Monday, January 20, 2014

It Takes Two to Plan

Mrs. Wongtastic and I are trying out a new planning method this year with www.planbook.com
Now, I must give her all the credit because she is the one who found this wonderful website back in September when we were racking our brains for a system or a program to be able to plan together.

Here is what the website looks like.
We tried the physical planbook (the free one from Lakeshore that every teacher has) but it was too time consuming for us to copy down the same plans twice (since we're co-teachers sharing a room) and hard to know when one of us added or changed plans.

We ALSO tried google calendar. We created a separate calendar for
our classroom plans and shared it with one another. The perks of google calendar was that we could add, drop, and modify plans and both have access to it. It worked great for a year then we wanted more options than google calendar was giving us on their basic calendar format.

That's when Mrs. Wongtastic went on a internet search journey to find an existing online planning program for teachers that would allow us to have one account and both have access to add, drop, and modify one set of plans. I guess we aren't the first ones who wanted such a program because it already existed!

We have been using planbook since September and I must say that it is pretty amazing and makes our lives as co-teachers so much easier! I love the simplicity of it and how it really is like those physical planbooks you write your week's plans in except, it's online, it's able to be shared with a co-teacher, anddd it's cheap! Only $12 for a year.
If you split it with your co-teacher that's only $6 which is around the price of a physical planbook, anyways.

So if physical planbooks are not working for you, check out www.planbook.com!
Your first month is FREE! :)

2 comments:

  1. I heard a lot about planbook...but didn't like that there was a fee for something I could do myself on a word document. do you feel that it is worth the price?

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    1. Hi Esther! My co-teacher and I love it. We tried to make our own but we decided for $12 a year its worth it because plan book has teacher friendly features that we couldn't make on our own template like bumping lessons forwards and backwards with just a click, having access to the plan book anywhere we go (wifi permitting of course). We have been using it for about 2 years now and plan on sticking with it! They used to have a free 30 day trial and if you're happy with it you can pay and keep it for another year. Maybe you can try it out in September =)

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