A lesson plan is an instructional guide that maps out teaching/learning objectives, teaching strategies, assessment criteria, and timeframe. Lesson plans are therefore central to the success of our teaching. In fact, regardless of your teaching experience lesson planning remains a key pedagogical practice that helps you meet out your instructional goals.
With the advance of technology, lesson planning is increasingly becoming digital. While its pedagogical essence remains unaltered, its structural format has radically changed. Teachers no longer draw solely on paper planners to plan their lessons, they now have access to a wide variety of online lesson planners that make it super easy to create and share lesson plans.
The purpose of this post is to share with you a collection of some good online lesson planners to help you easily create, collaborate, and share lesson plans. I invite you to check them out and use our social media channels to share with us your feedback.
1. PlanbookEdu
2. Common Curriculum
Common Curriculum allows you to customize your planbook so it fits your teaching goals. You can plan all your class in one place, use rotating schedule, write notes on lessons for important reminders, drag activities between lessons, add instructional notes for substitute teachers, and many more. Teachers can share their planbooks with collaborators or with admins using generated links.
3. ClassFlow
You can also select among 10 different activities to include in your lessons such as crossword puzzles, word searches, memory games, flash cards, labeling, and matching. You can also create quizzes and assessments using different question types including multiple choice, short answer, math, true or false, essay, and creative response. Teachers can use annotations, images, grouping, and color-coding to interact with students responses.
4. Planbook
Other important features provided by Planbook include the ability to create ‘team lesson banks for full curriculum management’, control who can view lesson sections, allow substitutes to view lesson details and add instructional details for them, create seating layouts and charts for students, track students attendance, integrate your plans with Google Classroom and Google Drive, and many more.
5. LessonUp
To capture students attention and enhance their engagement during lessons LessonUp provides the following features: Hotspots (enable you to add clickable elements to your lessons), Spinner wheel (helps you generate random students names), and Traffic Light (use it to manage students class participation and noise level).
LessonUp embeds a library of pre-made lessons created by other teachers and educators. Browse through the collection for inspiration and ideas to include in your own lessons. You can filter your lesson search by subject, school type, and country.
Besides creating and sharing lessons, LessonUp provides you with the tools to track student progress and monitor their learning growth. “LessonUp automatically generates student reports, and saves them in your LessonUp account. They are safe, exportable and always consultable. Engage your students also with the chat function, and by giving them real-time feedback in the classroom, during hybrid lessons, or remotely.”
6. Lesson Plan Templates
Yo can add/delete sections, upload and add images and videos, insert symbols and share, and many more. Once your lesson template is ready you can publish and share it anywhere online, print it, or download it in different formats (e.g., as PDF and image file).
7. Teacher Planners
These teacher planners offer a wide variety of planning and organizational features that will help you set up your school year for success. Features include: monthly and weekly planning pages, a yearly overview, sections for recording notes and important events, special dates sections, inspirational teacher-themed quotes, and many more.