Planbook Plus New Features, November 2015

October 21, 2015Getting Started Standard

First, I would like to thank everyone for their interest in Planbook Plus and all the great feedback. We continue to improve Planbook Plus to make it the simplest, yet most powerful lesson planning software available. Your desire to use Planbook Plus coupled with your willingness to provide feedback make this all possible.

This article will provide a basic overview of the features that are coming out in November, 2015.  We are excited about the impact these new features will have for all users of Planbook Plus. We look forward to continued feedback. Our goal is simple. We want to be the simplest, yet most powerful lesson planning software available.

We have made changes in the following areas.

 

Updates to the General Navigation and Menus

Menu Changes

We have made some updates to the menus and general navigation in Planbook Plus to make it even easier to get around.

The only changes to the menus are to the My Planbooks menu and the Account menus.  The new My Planbooks menu now allows you to add a new planbook and go to the Planbook Search screen, which replaces the buttons that were previously available on many on the pages.  The “gears” icon menu item allows you to view your account, log out and replaces both the old menu item and the logout link.

 

Changing Planbooks

The other main change we made was to how you switch planbooks in the system.  Planbooks are now prominently displayed as a dropdown list in the upper left corner of Planbook Plus.  This makes it easier to both see your current planbook and switch to another one.

 

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Updates to the Timeline View

Outline vs. Details mode

The timeline view has been simplified.  There is no longer a toggle between the outline and details modes.  Both are always available.  You can still double-click items in the list (on the left) to perform simple inline edits, like a name change.  However, if you want to see all the details for a lesson plan, click the link in the bar in the Timeline chart area.

 

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Updates to the Calendar View

Show all Planbooks

In the previous version, you had to select the planbooks you wished to display in the Calendar View.  We have changed the default behavior to automatically show all planbooks (for the current school year).  You can still change which planbooks display, but we have moved that to this new location.

 

Change Lesson Time

The calendar will often be the screen where you decide to change the lesson time as you see a consolidated view of many planbooks.  Now you can quickly and easily change the time of a lesson in this view.

 

Planbook Color

You can now set a custom color for each planbook in the Planbook Settings screen.  This color will be reflected in the Calendar view enabling you to more easily distinguish one planbook from another.

 

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Updates to the Weekly Planner

Customizing the Lesson Plan Template

Instead of navigating over to the Planbook Settings where you can customize the template, there are links right in the pages where you would generally want to make changes to the planbook design, i.e., the Details Edit screen and the Weekly Planner. Some updates might even be inline on that page making it even easier to change your lesson plan template.

 

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New Features

Scheduling Specials

Specials can now be scheduled very easily for the entire year.  Instances of a special can easily be added or removed when scheduling conflicts arise.

Stay tuned for an upcoming article on Understanding Specials for a detail explanation.

 

Sharing Lessons Across Planbooks

If you teach a course multiple times a day, or are a kindergarten teacher that teaches AM and PM classes, this feature may be of benefit to you.

If you can manage multiple sections or classes with one planbook, we recommend you do that.  It simplifies your work. However, if you need more control, section by section, or AM vs. PM classes, you can create a separate planbook for these classes, yet share the lesson plans from another planbook to minimize recreating the details.  This allows you to differentiate the order and sequence of lesson plans or the specific time you teacher that lesson plan, between the two classes.

Stay tuned for an upcoming article on Understanding Lesson Plan Sharing / Reuse for a detail explanation.

 

Sharing with Other Planbook Plus Users

You can now share planbooks with other Planbook Plus users.  (You can also opt out of sharing completely.)  You can provide read only access to your planbooks or edit access so that you can co-author a planbook with a friend.

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Additional Updates

Simplified Report Options

The reports in Planbook Plus have a number of features to make them more powerful, yet, most of the time users want the simple default report.  As a result, we have put the advanced options for each report into an “Advanced Options” section that you can ignore, making the reporting pages easier to understand.

 

Shared Holiday Schedules

While we support a custom holiday schedule for each planbook, let’s face it, your school schedule is going to be similar, if not identical, for all your planbooks.  So we now have the ability to create one holiday schedule and share it in any planbook.  By default, the shared holiday is reused for all planbooks.

Holiday Impact for A/B and N Day Rotations

What happens to your school schedule when using Holidays in Planbook Plus?  For example, if Tuesday is an “A” day, and Wednesday is a holiday, is Thursday an “A” day or “B” day?  We will let you choose.  By default, holidays are skipped, so in the example above, the default behavior results in a “B” day.

And just in case something strange happens to your school schedule, we let you force any day to be a specific schedule day (A or B, or any day in an n day rotation).

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