Back when I was a classroom teacher, I rearranged the furniture in my classroom regularly, looking for that perfect arrangement. Now that I teach in a computer lab with desktop computers, moving the furniture is out of the question. Maybe that is why I keep changing lesson plan books.
Other than sub plans, I haven’t kept a paper plan book in longer than I can remember. Maybe never since student teaching. For major planning I use an Understanding by Design inspired Word document. However, for weekly plans for each of my 15 classes, I keep shifting what I use.
First I used Word. Tried Exel, then went back to Word. Then One Note became available and I loved using that. Moving between classes was so smooth. The first year I used it I made a tab for 2008-09 and made each teacher a page within that tab.
I was excited the next year when during my team planning with the classroom teachers, I found I had to reorganize the notebook. For 2009-2010 each teacher had their own tab and the plans and other supporting documents such as rubrics, worksheets, etc., were separate pages within that tab.
I loved how that worked, except I could only check it on a Windows computer. That meant I kept lugging my work laptop home each night so I could work on my lesson plans.
At some point during last year our school acquired its own Google Apps. In the interest of learning its quirks and strengths, I switched my plans from One Note to Google Docs. The advantages were I could work on my plans on any computer with internet access. I could even check them on my iphone. I was surprised at how often I did look them up on my phone.
However, I didn’t love this format. Having been copied over from One Note there must have been stray bits of code that I could never find but they made some of the tables behave poorly. Now I know I should have exported each from One Note to Word, then uploaded them to into Google Docs.
I also had significant lag and denial of access problems. This was good in that I raised a ticket on it with our IT Help and one of the engineers fixed it by changing some network settings. I was glad to have that problem identified and fixed before large numbers of our users began using the platform. Even with these problems fixed, I still didn’t love this option. It felt clunky despite its advantages.
This fall, I decided to return to One Note. I now had a little Lenovo S10-3 netbook running Window 7. It had One Note on it which was going to make my life much easier. I have everything set up with my lesson plans stored in a One Note notebook in Sharepoint so I could access them at work or at home.
Unfortunately, it isn’t playing well with the netbook. Sections keep getting corrupted. They work fine on any computer at work, but on the netbook they quit syncing. Of course, it happens the most to the sections I use the most. Not handy.
Today as I stared in dismay as my lesson plan notebook began corrupting on the netbook, I felt like I was back at square one, needing to lug my work laptop home when my lovely Mac was already there. Then lateral thinking kicked in an I thought of another idea. Why not use Evernote?
In case you haven’t heard of it, Evernote is a collection of software and services that allows users to collect, sort, tag and annotate notes and other miscellaneous information. — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evernote
Evernote comes in many versions. You can have a free account or one with an annual fee with more features and more storage. You can use it on the web by logging into their site. You can also download their free desktop app which can work offline but syncs with the web one when it can get online. There are also mobile versions.
All of these versions sync. This means I can access my Evernote notebooks at work on any computer there either through the web or by downloading the desktop app. Then, when at home I can access it on my Mac. I also have the free iphone app and it has worked well on there.
I have had an Evernote account for a few years. Like One Note, I have a number of separate notebooks within it. This summer, as part of an AppSumo deal, I was able to purchase a one year subscription to the pro version of Evernote and a number of other online apps for the same price as the Evernote subscription usually costs so I jumped in.
One of the premium features in Evernote is the ability to have your notes on your phone. With the free account, you must be connected to the internet to access your notes. Now I have all my notes on my phone all the time.
Another feature is the ability to import Office files. Since I already had lessons started in One Note, I used One Note’s Send to Microsoft Word feature. After I had done this with the plans for each class, I emailed them to myself so I could work on my Mac instead of the netbook with its smaller screen. If I already had Evernote on my netbook, I could have eliminated the email step.
I just made all of these changes today so I can’t tell you if this is THE solution. I am already finding things to like about it. One nice feature in Evernote is tags. In addition to tagging each page with lessons2010, I also tagged them with their grade level + 2010. For example, 3rd2010. Now I can quickly find just my third grade classes and copy information between them when they happen to be doing something similar.
I also accessed them on my iPhone. Because the lesson plans have tables, they are stored as rich text and cannot be edited on the iphone. However, I am able to view them just fine. I was in a similar position when the plans were in Google Docs.
I think I will miss having a tab for each teacher. I haven’t yet figured out how I will keep rubrics and other items with the lesson plans. I can think of a number of options. I did have to put numbers in front of the teacher names (e.g. 01., 02., 03.) to force the plans to be arranged in the order of my classes rather than alphabetically by teacher name.
I will update you later on how this works out. In the mean time, if you have a digital lesson plan book, please tell me what you are using and how well you like it. I need to get back to those lesson plans I was working on two hours ago.