Planbook Plus: A Teacher’s Perspective

I am a second year teacher who is teaching High School 10th and 12th grade English, as well as speech and yearbook in a small West Texas town. I needed something easy yet thorough plan my lessons on. Something that I could easily print and put in my teacher binder for those unexpected walkthroughs. I stumbled upon PlanBook Plus about six weeks into my first year. I signed up for the free-trial and fell in love.

This program is so easy to use, and as an added bonus it has my state standards on there (my principal did not require that they be included in our lessons last year but I liked having them there just in case anyone higher up comes into my room). When PlanBook Plus came out with the Master Planner, I immediately signed up. I like the option of the online lessons and the gradebook, and now I can easily share my lessons with my supervisors, other teachers (though this isn’t necessary since I am the only English 2 and 4 instructor for my campus), and with my parents of my SPED kids.

I have recently started to use the timeline feature. This makes it easy for me to copy my entire first semester of my speech class to the second semester. Since this is a one semester class, I just repeat everything the second semester and instead of retyping everything into each day for the second semester; I just copy it.

One important feature that I have enjoyed is the shared calendar. I took the approved school calendar for the upcoming year and put in all of our holidays, teacher workdays, and testing days (all of these are set as holidays because for two of them the students are not on campus and on testing days there are no classes going on for the majority of the day.) Using the shared calendar makes it to where your holidays are automatically inserted into each of your different planbooks.

Another feature I like is the element designer. I like this because there are parts of the default planner that I don’t use and others that I do. With the element designer I am able to delete what I don’t use. Some teachers may not like putting in the required materials on their lesson plans, I like this part of the planner so that when I share with my students they know what to bring to class. I don’t usually use the Big Idea part of the lessons so I take that out. There is also a spot where you can add your own element to your lessons.

One feature I will be using a lot this coming year is the Reports button. Texas is going to a new teacher evaluation system this year and we have to show the standards we teach and how often. With the reports button I can see the standards taught and on which days. This will make my yearly goal setting and end of year review easy to complete.

Over all I am extremely happy with PlanBook Plus and I can’t wait to use the sharing option this year. Whether you are on the free subscription or have upgraded to the advanced or the master planners, this program is easy to use and very compatible to how the user wants to use it.

Teresa Brightbill