Planning with Multiple Planbooks

Need to plan for your year? Getting ready to start a one-quarter or one semester class? Want to give online planbook software a try and don’t want to redo everything?

These are all great reasons to use Planbook Plus. When you plan with Planbook Plus, you’re not just planning for today, you’re planning for next year as well…because when you do it once, you’re all set for next year. A few tweaks here and a few touches there and you’re done.

One great feature is the ability to work with multiple planbooks at a time. Yes, you could create just one big planbook…one that contains all of your classes and sections. The problem with that is that if any of your classes change next year, you’ll have to go through your planbook and remove everything that no longer applies.

When you plan with multiple planbooks, you keep everything related to just that class in one planbook. Then you can overlay each of the planbooks to see how they work together. Let’s take a look…

Scenario: You’re a high school math teacher with a section of Algebra and a section of Geometry

Let’s start by creating 2 planbooks: One for Algebra and one for Geometry.

 

From the main menu, click the My Planbooks menu item, then click the Add Planbook sub-menu.

 

Choose the School Year, First Day of School, and Name for your new planbooks (courses) and press the “Let Get Started” button.

 

 

Now let’s add a few units and lessons to the Algebra Planbook…

1) Go to the Calendar View by selecting the Calendar sub-menu within the Planning menu .

 

2) Click the Add Lesson button.  The Add Planbook Item dialog will display.

3) The system will recognize that you have not set up a schedule and prompt you to do so.

Select from the follow scheduling types:

3) Once you set your schedule, enter the name of the lesson and click the Add button.

In this way, you can add multiple lessons to the Calendar View.  After adding lessons for the week (and assigning standards) your Calendar View will look like this.

 

Now you can follow the same steps for the Geometry Planbook.

The Algebrea II lessons still show in the Calendar.  By using the drop-down in the upper-left corner, you can select another planbook.  All planbooks (for the current school year) display.  They can be hidden by using the Planbook Filter.

 

Add some lessons.  You’ll now see lessons from both planbooks in the Calendar View.

 

But what if you have A/B scheduling or a 6-day schedule? Yes, Planbook Plus can handle that. We’ll leave that for another tutorial.