What do you all use for a planner / lesson plan book. Are there some DIY templates / printables or do you prefer to purchase a ready made one? Links? Examples? Ideas?
I like to see the whole month at once, so I use a "Teacher Planning Calendar" I found at Office Depot. It's set up with a M-F grid and has an additional column on the left that's supposed to be for every period of the day for a week. I write in the dates and use it as a monthly calendar. I have two preps and just keep track of both in the daily squares; the column on the left is handy for extra notes. Another bonus is that it's got room for at least years, so it's easy to look back at my previous year's pacing.
I use an Excel spreadsheet. I print one for myself and one to cut up to put homework on a bulletin board. It also makes it easy to copy and paste homework assignments to our online homework site.
I have been using this http://www.continentalpress.com/pages/products/90.html for as long as I remember. It holds up wonderfully. There are enough boxes in the grade book to accmodate a class of 45. The planning boxes are large enough for me to include what I need. And I LOVE having all my information in front of me at the same time. I just got next year's.
Our school requires an online lesson plan format, so once we went to that, I stopped keeping my own. We can view by day or week, but we must use it.
This is what I do as well. Because of my split teaching assignment, my plans don't work well with pre-made boxes. Sometimes I need much more space, sometimes not as much. I like one page/day with a weekly plan at the beginning of each week.
We have a required format... I also use a 9 week calendar to plan out each quarter. Makes filling in the weekly one a lot easier.
It's real easy to copy and paste. It's easy to send to your principal, sub, or yourself to work at home. It's easy to modify number of boxes each day. Simply love using it.
For right now, I am using a unit planner, and that gives me a whole view on the entire unit, and provides a place for me to pace out the lessons on the back, and label the types of worksheets and assignments I will be using. As for creating more detailed plans, I need to come up with a way to do it more efficiently, because last years planning didn't work out. I think I will use a Google form this year. I also use Google Calendar. Here is my Unit Planner: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B7fdLKjXoelyaDZ2RzZGdDJ5NVE
Our school provides lesson plan books for us to use. I believe they get them from the school photographer. However, I have gone to an electronic format for my lesson plans. I do print a copy to tape into the lesson plan book, but the electronic format allows me to post plans to the school website and to email them to parents and students.
I use a table in Word too, and we don't keep gradebooks for kindergarten. I use a planner with a month view to write appointments or whatever in and a plan book to jot noted in when I plan with my team. It is usually just a word or two to refer to when I type. A good portion of my plans are copied and pasted and then I add new ideas each year. I alkso go back and add anything I did that wasn't in my plans or websites I used for lessons so that I can remember them the next year.
I would love to see one of the templates you've made using MSWord tables. I use the table feature for lots of other stuff, so it would be logical for me to use it for plans.
I use MS Word for individual lesson plans. I use monthly calendars for longrange planning. I like the program Planbook (a Mac program) as well.
I make my own, too. I use Word. I make my own grade book, daily lesson plan book for myself, and the formal lesson plans. I put all of my data into Excel, and I can mail merge to put it into any form I create. Saves so much time!
My school creates a custom plan book with ELAN Publishing. It has the standard planner pages along with a whole resource section with relevant strategies/materials that all teachers could use. I love it, but I'm biased since my colleague and I are the ones who put it together each year! In terms of the way I use the book, I kind of ignore the boxes and create my own divisions for the different classes I teach. Right now, I teach Modern World History (standard level), Modern World History (honors), and AP European History. Since our current plan books are configured for six periods, I use three boxes each day for the MWH classes, and three boxes for AP Euro. I write down my objective, warm-up, list of strategies/activities used, and any HW. My plans are more detailed than most other people in my school, but I like it that way so I can build off of my work from year to year. (I'm very happy when it comes time to plan a unit and I already have all of my plans laid out from the previous year! I usually tweak my units, but I don't need to reinvent the wheel each time!) As for a grade book, our school orders ones from School Specialty (at least through last year.) All of our grades are now done online through PowerSchool, though, so I don't know if there is really a need for them anymore. This past year I found myself using the paper book less and less, since I usually just enter the grades in the computer once I grade the papers. I still use the paper book on occasion in the event that the computer is not accessible when I'm grading papers, but you can easily print out class roster spreadsheets right from PowerSchool. That beats writing in all of the students' names each quarter!
I made my own template in Word. You can download it here if you want. It's broken down to 9 Weeks because that's how my school refers to each quarter. http://www.sendspace.com/file/g9iv0e
I too create mine not from Word, but OpenOffice. I like being able to email my plans, and bring them up from any computer.
