such a hoarder with such (4.) easy archiving. Plus, you'd be going (5.) paperless! Yay, Earth. On a related note, you can (6.) access Planboard from your school and home computers, so you don't have to lug planners (or computers) back and forth. You can even (7.) attach files to your lesson plans (handouts, yo!) and (8?) embed videos and images in them (as opposed to just links... I don't really see why that matters since you wouldn't show your students a tiny video embedded in your lesson when you could just click on it, but it's touted as a benefit, too.)
The last element of Planboard that I didn't really touch on in my tutorial is the (9.) ease of sharing. If you "publish" a lesson plan, Planboard says "it can now be discovered by other teachers."
However, I couldn't find any mention on the website of a Planboard community, or a place to browse existing lessons. In the top left corner there's a search bar that says "search for lessons, standards, and more" but when I tried searching by content I got no results--the only hits were based on standards. I think this feature is still in development, because coming soon are platforms for gradebooks and attendance that you can access with the same account (!). And over at chalk.com (which I also logged into using the same account) things look more collaborative, although there was nothing for me. I believe sharing is by school, but since I had to enter Oakland High School myself, I'm the only one there. Perhaps if you could get a group of teachers from your department on Planboard, you would be able to see what everyone's up to.
Nevertheless, that link works even without a Planboard account. Thus, the final affordance for me is still ease of sharing. Now if you and your BFF teacher don't have the same prep, you can easily send each other your lessons for the day rather than drifting apart. Really easy way to co-plan remotely!
System Requirements: I couldn't find any mention of this on Planboard's website, so I imagine it doesn't require anything special and if you have internet, then you're good to go. And, as I guess I didn't mention at all, Planboard is free! That's all I got for ya, thanks for reading!
My guess is it will take 20-40 minutes to get started with Planboard--create an account, set up your class schedule for the semester, and familiarize yourself with the website. I found the interface to be weirdly user-friendly and counter-intuitive at the same time, so give yourself a chance to explore it. Fortunately, though, there's not as much to explore as I was anticipating. I thought there would be a million features, but it's just your calendar and standards list. I appreciate this simplicity, because I often get overwhelmed by too many options and, also, because I can't think of anything else we would need for planning. This website is essentially supposed to take the place of your paper planner, and it really doesn't try to do anything fancy aside from allowing an entire lesson plan template, should that be your style, and keeping track of standards for you. I'll discuss these and other affordances after I run through the tutorial.
Getting Started
1.) Go to planboardapp.com
2.) Sign up!
I just entered my email address (which I now realize was not my school email address, but that didn't impede my progress so don't worry) and hit "Sign Up!" You could also log in with Facebook or Google+ if that's what you're into.
3.) Check your email for a link form Planboard (I imagine you wouldn't need to do this if you logged in through one of those other accounts). Click on it, and it leads you through 4 steps for setting up your account, which I have documented in this video:
If you don't feel like watching my video:
-First, you set up your class schedule by selecting a weekly rotation (unless you're on block schedule), creating a class for each section you teach, and dragging and dropping them onto the calendar.
-Then, you enter the start and end dates of the semester you're planning.
-On the next page, you enter your own name, find the school where you work (or enter it if it isn't on the list) and create a password. Then you're ready to plan!
Using Planboard
4.) In this video, you can see me monkeying around with navigating the site, editing the schedule I just created (which was not easy mind you), entering a lesson plan, and exploring the standards feature:
5.) I had mentioned in my video that the space for lesson planning seemed oddly free-form, so after a bit of investigating in the help section, I found Planboard's tutorial on how to upload templates, which is great:
When I tried copying and pasting my template, though, the results were less thrilling:
Further Resources
That's pretty much it for getting set up with Planboard! Their help section has lots of answers to more specific questions, and according to users they're also great with responding to questions--they even have live support.
Affordances
One of the biggest advantages of Planboard is (1.) the ease of lesson/standards alignment. Planboard is designed specifically for that purpose, and forces you to make sure your lessons are aligned with standards on a daily basis (rather than assume they are). It's a pain to constantly look up and sift through standards; with Planboard, not only are they in the same place as your lesson, but they also function in checklist form. Apparently there's 41 things we need to teach, and this is an easy way of (2.) ensuring we cover all of them rather than just the same four or five over and over.
Planboard is also (3.) teacher planner-meets-lesson plan template. This is pretty rad because most teachers I know stop bothering with all the finer points of a Marco-approved lesson plan and just start writing down what they're going to do in a notebook. Unfortunately, though, I have also seen such flippancy lead to neglected goals/catalysts/closure/logistics, etc. With Planboard, you can insert a simple template for every day in one step, thus forcing yourself to stay on point!
Another thing all the teachers I know do is keep planners from bygone years. By having your lesson plans online, you can stop being such a hoarder with such (4.) easy archiving. Plus, you'd be going (5.) paperless! Yay, Earth. On a related note, you can (6.) access Planboard from your school and home computers, so you don't have to lug planners (or computers) back and forth. You can even (7.) attach files to your lesson plans (handouts, yo!) and (8?) embed videos and images in them (as opposed to just links... I don't really see why that matters since you wouldn't show your students a tiny video embedded in your lesson when you could just click on it, but it's touted as a benefit, too.)
The last element of Planboard that I didn't really touch on in my tutorial is the (9.) ease of sharing. If you "publish" a lesson plan, Planboard says "it can now be discovered by other teachers."
Nevertheless, that link works even without a Planboard account. Thus, the final affordance for me is still ease of sharing. Now if you and your BFF teacher don't have the same prep, you can easily send each other your lessons for the day rather than drifting apart. Really easy way to co-plan remotely!
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System Requirements: I couldn't find any mention of this on Planboard's website, so I imagine it doesn't require anything special and if you have internet, then you're good to go. And, as I guess I didn't mention at all, Planboard is free! That's all I got for ya, thanks for reading!
(The videos for this tutorial were made with Jing.)
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